Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart [PS5, PC]

[Panino Manino]

The big set piece with the giant robot looks a lot like that Epic demo.

 

[Shortbread]

https://www.ign.com/articles/ratchet-and-clank-rift-apart-shows-plenty-of-heart-and-ps5-spectacle

The visual flair that comes with all of these weapons, the character animations, and the incredible level detail across planets is certainly stunning, but that too, like using the DualSense, is something I didn’t get a full flavor for in this demonstration. Given the recent State of Play and the gameplay you can see right now, I’ve no doubt Ratchet and Clank has the capability to look as good, if not better, than the Pixar movies it’s always compared to, but a streaming video demonstration just doesn’t offer the full effect. That’s not to speak anything ill of the game or the animation work, but if anything it only makes me more excited to get to play Rift Apart as it’s intended – on a large, 4K HDTV.

https://www.gameinformer.com/previe...rift-apart-the-best-looking-next-gen-game-yet

In the decades we’ve spent journeying with Ratchet and Clank, we’ve watched them battle against alien armadas and save the universe time and time again. Their efforts have not gone unnoticed. One thankful civilization on a distant world is finally honoring our brave heroes with an extravagant parade. In the opening shot, we see Ratchet and Clank emerge to a sea of roaring fans seated in airborne bleachers that overlook massive balloon representations of the heroes. This single moment has so much to see, including a detailed alien cityscape on the ground far beneath the festive parade. For the opening shot, developer Insomniac Games leans into the power of PlayStation 5 to drop jaws and establish the scale players can expect as this adventure unfolds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ar...-rift-apart-preview-like-playing-a-pixar-film

The game shows off the power of the PS5 through its ability to load entire new cities in the space of seconds. If you see a rift in a level, you can shoot yourself through it and you’ll almost instantly be transported to an entirely new locale. It’s seriously impressive to watch it happen and screams the type of thing that would have been entirely impossible in the last generation.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/r...-ps5s-gorgeous-new-comfort-food/1100-6491353/

That filmic quality is most visible in the characters themselves. If the world has gotten a significant upgrade to take advantage of the PS5, it didn't come at the cost of Ratchet, Clank, or Rivet. In the case of the two organic creatures, their faces are stretchy and expressive like an animated film, and their fur is beautifully detailed. You can actually see the direction their fur is brushed on various parts of their faces and arms. Clank is built to look like he was made of actual metal materials, with a visible difference between shiny reflective steel and coarse brushed nickel. His eyes look like dappled LED arrays. And being a metallic companion, you can see ray traced reflections on his face and body.

https://www.gamesradar.com/uk/ratchet-and-clank-rift-apart-PS5-preview/

It helps that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is utterly gorgeous from top to bottom, utilising the PS5's capacity for native 4K, ray-traced visuals and silky smooth frame rates to achieve what Insomniac calls the "playable movie" experience. The studio's promise of a loading-free adventure appears to be holding up this far into the campaign, too, with Rivet switching between dimensions, through rifts, and beyond without a single hint of processing on-screen.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...rift-apart-a-ps5-stress-test-built-from-charm

But here are the basics: PS5's SSD is a beast at loading, so while that's bad if you like to make a Pop-Tart between levels - I am not here to judge - it means that you can jump right into a game from the off. And game developers, after really thinking about it, have realised that you can jump right into a game inside a game. And what if both games are the same game? Hold me.

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/202...is_an_eye-popping_demonstration_of_ps5s_power

How’s it achieving this? Talent, money, and magic, we assume. The team did touch a little upon how the title isn’t open world in a traditional sense, but is using techniques typically employed by sandbox games to render as much on screen as possible. The SSD helps with that, of course – and has even allowed it to render two scenes simultaneously in real-time so that it can include some classical sci-fi transition swipes.

https://www.theverge.com/22431256/ratchet-and-clank-rift-apart-ps5-interiew-tech-ray-tracing-ssd

There are some big, obvious features we can see in terms of the benefits of the PS5, like the fast load times or the rifts that pull you into a parallel world immediately. But are there any examples of smaller, less obvious things that are cool or that you’re really proud of that wouldn’t have been possible on the PS4?

