Insomniac Games today announced an update for 2016’s Ratchet & Clank. The nearly five-year-old game will be playable on the PlayStation 5 at 60FPS, optimizing it to take advantage of the next-generation console’s hardware. Like most PS4 games, it’s already playable on the PS5, but this will make it look much better than it does currently.
According to the announcement, this update will be free for those who own the game on both PS4 and PS5. If that wasn’t enough of an inducement, Ratchet & Clank is currently free, though it won’t be for much longer. It was released as part of the Play at Home initiative, in which Sony offers some of its titles for free, presumably in an attempt to alleviate the boredom of the pandemic. It’ll be free through Wednesday, though you can expect even more games to come out as part of that initiative, including Subnautica, The Witness, and Horizon Zero Dawn.
There’s also a chance the developers want to raise the awareness of the R&C series ahead of Rift Apart’s launch, which is set for this coming June. That game is supposed to take full advantage of the PS5’s hardware (or so say the promotional materials thus far), so it would make sense to get more people playing the older game on the new console and thus keeping it fresh in their minds.
Rift Apart is also supposed to run at 60FPS, though like many PS5 games including Spider-Man: Miles Morales, it’ll come in two modes. One, the “performance” mode, will offer 60FPS but at a lower resolution; while the other will offer 4K resolution but will run at 30FPS. We don’t yet know if Ratchet & Clank 2016 will have a similar choice, but we’ll find out when the patch rolls out in April.
Source: Insomniac Games/Twitter
