[The Animation]
From weapons, we headed into our final stop before being turned loose in the game, as Animation Director Chris Nicholls walked us through what the developer was trying to do with next-gen hardware. For starters, he was quick to point out that all of the animation in Ratchet Future was done by just six or seven animators, which is staggering given the amount of variety there is in place. The infamous Groove-o-Tron, which makes enemies dance, makes all enemies dance -- even bosses -- and every character in the game has their own moves.

The goal this time around was to explore emotion and nuance in the main characters, and to this end, they made the critical choice to craft all of the pre-rendered cutscenes with the exact same assets and models that you'll see in the game while it's running in real-time. What this means is little to no shock as the game transitions from a video to the actual game, and to be honest the only difference we could see was perhaps just a bit more anti-aliasing and cleanliness in the cutscenes.

As Nicholls put it, Resistance was helping the team learn and build the tech to power games on the PlayStation 3, while Ratchet Future is actually using that tech for actual performances, highlighting things like timing and poses in cutscenes to get -- they feel -- as close to Disney-quality animation as they possibly can.

Much of the performance in the game is done with two characters, not just in Ratchet and Clank, but with enemies in the game two, such as a pair of space pirates Cap'n Slag and Rusty Pete, his second mate. Having two robo-pirates on screen at the same time not only allows them to play back and forth, but lets the animators coax some seriously personality out of both characters independently, adding as much nuance as possible to really sell the idea of it being top-quality animation running in real-time and in hi-def.

To help accent this further, they had a little vignette called "Swarmer's Life" showing the varying stages of just one of the creatures in the game the impish little Swarmer. The first showed the idle animation, then what happens when it happened to spot an enemy, then its attack, the gloating animation as the enemy died, it's Groove-o-Tron dance moves and eventually its own death animation. The sheer level of detail and smoothness wasn't lost on us, and given that it was just one of the characters in the game, it gave a nice sense of scale to just how much work the animation staff is putting into the game.

For those looking for hard numbers, we offer this: in the PlayStation 2 versions of the game, Ratchet had 112 bones (or basic points of articulation) for his entire body. In Ratchet Future he has 90 just in his face alone. This increase in detail allows the developers to work with more subtle facial movements that help evoke those kinds of emotions they're going for.