Ratchet and Clank's Trek Towards Pixar Quality Visuals

MTV's Multiplayer Gaming site has up a discussion with Brian Allgeier, creative director on the latest iteration of the Ratchet and Clank series. The Ratchet games are made by Insomniac, who released Resistance at the same time the PS3 launched last year. That makes them unique, one of the first teams to have a second PlayStation 3 title out, and it shows in their amazing graphical presentation. The interview covers the team's trek towards an internal idea of 'Pixar-quality' graphics. "The new game is designed to sell itself at a glance. The hook is the image, the approaching-Pixar graphical quality. It's the product of 125 developers at Insomniac, a surprisingly small increase in team size from the 110 who made the third Ratchet game, Up Your Arsenal, for PS2. Allgeier conveyed some stats to emphasize the boost in graphical quality: 90 joints in Ratchet's face in the PS3 game compared to 112 joints in his whole body in the PS2 games; 'tens of thousands' of particle effects on the screen at any one time on PS3 compared to 3,000 in the PS2 Ratchet games. The game's action glides at 60 frames per second, double the rate of Insomniac's Resistance game. But, again, it's not numbers that count. It's just supposed to take a glance." Meanwhile, for more on the development process, the PlayStation blog has up a video post by Brian Hasting, Chief Creative Officer at Insomniac, on clarifying the vision of the game.

Re:Pretty

[toleraen]

Sounds pretty good. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Impressive stuff.

[caerwyn]

The Ratchet and Clank games actually have a pretty good reputation for actually being fun as well. I played the first one on the PS2 and found it thoroughly enjoyable- fun puzzle-platform-action. The high production values really did add to it, as well.

From what I've heard so far, this one's done the same, though I haven't been interested in throwing that much money down the drain to buy a ps3 just yet.

Try this:

[Tony]

http://www.us.playstation.com/ratchetandclank/

There are several screenshots. There're also three trailers out, and have been for a while. If you own a PS3, the R&CF demo came out a few days ago. It'll give you a good flavor of the game.

I've loved the R&C franchise so far. The first two games were fantastic. The later two were more weapons-oriented, which was fine, but missed some of the storyline feel of the first two.

R&CF:TOD is supposed to be a return to the cinematic feel.

All I can say is, both the Groovatron and the morph-ball thingy are cool. Use them together to get a chorus line of penguins!

Mostly just pretty

[LKM]

I was really looking forward to this game. It looks awesome, and it was bound to play very well. Unfortunately, playing the demo was one of my biggest disappointments on the PS3 yet. Yes, it's a great game. Yes, it looks gorgeous. But it basically seems to be a linear shooter that plays pretty much like the PS2 versions.

Maybe I had the wrong expectations, but looking at the videos, I was hoping that the gameplay had evolved at least as much as the graphics. I was picturing huge levels and interesting platforming. Instead, you get to run through predefined narrow paths and shoot hundreds of enemies that all look pretty much the same.

If you want a third-person shooter with some platforming, you can't go wrong with R&C. If you loved the PS2 games and want more of the same, buy the thing. If you expected something fresh and innovative, something worthy of this generation, skip it.