Told You So! Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Really Wouldn't Have Worked on PS4

I'm pretty sure this killed the "SEE GUYS, WE DON'T NEED AN SSD TO RUN THIS GAME! THE CURRENT GEN IS A LIE" argument.

I mean it still works, but it's like playing on a Game Boy with butter on your hands. It's unnecessary, embarrassing, annoying, gross, possibly expensive, and will probably give you a mental breakdown.

@HotGoomba I'm sure it won't. Certain internet people are so full of themselves, they always think they know better, even when we get official word.

Really happy to hear the PC port is pretty good. I'll definitely replay it on PC some point in the future.

I'm also looking forward to all of the goofy mods that will be released.

This should have been obvious to people. Of course it would still work on a slower HDD but it would, surprise surprise, load more slowly. You can run Doom on a microwave so of course a PS5 game could work on a PS4, just badly - exactly the same as running a new game on an old PC.

@naruball (insert the lyrics to Bo Burnham's Welcome to the Internet here)

The title of this article is very misleading. It would obviously be much more playable if the game actually came out on ps4 because of this one magic word called optimization.

At least it wasn't held back to be compatible with old hardware, like HFW which has fog that magically appears only to hide all the details as soon as you are 10m above the ground so it could run on a PS4.

@HotGoomba yup. Pretty much

@GloriosaDaisy care to elaborate?

@HotGoomba Nah, I’m already seeing parts of Twitter (sorry - X!) saying Insomniac and DF are both lying now
Backed by footage of the game running ok-ish on a machine with a hdd (that just happens to have 4x, maybe 8x the amount of RAM the PS4 had)

Well it's known that any game will really run on any hardware, if you're prepared to put up with performance hits of grand magnitudes.

I remember seeing people playing Quake 3 Arena back in the day on the very lowest settings on PC, trying to eek out a performance advantage on their competitors.
It looked like an Atari 2600 game though.

@Wheatly well, in Insomniac defense, they said they needed PS5 super fast SSD as that was the only SSD in the platform they were targeting. It would be weird for them to say it needed a PCI Gen 3 NVMe drive to run, and then publish a game on PS5 using different hardware options...

As for optimizations, I feel like they could make the game run on a larger spectrum of configurations, but probably by changing/tweaking the mechanics. It becomes a question of how much you are willing to compromise the experience, which I am glad they did not. Requirements and performance on Ricks machine seem perfectly reasonable to me, and I would actually call it well-optimised for what it delivers. Games for few years now are almost completely unplayable on such hardware, and R&C was perfectly serviceable.

@GloriosaDaisy Right - nailing an ancient PS4 hard drive into a Windoze PC doasn't really prove anything?

The PS4 OS is so much more efficient than Windows 10 or higher without anywhere near the same memory requirements or DMA issues. Yes, some of the interactive load screens (which the PS5 still has) would be longer but it's perfectly possible with lower resolution and/or frame rate.

And 7100Mb/s is faster at transferring data than 500Mb/s SATA? Well, duh! That said, it didn't seem that bad, certainly if you weren't looking at them side by side.

Its just the Xbox Series S problem all over again. devs don't want to work with weaker hardware so spend less resources on it as they know they can fix it later. So try it again in 6 months time after it's been patched.

People put up with far worse - on PS5, it may be the fastest way through that 'portal' sequence which would make it feel much more 'fluid' than those who may play on HDD, who would be stuck in those portals for seconds longer but the 'actual' Game-play in-between those is not really affected.

Graphically of course its not on the same level but all it proves is that it would have 'worked' but loading would have been more 'intrusive' and interrupted the 'flow' a bit more...

It's whether or not 'Gamers' would be 'OK' with that - but for Sony, it makes more sense to have games 'exclusive' to PS5 so that Gamers have no choice but to buy a PS5 to play R&C:RA - not given the 'choice' to have a 'lower' Visual Quality with more 'intrusive' loading etc - at least not until it releases on PC. That being said, it does affect the 'Flow' in certain sections so I can understand why from that perspective too. They can't get the PS4 version to 'flow' as well due to slower loading...

Nobody here in the comments arguing that it could work on a PS4 or HDDs seems to be acknowledging the fact that Rift Apart uses the "Direct Storage" technology which did not exist when Rift Apart was released on PS5 2 years ago. At the time of development (which was 2020/2019 or even before that) there was first of all no consumer SSD faster than the one in the PS5 at a reasonable price, there was no DirectStorage to compensate for the speed at which HDDs and SSD decompresses files. In the Digital Foundry video the game running on a machin with the latest CPU and latest GPU (both released AFTER the PS5 and the setup costing about 4-5 times the price of a PS5) still loads slower than the PS5. Insomniacs never said "you will never be able to play this game anywhere else than on the PS5" but at the time of development, the SSD of the PS5 gave them the possibility to create this game as they intended.

