Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is coming to PC – and it’s going to be a showpiece artifact

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Sony has announced that it will be the next PlayStation Studios game on the way to PC blog post Tuesday. The game, which debuted in 2021, will launch on the new platform on July 26th.

While Sony has been in the habit of releasing its big PlayStation exclusives on PC long after its console debut for some time now, there are a few things that make this announcement particularly interesting.

First, this is the first Ratchet & Clank game to be released on PC – after 16 home and portable console releases since the first game was released on PlayStation 2 over 20 years ago.

Fortunately, despite its position as the newest game in the Ratchet & Clank timeline, rift apart It works fairly well as a standalone story. PC gamers who haven’t played the previous 15 games might miss some of the inside joke, but they won’t get lost in following the story or the characters. However, it still seems uncommon for the sixteenth game in a series to be the first port for PC.

More interesting for many is the technology angle. rift apart Produced by Insomniac Games – developers of the recent Spider-Man games, the Resistance first-person shooter franchise for the PlayStation 3, and the early Spyro the Dragon games of the PlayStation 1 era. After Sony’s relatively recent acquisition of Insomniac, the Rift Apart was meant to be a tech demonstration of the hardware PS5.

Specifically, the game is built around the premise of navigating different dimensions and planets with very different origins through portals with no load times, something that was only possible with the PS5’s ultra-fast SSD and related hardware. The PS5’s internal drive has a read/write speed of 5,500MB/s, which is much faster than most PC drives at the time of the console’s launch. Sony requires any additional PS5 storage to meet minimum speed requirements as well.

There have been faster PC SSDs than that for a while, but they’re expensive, and most people (even basic gamers) don’t now have drives that fast, so it’ll be interesting to see how Sony handles slower PCs. drives. Instant travel through these portals is not a nice bonus; It’s an integral part of the game’s presentation and experience, and is one of the reasons why the PlayStation 4 version doesn’t exist rift apart.

It is curious that Sony did not touch on this topic in its blog post, although it did talk about other technical features of the game. Like the PS5 version, the PC version of rift apart It will support ray tracing reflections, though Sony notes that there will be “a variety of quality levels to choose from.” The PC version will also get a few things the PS5 didn’t: ray tracing shadows and ultra wide screen support. The PC version will also support Nvidia DLSS 3, AMD FSR 2, and Intel XeSS, as well as Nvidia Reflex and Nvidia DLAA. There will be full keyboard and mouse support as well, of course.

There’s a third reason why we should focus on this game: It’s a personal favorite of two Ars employees, myself included. I’ve played every Ratchet & Clank game over the years, and the promise of a new game for PS5 was one of the main reasons for buying this console. The same goes for a co-worker. I was able to get my hands on two PS5s in the first week of launch and gave the second one to a co-worker, who also wanted a custom one for Ratchet & Clank. It quickly became one of my favorite games in years. On the other hand, Ars Games Editor Kyle Orland called it a good game in his review but had some reservations – so your mileage may vary, of course.

They’re great games, with a good mix of action and story, and absolutely none of the games-as-a-service that you see in trilogy games so often these days. After all these years, it would be great to see these games perform on PC, given their deep console pedigree.

rift apart It ended up being a decent entry in the series, but perhaps not the best; We’re still waiting for a PC version of future titles that were originally released on PS3, which arguably were the days of the Halcon franchise. Even if it’s not the absolute pinnacle of franchise entries, rift apart It has one more thing: it’s a great game graphically. The only other game I’ve played recently that competes with it has been Cyberpunk 2077 movie on a very advanced computer, rift apart Worth playing on that basis alone. Sony says it will be available on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Listing image from Sony