Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is less than a month away, and a new spate of previews are building hype for the game. For those looking for new footage, the official UK PlayStation Access channel has published a lengthy preview including a look at some stuff we haven’t seen before. This includes a rocky, desert area traversed by new Lombax hero Rivet and a brief chase/boss fight of sorts against Dr. Nefarious. You can check out the video for yourself, below.
Meanwhile, The Verge had a chance to chat with Insomniac Games tech director Mike Fitzgerald about what the PS5 is bringing to the table beyond the obvious rift-hopping gimmick. Interestingly, while Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart isn’t an open world game, Insomniac is using the SSD in the same way they did in Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
Meanwhile, it sounds like Rift Apart will be using ray tracing in a more extensive, and sometimes subtle, way than Spider-Man…
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.
Sounds like we’re in for quite the visual feast! Do check out The Verge’s full interview if you have the time, as they cover a lot more than we can relate here.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart jumps onto PS5 on June 11.