I'm pretty shocked to see people still saying they "lied" about it needing the PS5 to run it properly. The way it smoothly transitioned from setting to setting is only possible on an SSD and is basically the whole point of the narrative for the game. Sticking a loading screen in between Rift jumps isn't the way the game was intended.

Just because it can technically run on a PS4 if you have a lot of patience doesn't mean it's running it as intended. If Insomniac and Sony released a PS4 version like this they would have been raked over the coals. They made the right choice to just focus on the PS5 version for the game.

Looks great! Shows how much power is in the hardware we use (PS/Xbox) but also how much better the PC market could be with some serious standardisation in SDKs (which Vulkan was supposed to do).

@Korgon yep, it would've been another "previous gen game running in boost mode.

Is this really still an issue? Just move on to PS5 already.

Welp it confirmed. Insomniac and Sony deserve an apology. They won't get it from certain folks, but they deserve one.

@BAMozzy so as long as the game works is fine with you? Cool,I hope you've been consistent in that thinking for the past decade. I'm pretty sure you're being hypocritical though cause most games just work.

This was never a surprise or scandal except to people who were misled by the gaming press or some weird friend group.

But isn’t it FuN to believe and promote conspiracy theories? Truth is soooo boring. Doesn’t get clicks.

PC is truly the best investment a gamer can make. You can run brand new games on old hardware and because no one locks the fps, you will run games faster than the PS5 with mid range parts.

It's running pretty damn smooth on SteamDeck off a SD card. 30fps in game and no issue on the pull rifts. Cutscenes run at 26fps for some reason. Only hitch I found was the end of the opening sequence when falling thru the rifts there's a 4ish second delay when loading the new dimension. Even if it's essentially a complex cutscene. Loving it tho.

@Cutmastavictory When you have people still playing on PS4/XB1 hardware, play on Switch/Steam Decks etc - especially when you have 'much' better Hardware options that offer 'better' graphical presentation, better Frame Rates and much better loading times, it proves that not everyone is overly concerned about those things.

Not everyone rushed out to get a PS4 Pro - despite offering better Frame Rates and/or Graphics - their PS4 was good enough. The 'story' doesn't change, the moment to moment Game-play loop doesn't change and you aren't missing out on any content.

Its like Spider-Man and saying that's 'unplayable' because its only 30fps on PS4 and fast travel/loading takes ages compared to the 60fps PS5 version. How can people wait to 'fast' travel - its interrupts the 'flow' - not that it changes the story, the missions, the game-play etc...

Congratulations to everyone who tirelessly ranted about this, you've earned a shortbread & pat on the back from yourself to yourself🥳
And a big shout out to those writing a wall of text, air high fives all around!

@Triumph741 oh really?

Can you list some mid range parts that will play a game better than the PS5?

Like how much money are we talking about here?

Not exactly sure where the “rock solid” PC port came from in the header. DF mentioned a ton of problems.

From the Eurogamer article:

“All of these issues give the impression that - once again - a PC port has launched when it's not in a fully polished state.” and “ Sony keeps shipping games with obvious problems at launch.”

They still overmarketed the gimmick of the game. The rift tether was not the next gen revolution they claimed it was. Fun game though.

@Ichiban Ooooh I like shortbread

Insomniac never lied. Rift Apart was built to basically be a tech demo for the PS5.

if you have 64 gb of ram , and a 4090 , why on earth would you have a hdd instead of a ssd. i mean if you only have a pc thats not bad i guess, but why would you play on the lowest settings vs playing on a ps5 in that case?

um....duh? Did anyone ever argue that this was even feasible on the PS4 in the first place?

@GloriosaDaisy optimization, as magical as it may seem, wouldn't make up for the speed this game needs new assets. They could lower the overall quality of assets, preload sections into ram, and lock your actions in some areas to make events more predictable... But how far would they have to go before this "optimized" version of the game is something different entirely.

@PorkYoself This. You can optimize it, sure. But you will have to make sacrifices that are so extreme (smaller levels, less detail, more frequent loading areas, etc...), that it may as well be a different game.

@HotGoomba Like playing Mortal Kombat on the go with the Gameboy it works but do you really want to play it like this.

@GreatAuk It won't be below €550.