With the SSD, it’s easy to say there are no load times, and look how fast we can load this other area, but it has all sorts of knock-on effects. We don’t need to be as careful with how we package our data. All of the assets for an area don’t need to be collated on the spinning hard drive to get the right streaming speed out of it. It makes the game smaller on your hard drive; it means we can patch it more easily. That’s a nice bonus. We unload the things literally behind you from a camera perspective. If you spun the camera around, we could load them before you see that. That lets us devote all of our system memory to the stuff in front of you right now, that you need to experience in that moment.

The ray tracing is nice and shiny — well, literally shiny — and it’s very obvious when it’s working. But it does have a really subtle effect on the materials. There’s a part where you’re in the spaceship with Rivet and Clank, for example, and you’re not actually looking at a reflective surface per se, but just all of the metal things in that cabin, which are all curved in different ways, are all showing the effect of those characters shifting position in a realistic way. It takes us a long way toward getting the same feeling of an animated film. The way things are grounded in the environments, the way they’re animating with each other, helps us close that gap.

https://press-start.com.au/previews/2021/05/12/ratchet-clank-rift-apart-preview-a-big-step-forward/

Not only does the game seem much more cinematic (which is likely thanks to Insomniac’s experience with games such as Spider-Man and Sunset Overdrive), there were a number of times where Ratchet or Rivet just stopped, with the camera panning behind them and the scenery looking absolutely stunning. If there’s one area that’s always been a tad forgettable, it’s the story, and that looks all set to change here. The characters in the game have always been great, but I’m genuinely intrigued find out not only what happens, but to discover the rest of the alternate universe characters.

https://www.vg247.com/2021/05/12/ratchet-clank-rift-apart-really-feels-like-first-true-ps5-game/

Basically, it’s all about that special data streaming solution the PS5 has. Insomniac designers explain that despite this not really being an ‘open world’ experience in the Spider-Man sense, they’re streaming content in and out in a very similar way. Even when you turn the camera, the game is unloading textures and the like that are behind you, out of sight, pretty much instantly. Traditionally, games will hold things that are nearby in memory even if they’re out of sight, so it can access them quickly if you suddenly open a door or whip the camera around. Rift Apart doesn’t do that, trusting in the PS5 hardware’s speed to load things in only when they’re strictly needed.

This basically allows for more detail. Usually a game’s memory budget isn’t just determined by what’s on-screen, but also anything that’s loaded in off-screen. By minimizing anything hanging around in memory, there’s more technical real estate to fill the screen with stuff, which means practically every frame of Rift Apart seems to burst off the screen. That can mean more particle effects or scope, but also more enemies, for instance.

https://www.polygon.com/22432013/ra...preview-weapons-story-rivet-new-female-lombax

Those rift portals will come into play between battles as well, as players explore the many interdimensional planets of Rift Apart. Pocket Dimensions are scattered throughout worlds, and players can jump into them to take part in minigames and side missions. In one example Insomniac showed, Rivet and Clank hopped into a Pocket Dimension and rode on a runaway Speedle — a hyper-fast, beetlelike alien creature — on a rollercoaster-style course. Her reward? A new cosmetic helmet that can be worn in battle.

 

[iroboto]

really can't get more epic than this.

These designers and artists out thinking way out of the box (experience with Spider Man showing though, perhaps some ideas they could not implement on SM due to PS4 are now showing up here).

Not many games are going to hit this level of fidelity for a while.

 

[chris1515]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1392487201754161154

Some interview of the technical director of insomiac

https://www.theverge.com/22431256/ratchet-and-clank-rift-apart-ps5-interiew-tech-ray-tracing-ssd

There are some big, obvious features we can see in terms of the benefits of the PS5, like the fast load times or the rifts that pull you into a parallel world immediately. But are there any examples of smaller, less obvious things that are cool or that you’re really proud of that wouldn’t have been possible on the PS4?

With the SSD, it’s easy to say there are no load times, and look how fast we can load this other area, but it has all sorts of knock-on effects. We don’t need to be as careful with how we package our data. All of the assets for an area don’t need to be collated on the spinning hard drive to get the right streaming speed out of it. It makes the game smaller on your hard drive; it means we can patch it more easily. That’s a nice bonus. We unload the things literally behind you from a camera perspective. If you spun the camera around, we could load them before you see that. That lets us devote all of our system memory to the stuff in front of you right now, that you need to experience in that moment.

