Jon Burton founded TT Games (Traveller’s Tales) in 1989 and directed many video games until his departure. In a video posted on his YouTube channel, the creative has accused Insomniac Games, creators of Ratchet & Clank: A Dimension Apart, of having been “Misleading” when they affirmed that the mechanics of the trips through portals “would not have been possible without the SSD of PlayStation 5”. Burton has gone further and pointed out that this production could work not only on PS4, but also on PS3.
“The way the Rift Apart gameplay was rendered before launch was quite misleading.” For the programmer, what was taught were “incredible sequences of Ratchet traveling between dimensions to other worlds all connected in a chain and through impressive action sequences.” He considers that in the end this has resulted in “very short little video scenes or sections with very limited gameplay.” Burton does not deny that PS5 uses the SSD to improve load times and to “get it all right”, but it disdains the idea that this set of sequences could not work on older hardware.
The explanation of the founder of TT Games
The programmer asserts that the bonus phases are the easiest to reproduce, because they are small scenarios. “Now, they can be playing any kind of tricks with the SSD,” he argues, “but because it’s a single dimension always targeting the same area, this can easily be accomplished on older hardware.” For Burton, these dimensions are graphically simple: “In fact, they seem to use a lot of generic objects that may already be available in generic memory.”
At its most impressive moments, the game continues to make use of smaller sections, according to the developer. “The important thing to note here is that none of this is optional, is forced. It is important because it means that you can preload the rails section while you are playing the speeder part. Not surprisingly, all the sections of this sequence are both mandatory and small ”.
According to his argument, the player moves in a very small portion of the world and has limited movements. “This means that the game has all the time in the world to load the next section while you are playing ”. And he adds: “Imagine that the title has two memory buffers. The first one takes care of the part that you are playing at that moment. As you do so, it can load the next one in the second. ”
Again, Burton comments that Insomniac Games may have used the SSD to do all of this: “I’m just explaining how other simple techniques can be used to achieve exactly the same on older hardware ”.
Source | VGC
.
