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).
