“One of the cool things about it, is that it’s all still live gameplay where you can control your character,” game director Mike Daly said. “All those worlds that you’re traveling through during those sequences are real, fully fleshed out worlds that you could just, like, stop and play in under other circumstances.”
The technology behind it is impressive, utilizing the power of the PS5′s solid state drive, which developer Insomniac fiddled with and optimized for its upcoming games thanks to early adoptions of PS5 development kits provided by Sony. In an
interview with Wired, for example, a demo from PS5 lead architect Mark Cerny detailed that fast-travel loading screens in 2018′s Spider-Man last 15 seconds on a PS4, and are cut to a mere 0.8 seconds when tested on a PS5. This is an impressive feat for a large, open-world game taking place in a densely populated digital Manhattan.
“As a studio, we were lucky enough to be one of the earlier developers who helped work with the new technologies as they were coming online,” creative director Marcus Smith told The Post in a recent interview. “Something is changing here. We’re not just talking about getting rid of loading screens, which is natural, but it enables us to do things at speeds that we’ve never, ever been able to do before.”
Smith calls the quicker loading times a “paradigm shift" for the next generation.
With “Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart,” the game is able to load entire worlds in “less than a second,” Daly said. It’s also targeting 4K and 30 frames-per-second, and will include a performance mode, allowing players to experience the game at 60 frames-per-second, a first since 2009′s “Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time.”
