Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One Will Make You Want a Foursome
Why Insomniac's four-player Ratchet is a terrific evolution of the series. It's a cool new direction for the Ratchet series: one that allows up to four players to play together (either locally or online).
If you tuned into the Sony press conference at Gamescom last week, you got to see Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One revealed and played for the first time by Ted Price and a couple of
other Insomniacs. Which means you also got to see why it's a cool new
direction for the Ratchet series: one that allows up to four players to
play together (either locally or online). As a hardcore Ratchet fan, I
was pretty much sold on the concept within minutes of seeing it in
action, but after getting a chance to check out some more of the game
and chat with Chad Dezern (studio head at the new North Carolina
Insomniac studio) and some of the other team members at the show, I'm
even more excited about what's in store.
As you see in the first videos, the game is very much like the Ratchet
titles we all know and love, except here you can have up to four people
playing on the same screen. According to Dezern, the project originally
started as a two-player affair, where one person would play Ratchet and
another would play as Clank, but when the team realized how much co-op
added, it experimented with adding a third and then a fourth player. So
now you can play as Ratchet and Clank, obviously, but also Captain Qwark
and Dr. Nefarious. And why would these four ever be teamed together?
Well, it turns out Nefarious had this elaborate scheme involving a
creature collector, but in addition to abducting Ratchet, Clank, and
Qwark, it also sucked him in. So they're all basically forced by
circumstance to work together -- which means they all need to rely on
each other, but that doesn't mean they always play fair (more on that
later).