A nerdy PS5 chat with Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s tech director

theverge.com:

We’re nearly six months into the life of the PlayStation 5, but exclusive games that really showcase the power of the hardware are still relatively rare. That’s part of what made last month’s Returnal so exciting. It’s also a big reason why the upcoming Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is so highly anticipated.

Ratchet has always been an incredible-looking franchise —just look at the 2016 reboot on the PS4, which was reminiscent of an animated movie — and the latest promises to offer new features only possible on Sony’s new console. It’s still a goofy shooter-platformer filled with weird gadgets, but Rift Apart also features incredibly detailed sci-fi worlds to explore and the titular “rifts” which let players instantly jump into new areas without any loading. (To see some of that in action, check out this recent, lengthy gameplay trailer.)

Ahead of the game’s launch on June 11th, I had a chance to talk to Mike Fitzgerald, core technology director at developer Insomniac Games, about the studio’s move into next-gen. He was able to get into the nitty-gritty of working on the console (in addition to Rift Apart, Insomniac has also released PS5 versions of two Spider-Man games), including some of the challenges of learning as you go. “This title is the first one where we made the content knowing it would only ever be running on the PlayStation 5,” he tells The Verge. “And so our artists would say ‘What kind of mesh density can I have?’ And I’d be like ‘… I don’t know.’ Because we didn’t have the hardware.”

Read on for our full conversation touching on what the team learned from Spider-Man, designing games with ray tracing in mind, why making realistic-looking metallic surfaces is so important, and much more.

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