For Fitzgerald, it's how wipes in cut-scenes worked by literally having two different worlds rendered at the same time. And basically just get to where you need to be without having to mask it or find some sort of compromise."ĭaly's favorite technical achievement in Rift Apart is how the graphics engine can subtly handle colored glass filtering light onto characters in real-time.
"But I think the immersion factor gets a huge leg up by the fact that we can basically cut between scenes wherever we want, whenever we want. "Games and movies are different in a lot of ways that will probably not change," Daly says. The interesting technique that Insomniac seems to be playing with in Rift Apart is just how quickly new environments can be jump-cut to. Rift Apart at times feels like a seamless blend of cinematics and gaming - the sort of "living film" that game consoles have promised for years. Jump-cuts and teleporting via a fast SSD: Could level design be reinvented? "Relative to Miles Morales, that extra six months was a bunch of time to let us really, really dig into the SSD and the decompression hardware and everything around it, and what we could get out of it for this game," Fitzgerald says of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.
To them, the solid-state drive's extremely fast-loading graphics has opened up the most interesting possibilities of all.īesides making Rift Apart, Insomniac Games also created Spider-Man: Miles Morales at the PS5 launch. Insomniac Games' Tech Director Mike Fitzgerald and Game Director Mike Daly spoke to me over Zoom to share what they've seen as the biggest changes in making PS5 games so far, and what that hardware could lead to in games. But it's the surprisingly vivid, living-cartoon style of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart that proves the PS5's superfast internal storage can do things previous consoles just could not. Maybe you thought that game was already here, in Spider-Man Miles Morales, or Returnal, or Astro's Playroom. The PlayStation 5's killer app seems to have finally arrived.