Jon Burton, veteran LEGO games developer and the creative director of 2001’s Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, has said that Insomniac Games “misled” players by claiming that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart‘s rifts would not have been possible on older hardware.
Burton, who founded Traveller’s Tales (now TT Games) made the comments in a YouTube video (via Video Games Chronicle), in which he said that those impressive rifts and pocket dimensions could even be done on the PlayStation 3, let alone the PlayStation 4 and 5.
“Now, they could be using all kinds of Solid State Drive trickery to pull these off, but because it’s just one Rift and it always goes to the same area this can easily be achieved on older hardware,” Burton said. “The Pocket Dimensions are really graphically basic, and in fact just seem to use a lot of the same generic objects like crates that would already be available in generic memory. So it’s pretty much a sky dome, a few small platforms, generic objects and nice lighting, so on older hardware it wouldn’t take much memory, especially as it also uses the generic objects, all of which make it quick to load.”
Using the example of a scene where Ratchet goes through a portal and then speeds through a rail, Burton added that it’s a small, forced sequence that allowed Insomniac to pre-load everything.
“You only move across a very small part of the world and have very little ability to even move during this section – this means the game has the whole time you’re playing the section to load in the next section,” he explained.
You can check out the full video below.
[Source: VGC]
