Ratchet & Clank rifts on PS3 could have been simply produced, According to the founder of Traveler's Tales

Ratchet & Clank rifts on PS3 could have been simply produced, according to the founder of Traveler's Tales.

According to Jon Burton, Insomniac's claim that only the PH5 could pull it off is false. Get the latest gaming news on Toisthe.

Ratchet & Clank's rifts

The rift effects in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, according to the founder of Traveller's Tales, don't require the PS5's SSD to work, and could "easily" be achieved with hardware from two generations ago.

Before his departure in 2019, Jon Burton, the founder of Traveller's Tales (now TT Games) and director of scores of Lego crossover games, made the assertions in a video on his new Coding Secrets channel. When Insomniac asserted that the portal-traveling mechanic "would not have been conceivable without the Solid State Drive of PlayStation 5," Burton charges them of being "misleading." Ratchet & Clank’s rifts could ‘easily have been done on PS3, claims Traveller’s Tales founder.

The programmer goes on to say that “the way the Rift gameplay was described before launch was quite misleading,” and that what was shown as “amazing sequences of Ratchet flying between many other worlds all strung together into spectacular action sequences” ended up being “mostly just cutscenes or very brief parts of very limited gameplay.”

Burton makes it clear that he is not claiming that the PS5 does not use the SSD's high loading speeds to "perform everything properly," but that it is false to imply that certain set-pieces are not viable to pull off on older hardware.  Get the latest gaming news on Toisthe.

Burton breaks down the two key Rift maneuvers in the game and discusses how he feels they could be performed on PS4 or even PS3 hardware in his video.  Get the latest gaming news on Toisthe.

He believes that because the extra Pocket Dimension portions are small stages with limited scenery, they are the easiest to carry off. "Ye could use all manner of Solid State Drive sorcery to drag it away," continues Burton, "but it can be readily performed on older hardware because there is just one Rift and always at the same location."

Burton then makes it very clear asset streaming techniques for people who are inexperienced with the process, stating, "The Pocket Dimensions are fairly graphically simplistic, and in fact only seem to employ a lot of the same generic objects like crates that would already be present in generic memory." Get the latest gaming news on Toisthe.

According to Digital Foundry, Sony PlayStation VR 2 specs are outstanding.

"Such this is pretty much a skydome, some little platforms, generic objects, and good lighting, so that much storage on older hardware would not be required, not least as it uses generic elements which make loading fast." Moving on to the more dramatic set-pieces in which players hop fast from Rift to Rift, Burton shows that these may also be accomplished through the creative use of buffers.

According to Burton's video, Rift Apart might have worked on PS3.

Using Ratchet on a speeder bike, going through a portal, and landing on a grind rail as an example, Burton claims that the game intentionally places the player in extremely short stages and gives them minimal control to help manage the data that is flowing in.

"The key thing here is to remember that none of it is optional; all of it needs to be done," adds Burton. "This is important since it is possible to precharge the ground element whilst playing the speeder part. In fact, in this sequence, all portions are forced and short. "You are only moving around a pretty tiny portion of the planet and have very limited freedom to travel around the segment - that means that the game is played in the load section throughout. Get the latest gaming news on Toisthe.

“Let's say the game has two memory buffers. The first buffer contains the segment in which you are presently playing. It can load the following portion into the second buffer while you're playing. To transition between buffers, you can just keep a simple intermediary Void address in memory to disguise any swap-over errors that may occur.”

After going over the process in greater detail, Burton says that it's very feasible that the game is using the SSD to "perform everything properly." "I merely describe how easy alternatives may be utilized to achieve the same on older gear," he explains.

He then shows a section he built for Lego Star Wars III on the PlayStation 3, where two independent gameplay stages are playing on-screen at the same time. Insomniac's creative director Marcus Smith stated the game's rift-traveling concept was unachievable on prior platforms in a video released on the PlayStation YouTube channel a year before the release of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

PlayStation 3 games that are no longer updated.

"Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is the game with dimensional rifts which, without PlayStation 5's Solid State Drive, would not have been possible," Smith revealed.“The SSD is lightning fast. It enables us to create worlds and transport gamers from one location to another at near-instantaneous speeds. It is a game-changer in the sense that we can now have gameplay where you are in one environment and then switch to another. We're loading up levels so quickly and in the action that you can't believe it's something we couldn't do before because it feels so natural.”

After the release, Game Manager Mike Daly told Axios, "To build the [new] 'Ratchet & Clank' game on the PS4, you'll have to pull the ton back to get it going." Get the latest gaming news on Toisthe.

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