Insomniac Explains How Ratchet & Clank Got Motion Control

A lot of PlayStation 3 games don’t take advantage of the motion control the Sixaxis controller provides. Oftentimes, even when they do, they feel tacked on and unnecessary, leading some developers to just completely ignore it so as to not annoy gamers who don’t wish to use it. Stephen Totilo recently asked Insomniac how exactly Ratchet & Clank Future ended up getting motion control in the game, and why some of the more obvious uses for it (flying your spaceship) weren’t included.

Creative director Brian Allgeier gave some answers in the brief interview. On why spaceship motion control wasn’t included, Allgeier said:

We wanted to let the player both dodge and aim. We found that if you were trying to both move the whole controller to move the ship and you were trying to move the reticule at the same time, that it works in short bursts. Like with the tornado launcher: if you were to fire out a tornado you could still maybe run Ratchet to the side while still directing it. It’s not something you want to do for sustained periods of time.

And we found in our focus tests that there were some people that were fans of Sixaxis and some people that were not. So we made sure to give the option to turn it off. We turned it off of a vehicle we thought it would work perfectly for. There’s this vehicle called the Gyro Cycle that we had Sixaxis on. And in our focus tests we found that people were having problems. So we removed it.

Maybe it was just me, but I had trouble controller the tornado while moving at the same time.

Read the full interview here.