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.

Comments

Re:This... will be interesting

[Nossie]

Dank... I said IF they gimp it anymore.

I was thinking about getting a ps3 once it came down in price... but after shafting us euros so hard initially (software emulation) and now taking it out completely (dont think it will ever come back btw) I dont think I'll bother now especially when all the original hype is about features they are now cutting out of the initial console. If I wanted a 360 I'd buy a 360 at the price of a 360. I'm certainly not going to buy a shafted ps3 at the price of a real ps3 with the equivalent SUPPORTED feature set of the 360.

So I'm saying IF they remove more features.... but hey they lost my money when the ps3 launched in euroland and my thoughts on the $:value ratio was already piss poor then. Now that the PS3 has essentially become the Atari Jaguar or 3DO of our time then I don't think we'll be seeing many spectacular PS3 only games and a shit load of 360 half assed back ports. The majority of the games will always be made for the most popular lowest denominator and that is the 360 and dare I say it.. the Wii!

Sony need to desperately pull a fantastic (read halo 3 popularity) 1st party game out their ass like YESTERDAY otherwise it will be the last Playstation Sony ever makes (they are already talking about selling their share of cell)

I wouldn't trust Sony's cinematics

[Fross]

They usually show pre-rendered stuff and imply it's in-game. Killzone, etc.

Re:Impressive stuff.

[KDR_11k]

A lot provided the game is innovative. After all a demo is supposed to demonstrate the selling points of the game. When a game is innovative you can usually see that in the demo already.