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:Sounds familiar

[AuMatar]

The problem is that back then, they had to utilize the emotion engine. Emotions are fickle things- the PS2 just didn't feel like rendering Pixar quality graphics. This time they went for the cell- put that good for nothing PS3 behind bars until it does what they want.

Impressive stuff.

[onion2k]

I have to admit it ... the screenshots look gorgeous. They've nailed the look brilliantly. It's innovative, clearly very clever, it's sumptuous and lush and all manner of other adjectives. Those 125 developers have been hard at work, that's obvious.

Thing is though, it's a game. It's not a film. Pixar only have to bother themselves with the look. These developers have to bother with the game too. So as delightful as it is, the real question any gamer asks isn't "how good does it look?" rather "how much fun is it to play?". Some of the most brilliant games I've ever played were written by 1 person working parttime in their bedroom on an 8 bit computer. "Fun" just isn't something that comes from pumping millions of dollars into a team.

One day studios will realise this, and will realise that they could make a lot more money concentrating on games written by 5 people that are enjoyable even if they look a bit pants.

I'm not going to hold my breath though.

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.