PlayStation 5 makers hit “Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart” shedding old ideas about the game’s difficulty — and even making a previously “unthinkable” design decision — to help players get past their new game, the game makers said. Axios in an exclusive interview.
why does it matter: Some game designers are rethinking the benefits of creating a challenging game versus creating games that can be accessed by more people.
- “We’ve broken away from the conventional wisdom that games should be hard to get satisfaction from,” Rift Apart Game Director Mike Daly told Axios of his team’s new approach to challenging the game.
Between the lines:Ratchet games weren’t the hardest games ever, but this new game gives players more help.
- This game features a furry human hero who acquires and shoots an arsenal of cartoonish weapons while exploring colorful sci-fi worlds filled with enemies.
- A selection of traditional difficulty levels for all this action in “Rift Apart” is supplemented by the extensive “ping” and hint system, giving missing players a boost towards goals.
- Among all the shooters there are puzzle levels, and basic sequences, but in “Rift Apart” players can skip them all with the press of a button. (Insomniac’s Mike Fitzgerald said, “This was out of the question three to five years ago.”
The biggest boost that Rift Apart gives to players It comes through a unique PlayStation 5 feature called Activity Cards, which appear in the console’s main menu and have been used inconsistently and unimportantly by other games on the fledgling system.
- For Rift Apart, cards are used to indicate in-game tasks, including tasks that players can complete or hide that they might want to track down.
- The cards offer text hints and for those who click, short video tutorials.
- It even shows time-limited players how many minutes each mission should take. Insomniac revealed to Axios that these songs are for one player.
- These are derived from an estimate made by the developers, which is then compared to average times other players complete a task performed over the PlayStation Network – and then adjusted by monitoring the player’s speed during gameplay.
Briefly: Daly says his team’s work to make the new game more accessible has changed the way they think about making the game more accessible.
- “We don’t think ‘What would most elite players like about themselves?'” And more than that, “What is going to enable everyone to have the experience they want?” Because that is the most important thing for us.”
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