Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a different kind of game — it is a generational leap in terms of graphical fidelity, performance, game design, and engineering. It is, in many ways, a glimpse into the future of gaming, and the staggeringly talented folks over at Insomniac Games deserve a metric ton of praise and commendation for what they’ve been able to accomplish.
When a game is made just for a single console architecture and a single console generation — and the developer is given ample financial backing and enough time to create something worthy of mentioning — that’s when the most mind-blowing titles tend to be brought into existence.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is one such title, and boy has it awed us in all the right ways!
Passing through portals (or rifts, rather) is at the heart of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. They’re not only a fun gameplay mechanic, but also an astounding achievement because of the way in which they leverage the sheer prowess of the PlayStation 5.
These rifts — or different worlds, to be more exact — are all rendered in real time. In other words, the game is rendering two totally different worlds all at the same time, and you can move from one to the other without any cutscenes or loading screens whatsoever.
All of this is possible not just because of the PS5’s sheer computational power, but also because of its blazingly fast NVMe SSD (±5.5 GB/s).
Its speed can perhaps best be illustrated with the following tidbit: turning the camera at any point in the game will automatically unload whatever is behind the player (that whole part of the rendered world) and therefore free up memory. This, in turn, has allowed Insomniac to cram in even more effects and textures and whatever else they could come up with and render these things “in front” of the player. So, in other words, only half of the world you’re in is rendered and actually visible — the other half gets brought up whenever necessary. It’s a constant balancing act and is truly an astounding achievement.
The limits of game design and world-building are no longer tied to the hardware itself — developers can now create their incredible worlds with fewer constraints than ever before. Those who know a thing or two about game development will have their minds blown, and those who are unencumbered with such knowledge will still enjoy Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart in much the same way, without ever really knowing the sheer amount of engineering and ingenuity that went into making it.
And you really have to see it in person to fully appreciate what the folks over at Insomniac were able to pull off; it’s like a Disney flick, albeit one that is fully interactive!
Remember when Lead System Architect Mark Cerny went on stage to wax poetic about the PS5 and its incredible technological prowess? Turns out, that wasn’t marketing hogwash. His emphasis on the internal NVMe storage was warranted after all. And, well, we knew it’d be a big deal, but no one could have foreseen just how big of an impact the introduction of such fast storage would have on game development. What at that point seemed like an exhausting deep dive into something most folks could never reap the benefits of, was actually a glimpse into the future of gaming.