The ray tracing is nice and shiny — well, literally shiny — and it’s very obvious when it’s working. But it does have a really subtle effect on the materials. There’s a part where you’re in the spaceship with Rivet and Clank, for example, and you’re not actually looking at a reflective surface per se, but just all of the metal things in that cabin, which are all curved in different ways, are all showing the effect of those characters shifting position in a realistic way. It takes us a long way toward getting the same feeling of an animated film. The way things are grounded in the environments, the way they’re animating with each other, helps us close that gap.

 

[London Geezer]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1392487201754161154

Some interview of the technical director of insomiac

https://www.theverge.com/22431256/ratchet-and-clank-rift-apart-ps5-interiew-tech-ray-tracing-ssd

That's what Cerny said at that presentation he did a while a go. I was skeptical but I guess it is possible after all!

 

[BRiT]

So nothing behind you will ever show up in the RT Reflections?

 

[London Geezer]

So nothing behind you will ever show up in the RT Reflections?

Why wouldn't it?

 

[chris1515]

That's what Cerny said at that presentation he did a while a go. I was skeptical but I guess it is possible after all!

Other crazy stuff from a design point of view one, this is the first time. He did not ask devs to cut down on enemy types because of RAM and low streaming system.

Per Insomniac's Lead Gameplay Programmer Adam Noonchester, this is also the first game he's worked on where he didn't need to tell designers to cut down on enemy types. 5:23 into the video

 

[BRiT]

Why wouldn't it?

Because it's unloaded.

"We unload the things literally behind you from a camera perspective. If you spun the camera around, we could load them before you see that. That lets us devote all of our system memory to the stuff in front of you right now,"

 

[London Geezer]

Because it's unloaded.

They most likely keep the lower LOD version in the BVH structure for reflections. No need for the full LODs which aren't reflected anyway. Maybe?

 

[iroboto]

Because it's unloaded.

I think it would stay in the BVH, and they would only load the things that are reflected perhaps. But that does sound like an interesting challenge.

 

[BRiT]

They most likely keep the lower LOD version in the BVH structure for reflections. No need for the full LODs which aren't reflected anyway. Maybe?

Yeah, I'm merely pointing out there is more details to it than the quick blurb marketing talking points getting attention.

 

[chris1515]

https://imgur.com/0hadz4n

 

[Arwin]

We could, he says. But I’m sure if there were a raytracing scenario where that would have you look behind you using a mirror, they could also just not unload everything behind them. There would probably also be less to render in front of them in that case anyway. [emoji16]

 

[London Geezer]

Yeah, I'm merely pointing out there is more details to it than the quick blurb marketing talking points getting attention.

Oh totally, I'm just guessing anyway. They used the lowest possible LODs for reflections on Spidey and I don't think those would take too much space compared to the higher LODs.

 

[chris1515]

Obviously ray tracing is a big buzzword right now, but when you’re making a game knowing from the beginning that it’s going to be supported, does that change how you approach things like art or level design?

For the Spider-Man games, it was a lot of “This looks really cool, this will have a great effect on the buildings in the city.” That kind of thing. We had a lot of content that was in the first Spider-Man game that wasn’t necessarily authored to show that feature off, but we knew that it would be in Ratchet & Clank from pretty early on. One thing it does is, the artists know to put a lot of care into the material properties that they author. So this is a metal and it behaves this way, and all of those physical material properties, so when it comes together it fits nicely when ray tracing is turned on.

Raytracing technology is the same than Spiderman MM but being an only PS5 game they could author the material for make raytracing reflection shine.

 

[London Geezer]

Raytracing technology is the same than Spiderman MM but being an only PS5 game they could author the material for make raytracing reflection shine.

SHINY SHINE! I'm still hoping for a 60fps RT mode.

 

[chris1515]

 

[Karamazov]

maybe they can unload everything behind the player's view in environments where there are no RT reflections like that canyon, and in the 60fps mode if there is no RT.

 

[chris1515]

maybe they can unload everything behind the player's view in environments where there are no RT reflections like that canyon, and in the 60fps mode if there is no RT.

They just need to keep the BVH. They don't need to unload everything.