Insomniac had to add gameplay prompts to Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart after seeing how seamless its cutscene transitions really are.
The developer broke down the game's stellar animation work in a new PlayStation Blog post, and one of the most interesting details has to do with the game's intro. As senior community manager Aaron Jason Espinoza explained – and as players may remember from their first run – the opening cutscene leads right into the first gameplay section without a hard transition or any dip in visual fidelity. The jump is so smooth, in fact, that Insomniac specifically added some sign posting to the intro to tell players that, yep, this is just how the game looks, time to play it.
"This is the first time we give the player control, so we added a few prompts like 'Grab the Wrench' to let them know it’s time to play," Espinoza says.
- Yes, South of Midnight will still run at 60fps despite its stop motion animation: "you're still in this crafted world without making it, you know, too nauseating"
- In 1997, Hideo Kojima said the "one thing" he wanted to avoid in Metal Gear Solid was "tedious" cutscenes with characters "blabbering at each other for 4 or 5 minutes"
It's remarkably easy to stare at this shot of Ratchet in the crowd for a few seconds before your brain clicks and registers that you are, in fact, in a playable section, which is a pretty good marker for what new-gen games are capable of. Not only are games not worried about masking loading times, they're now actively worried about leaving players behind as they glide through functionally invisible transitions. Obviously, it's not a huge issue to start moving a few seconds late, but the fact that this was even a concern is marvelous.
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