Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One

Ratchet & Clank is, without a doubt, one of the best Sony-exclusive series. Instead of just resting on their laurels with another brilliant sequel that's really just more of the same, Insomniac Games is mixing it up a bit. After first announcing Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One at gamescom a few weeks ago, there hasn't been much news. That changed at PAX today, however, when a panel hosted by Adam Sessler of G4TV fame gave us loads of new details about the game. Oh, and we've got some shaky cam gameplay videos! Woo!

All 4 One is a co-op game. It's very co-op, like The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords on the Game Boy Advance, or LittleBigPlanet. You can pick up your friends and throw them across gaps (or off cliffs!), and you have to work together to turn levers, solve puzzles, and fly up air shafts. It's a game that Insomniac has been wanting to make for a long time, and with the last two Future games on PS3 neglecting to include the multiplayer aspects present in the final PS2 R&C, it seemed like a prime time to bring back some teamwork.

It's a funny team, though: Ratchet, Clank, Captain Qwark, and Dr. Nefarious(!), who is the sworn enemy of, well... the rest of the team. The story of the game is that Nefarious sets out to kill Qwark, but all four of the characters are captured somehow by the Creature Collector on an unknown planet and forced to work together to survive. That doesn't mean they have to like it, however. The grumbling and bickering in the ambient dialog will make it clear that Nefarious really doesn't want to be here. Luckily, he wants to live more than he wants Ratchet, Clank, and Qwark to die, and the relationship between the four characters is a key part of the game's storyline progression.

So how does it work? Each character has their own lifebar that floats under them at any given point, and the camera zooms back to a "director's view." There's can't be a classic R&C over-the-shoulder camera when you need to have all four characters on-screen at the same time, all the time. (There didn't seem to be a HUD, either.) To survive in the world, it looked like every character had a vacuum cleaner-type weapon that can suck in anything - even their allies - and shoot it out: across gaps, at enemies, etc. You can throw your friends off a clliff, too, but that won't win you the game very quickly, now will it? Insomniac has built a bit of "playful antagonism" into the game, so you won't really have to worry about griefing too much.

After you toss an ally across a gap, you can use a hookshot-type item to pull yourself to them across distances. The hookshot also plays into the play mechanics; at one point there's a Pixel Junk Eden-like section where the four players have to swing around each other to reach higher areas. Reminds me of the magnetic grapple on Jet Moto. Fun stuff. If you get tossed of a ledge, don't worry too much. Respawn time is very short because Insomniac realized it had to be; it's no fun having to sit and watch your friends play the game while you wait to return to life.

The co-op will be drop-in/drop-out anytime, online or off. If you want two people on the couch and two across the world, that's fine. Four on the couch? That's cool too. Players can come and go as they please, and you can even migrate your PSN ID over to your friend's house if you want to play together so you can nab those precious trophies while on the road. Very cool.

Besides the vacuums and the hookshots, each character has his own special weapon. Qwark has the Fists of Justice and Nefarious has the Annihilator Blades, but the Ratchet and Clank weapons haven't been revealed yet. At least you can suck up Clank with the vacuum, hurl him at an enemy, and have him transform into a destructive weight to squash the baddies from above.

The other weapons, probably the biggest draw of the Ratchet & Clank franchise, are still being tweaked, and especially the weapon selection process. In a four-player online game, you don't want to have to wait every few seconds while a member of the team changes out their weapon via the auto-pausing weapon select wheel. Insomniac assured us that they are making that as simple and streamlined as possible while still having the variety of weapons and ease of selection that gamers are used to. They haven't quite perfected the formula for the ammo in the game, either, but there is definitely going to be a marketplace where you can buy and upgrade your guns, at least.
A few final things from the Insomniac panel:
Death - If you die in battle, a friend has to revive you to get you back in the action. If all four die, the team has to restart from the last checkpoint. Falling/being thrown off a cliff just gives you a minor health penalty and a few seconds to wait to respawn.
Frames-per-second - All 4 One is set at a solid 30 FPS to allow some b-e-a-u-tiful effects and details in the environment. Totally worth the higher-speed trade-off.
There's a TON of hidden stuff to encourage replayability. Did you expect anything less from a Ratchet & Clank game?
You can hurt your friends in ways that don't involve throwing them off cliffs for a minimum life loss, but they're a secret until the player discovers it themselves.
Bots - If you don't have a friend, one will be appointed to you by the computer. Hope the AI can figure out things like how to use a staircase. This ensures that there will always be a one-player mode, at least.
Other possible names for the game? "4play," "Multiple Organisms," "Fiends with Benefits," and "Bros Before Foes." Insomniac went with All 4 One because they wanted moms to actually buy this game for their kids.

That's all the info for today, but check out the two off-screen-camera gameplay videos below and see if I missed anything. The game will launch in 2011 exclusively on the PS3.