So much for the crushing requirements of making a next-gen game.
"Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction" for PlayStation 3 only required 15 more developers at Insomniac Games than "Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal" for the PS2.
So said Brian Allgeier, creative director of the PS3 game, in an interview with me at MTVNews.com.
Note that we're talking a team of 125 people, instead of a team of 110.
The Insomniac team was going for Pixar-quality graphics and have a box-art blurb from The New York Times, of all gaming outlets, to push that idea (said the guy who writes for MTV, of all gaming outlets).
There are a bunch of tidbits in the interview for "Ratchet" fans, but for the wider audience, the thing I think will be most interesting is Allgeier's pondering of whether a Pixar graphics goal is a meaningful goal for a game.
From my write-up:
Can graphics matter the most? Should they? "I feel like there's two sides to this," Allgeier said. "My game-designer side wants to say graphics don't matter and it's all about what the player is doing. But the other side is that it really immerses you in a world. ... Our burden is to create a world that is very convincing. So the fact that we can improve the visuals and the graphics adds to that."
Can anyone disagree with that? "Ratchet" is visually stunning. I'm happy to see it look as good as it does (on my standard-definition TV, no less). So were graphics the right priority?
Do top development teams' graphics goals ever detract from the gameplay they create? Or is the relationship between graphics and gameplay not nearly as zero-sum as people often assume?