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Interview with Insomniac - pt. 3
Pixar and Uncharted 2 are the two topics up for discussion in the third part of our exclusive interview with Ratchet & Clank creators Insomniac Games.
Written by David Scammell, 29 October 2009
GamerZines: Do you think the approach that Rockstar has taken with GTA IV's DLC, whereby it's the same environment and essentially the same gameplay as the original but told from the perspective of a different character, is something that could potentially work with Ratchet & Clank? Obviously there's a huge amount of characters in the universe - how about the story told from the perspective of Captain Qwark, or something like that?
James Stevenson, Senior Community Manager, Insomniac: That seems like a massive project. The problem is we don't do small things very well at Insomniac. Quest For Booty was supposed to be smaller and probably cheaper than it ended up being; we ended up making a bigger and bigger game, it kept growing. And I don't know if our levels lend themselves to that as well. You know, GTA is a sandbox, same thing with Fallout, it's much easier to colour in a new area to a sandbox, drop something in and add something to it. Obviously there are no plans for anything but let's say we did try something like that, we'd probably have to build some new levels or paths through levels which would basically end up being entirely new assets and you'd need more environment time. I think if you could something like that without needing a tonne of environment time you could probably reduce the cost to get it within the range of profitability, but I don't think our levels have really been designed with that in mind. GTA is perfect for it; Liberty City doesn't have to change. It may need a few more indoor environments or a new building here and there, but they can really focus on characters and doing new story-telling and very rapidly make an experience at a much smaller price because they already have the scene and the massive environment to play around in.
GZ: How has Ratchet & Clank progressed technologically over the course of the PS3 series? Have you invested a lot of capital into expanding the engine?
JS: Well it's actually the Resistance engine which became the Tools of Destruction engine which became the Resistance 2 engine which became the Crack In Time engine. So yeah, we invest in it every single time round. It's change or die, basically. You've got to keep progressing, everyone else is, the bar's always being raised. I think the best example of that is Uncharted 2 just completely raising the bar on everyone only a couple of weeks ago. I'm sure people will play our game now after playing Uncharted 2 and probably think, "yeah, it looks good, but it isn't Uncharted 2". To us our game looks great but Uncharted 2 is at such a high level, unless you keep investing you're just going to fall behind everyone else. To keep improving on our engine and our technology is a very important thing for us, and from two perspectives. There's the forward facing perspective of the customer that sees and points out all of our water technology, the self-shadowing, the larger levels and lighting tricks that we're doing now, and the muscle system that makes animations all believable. But then there is a lot on our side too. One of the biggest things we can do to make our games better is make it easier for us to make games. So from our engine and tool scene it's, 'how do we make our tools more useful to the team so that they can make assets faster, better and iterate it more quickly?' We're always investing in that because it's just as important to have a really strong toolset as it is to have 'whizz bang' graphical features that people can mention in reviews and show off in screenshots. It's a lot cooler if you have tonnes of assets that the artists can iterate on more quickly, and I think that's a feature that a lot of people don't ever really think about when they think about engine development.
GZ: You mentioned Uncharted 2 there, and you guys are obviously very friendly with Naughty Dog. Do you think that Uncharted 2 could be seen as the Half-Life of this generation?
P3Zine Issue 31
For our latest Ratchet Clank coverage, click here to download P3Zine Issue 31 for free.JS: It seems like it's a shoe-in for game of the year right now and it's definitely one of the best games of this generation. Right now it's the benchmark, but who knows what people are going to do in the next couple of years. There could be a better game in the works. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say Half-Life, that's a big name to throw around, but it very well could be - they've done a tonne of amazing work. Christophe is incredible, Evan does a great job and Amy too with the story. And the acting they have, their motion capture, their environments, the interaction with everything, how things fall over and move - it's voodoo! I'm glad we're such good friends with them because it's like, 'okay guys, come on over, let's talk about how you did this and share the love'. But let's see, it could very well be one of the defining games of the generation. I think it's a little hard for me to say that a week after release, but it's definitely put itself into the position to be that. I think it'll be a couple of years before we know for sure how it stands, but it seems like based on reviews that you see once in a generation, and comments and feedback that you see once in a generation, that it very likely could be one of those games.
GZ: Ratchet & Clank's visuals, particularly the cutscenes, have been likened to a Pixar CGI movie. Do you think you're at that level yet?
TJ Fixman, Writer, Insomniac: I think we're definitely getting close. In terms of our cutscenes looking good, that's more our post team than the engine, because it's something that we capture in layers and they spend their time polishing up, so I don't think we're quite at that Pixar-level yet but it was a flattering comparison we got with Tools of Destruction that we started taking really seriously after that. That's why in A Crack In Time we have more full motion videos. There are two kinds of scenes; the real-times and the full motion videos. In the real-times you can have effects but the FMVs are the ones that you can really polish, adding in depth of field and tweaking the effects a bit more, and we did more FMVs in this game so we could add that extra layer of polish. Our post team just went all out and made it look insane. Certainly in the Future games the guys were capable of doing more stuff like that in real-time and getting more bandwidth, especially in the cutscenes for that Pixar feel. In terms of the gameplay I think we're closer to a CGI animated movie than anything else I've seen.
GZ: One particular criticism we read of A Crack In Time was that it was largely the same game as Tools Of Destruction. Do you think that's a fair and valid criticism - should games constantly be evolving?
JS: I think it's tough because obviously we've sold a lot of games and our fans seem very happy with the series. You don't want to change things up too much; we tried changing it up with Gladiator and fans didn't seem to appreciate that as much, but then there's always another group to that loved it. It's really, really hard to say what can we do and how do we treat the Ratchet gameplay, because that gameplay is what people want to play; they love that and I think we've perfected that platform/shooter hybrid. We've tried to add a lot of new stuff; Clank's time puzzles are the best and most interesting Clank gameplay we've ever done, and the space exploration segments and adding some really hard platforming on those moons. We're focussing more on the platforming than we did in the previous games, but I guess to some people it's more of a subtle change than a wholesale change. In this case, if you count the two PSP games we've done nine games in seven years. That's a lot of Ratchet & Clank, but I don't think it's too much because it's found audiences everywhere and been on different platforms, telling different stories and it's still selling well which is a good thing.
I guess I have to look at sports games which release with a similar frequency. They have a fundamental gameplay which you cannot change: Madden is Madden and FIFA is FIFA. So what did they do to expand on that, how did they offer new things? It depends on how you look at what we offer. To me, I think we innovated in a lot of ways and our fans will be very excited by that. To the average games journalist who maybe isn't a huge R&C fan, who enjoys it but plays a tonne of games and who might have been forced to play five or six R&C games in the last four or five years, maybe it does feel like too much of the same to them. We have to be aware of that if reviewers are saying it, and there's probably some layer of truth to it; they're at least feeling that and that's a valid feedback and response. Whether or not that changes anything that we do, I think we have to weigh that with all the other factors. What do the fans think? How are the sales? Is it showing signs of franchise fatigue? There are a lot of things and if a few reviews call up too much of the same, I don't know if that will shatter our world but we definitely take everything into consideration when we look at our games. We spend a lot of time looking at all the feedback we get because we don't want to be stagnant.
Ratchet Clank coverage available in P3Zine Issue 31 - click here to download it for free!
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