Ratchet and Clank is one of Insomniac’s longest running franchises, but it hasn’t seen a proper new entry since 2013’s Into the Nexus. Sure, there was the 2016 reboot/remake, but Insomniac has certainly been busy in that time outside of the R&C universe, creating new worlds with Sunset Overdrive and launching PlayStation’s megahit Marvel’s Spider-Man series.
So with Rift Apart set to launch exclusively on PS5 on June 11, the studio has a chance to not only modernize and iterate on what’s worked for Ratchet in the past, but to learn from its other series and blend their highpoints into the DNA of Ratchet and Clank.
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The Ratchet series is no stranger to robust arsenals of weapons, but game director Mike Daly explained how the toolkits Sunset and Spider-Man give players opened the team up to improve various aspects of Rift Apart’s gameplay.
“What we found with developing Sunset Overdrive, and one of the things I think worked really well in Spider-Man, is giving the player a bigger move set to tackle their challenges than is strictly necessary,” Daly said to IGN in an interview. “Since you have so many more permutations of ways to handle threats or navigate spaces than you did before, it feels a lot more personal and customizable, like you had really solved that problem, which makes all the game play that much more satisfying.
“So in [Rift Apart’s] case, the responsiveness of your moves, the ability to cancel them our and transition fluidly, the different moves, the addition of the new Phantom Dash, among other things, really give you that ability to get creative with dodging and feel like you have gotten really good at its systems compared to past Ratchet games.”
That level of improvisation and expansiveness also applies to the battlegrounds themselves and the enemies players will encounter.
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“Our battlefields are, on average, larger and more complicated than they were before. There are more places to take cover or get high ground, more places to find ammo and health refills across the battlefield,” Daly said. “Some places do use Rift Tethers to get an advantage, and this is balanced out by an arsenal that’s generally longer range and more effective, and a much larger number of enemies that come in at once.”
Daly went on to explain how Insomniac’s focus on weaving narrative and gameplay together, rather than making them feel like distinct parts of the whole, afforded them new opportunities with this next Ratchet game.
“Another thing we have taken away from our past games is how much we’ve realized gameplay works better when it’s married to narrative. Especially the very early Ratchet games, we plopped you on a level, and we give you a cutscene that almost seems unrelated. Now we know that all that moment-to-moment gameplay feels better when it has a narrative purpose. And that’s amplified all the more when you get to the end and the conclusion relates to all of the stuff that you’ve done as a player,” he continued.
And that’s certainly something we noticed in IGN’s hands-off preview of Rift Apart, as scenes felt reminiscent of moments in Spider-Man, dancing between combat, cutscenes, and back into action all without skipping a beat. While Insomniac has discussed how the PS5’s SSD essentially eliminates loading and has allowed them to pull off the impressive rift hopping seen in gameplay, it’s also led to some fundamental changes to development akin to that emphasis on gameplay connecting to story.
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“What we learned from making Rift Apart is that not only do loads not matter anymore, you need to consider certain things, but you don’t have to design it into your level layout, you can continue. You can have gameplay through these [loading moments] as well. It really changes the way that we think about how we design the player experience. That to me is the most exciting part of this, the way we lay [the game] out. Levels have been consistent for nearly 20 years,” creative director Marcus Smith told IGN. He noted that this change is also significant because we’re just at the ground floor of it – developers like Insomniac are only just learning how to think about game development in this new way.
“I’m constantly amazed at what we’re able to do. What’s great about the Sony [console] life cycles is we’ll get better and better as we go,” Smith said, and those changes and opportunities are very much exciting challenges to him.
“I don’t think you can be in gaming if you aren’t excited by these new challenges, everything changes all the time. So even if you’ve gone several generations of doing the same thing over and over again, something’s going to happen where you come in and need to rethink,” he said.
Some of those new opportunities and challenges come with providing a well-rounded, robust experience to players, and as the recent State of Play demonstration indicated, Rift Apart seems to be filled with gameplay ideas and opportunities. Ratchet and Rivet’s core combat, aerial combat, rideable aliens, Clank gameplay sections, Glitch gameplay, pocket dimensions, collectible suits… the list goes on. While Into the Nexus may have been a smaller offering than some past Ratchet’s, Smith explained how the goal for the team from the start was to very much match the expansiveness of past major entries.
“Our goal was to make sure that the player experience is one that is equal to the rest of the franchise. In terms of playable hours, we’re in that window of where our full length games were in the past. And that was a goal from the beginning,” he said.
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And all of those listed gameplay features are something he explained the team ensured felt substantive and additive to the experience.
“It’s tradition in the franchise that we want to break up the experience so you don’t feel like you’re just doing the same things over and over again. And all of those [different gameplay elements] are examples of experiences that will be layered in, in a way that feels paced out well. That’s all been meticulously argued over for hours and hours and hours, like every decision that we make,” Smith explained.
Game director Mike Daly explained how some of those decisions, in maintaining pace and keeping the gameplay fresh, boiled down to planet-by-planet discussions for Insomniac.
“With each individual planet, as they were developed by their own teams, they had the flexibility to get creative and ask, ‘What do you think is this level’s creative identity,’ which manifests both in terms of that level’s localized, personal story and that level’s gameplay themes and gameplay footprint,” Daly said, noting the team did a lot of prototyping for gameplay elements they thought would work in Rift Apart.
“When we asked ourselves for each level, ‘How are you going to distinguish yourself gameplay-wise,’ we could pull on that pallet of prototypes. And we had our minds open to [the possibility of] other things we haven’t thought about or haven’t tried that we can weave into the fabric of this level to make it a better, more distinct and varied experience.”
For more, be sure to read about how Rift Apart uses the DualSense and 3D audio of the PS5, and about how Rivet has always been core to Rift Apart’s story.
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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor, host of Podcast Beyond!, and PlayStation lead. Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.
