STACK #138 Apr 2016

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The Pixeliser is the best weapon I’ve seen so far – where did the idea for that come from? We loved the visual idea of reducing enemies to their 8-bit components. When we started making the weapon, gameplay programmer Joel Bartley realized that it’s really fun to

challenging – is it difficult to achieve this? It is. We spend a lot of time playing the game ourselves, then making it much too hard because we play it every day. Then we watch other people play and tune it properly over many, many weeks. A lot of our systems are designed to

Is the levelling/XP system the same in this game? The levelling system is an evolution of our best work. It uses the “level as you use it” system from the Future series, coupled with the “choose your own Raritanium upgrades” system from Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus . Do the Smuggler and his parrot make a return, or is he being replaced by the Telepathopus guy? Not just yet - Ratchet’s origin story takes place in the Solana Galaxy, while the Smuggler hails from the Polaris galaxy. There’s no replacing the Smuggler, but as you note there is a Blargian brain scientist who would love to get his hands on some Telepathopus brains. I wonder if he has any exotic tech to trade?

turn enemies into colourful voxel cubes, and then submit the cubes to the physics system. The result is a weapon with a lot of toy-factor; it’s fun to see what each enemy looks like in its pixelated form, and then reduce it to a shower of bouncing cubes! Where do the different dance moves for each of the monsters come from? Is this something that’s thought of when they’re designed (provided the Groovitron is always included) or is it conceived after? We have an awesome animation team, and every animator contributes dance moves for the enemy they’re working on, from concept to final. It’s not uncommon to see animators dancing in the mirror to get the subtleties just right. This is a fun place to work, but it’s also sometimes highly disturbing.

let us tweak right up until the very end; we want the game to require skill and be challenging, but never frustrating. Given your venture into the VR market, will we see any form of Ratchet and Clank in that department? Hmm. That’s an interesting idea. It sounds mind-blowing. It’s hard to even think about our next projects; we’re still focused on this one! Where does the franchise go from here? We’re still thinking about Ratchet & Clank PS4. We can’t wait for the movie to come out, and we can’t wait to get the game into players’ hands. After that - and after we’ve had some sleep - we’ll think about what’s next!

• Ratchet & Clank is out on April 20

Ratchet & Clank manages to find the middle between simple and

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