On the face of it, last week wasn't exactly crammed with gigaton news announcements - and so we were expecting a fair light edition of DF Direct Weekly, but the announcement that Ratchet and Clank is coming to PC next month changed all of that. It may not be a game designed to appeal to the core PC audience, but how well the port turns out is crucial to the future of the PC format.
If that sounds somewhat hyperbolic, allow me to explain. The new consoles have much in common with PC: they are based on x86 processors, they use Radeon graphics and they have SSDs. These have been staple components of a mainstream gaming PC for many years before the arrival of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in 2020. However, Ratchet and Clank leans in heavily to proprietary PS5 components and their equivalents in the PC space have yet to be established nor have they been battle-tested in a triple-A release. Ratchet and Clank looks set to change that.
Let's spell out the challenge here. Insomniac's game is built from the ground up for PlayStation 5. With its rich visuals, ultra-fast loading and portal mechanic that literally zips you between dimensions within the blink of an eye, it's heavily reliant on two aspects of the PlayStation 5: its solid-state storage and its hardware decompression blocks. The SSD streams in data at lighting speeds, the decompression blocks take care of losslessly decompressing the data for the game to use.