Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart has been Steam Deck Verified.
Insomniac Games revealed the news itself on their Twitter. As surprising as it sounds to say this, this is welcome news and not something we can just take for granted from PlayStation Studios.
Of course, the reason I say that is something PlayStation fans won’t want to be reminded of. The controversial release of The Last of Us: Part 1 on PC turned out to be poorly optimized at launch. It had reflected poorly on the usually well regarded Naughty Dog, as well as their porting partner, Iron Galaxy Studios.
Since Sony started PlayStation Studios, and revealed plans to start releasing their PlayStation exclusive games on PC, the company has had a stellar run of PC releases, on both Steam, the biggest platform on PC, and Epic Games Store, under a company where Sony has partial ownership.
Among those stellar PC ports of their AAAs have been their very best games, Horizon: Zero Dawn, God of War, and Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered. However, even their smaller and less regarded games, such as Helldivers and Days Gone, have also received very high quality ports.
PlayStation PC has had a peerless reputation for these ports right until The Last of Us: Part 1. As they say, it only takes one mistake to ruin that clean reputation you may have maintained for years.
While reviews have not come out yet, it does not seem like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will not have the same issues on PC. For one, Insomniac’s porting partner is Nixxes, the studio that got the ball rolling on these ports with Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Nixxes also did the ports for the Marvel’s Spider-Man games to PC, and they have demonstrated that they were not only capable to the task, but that they have even been improving.
Recently, Sony revealed that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart won’t need an SSD on PC. This isn’t because Sony has been disingenuous.
In fact, it’s because Nixxes optimized Windows 10’s new capabilities to use DirectStorage technology. In their application, Windows 10 and 11 will buffer the game’s data off of your hard disk drive, before bringing them to the GPU. That makes Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart the first game to use DirectStorage 1.2 technology.
That’s certainly a lot of big claims to make, and we hope Insomniac and Nixxes are truly able to live up to all of them.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will be releasing today, on July 26, 2023, on Steam and Epic Games Store.
