Our sterling act of “heroism” has inadvertently done more harm than good. According to the thief we recovered the experiment from, the whole galaxy is in imminent danger.
Now that our ship has been restored, it’s time to investigate this potential risk to the Bogon Galaxy.
Going back to replay these older Ratchet & Clank games, knowing more about the development cycle of them now than I did growing up, it’s fascinating to watch Insomniac learn valuable lessons about player engagement in real time.
Lessons like the fact that players don’t enjoy being nickel-and-dimed just to make story progress. Back in the original Spyro the Dragon, there was little incentive to collect treasure beyond a couple of checks that the balloonists would make before allowing players to travel to the next world. Unless one was going to 100%, there was simply no need to be concerned with the treasure counts.
To correct that, Spyro 2 created Moneybags, an NPC who served as a gem sink, which gave players a reason to gather, save up, and spend gems in order to make progress in the game. That way, even if players don’t go for 100%, they still have a reason to go out of their way to collect the gems scattered about the level.
In the hypercapitalist world of Ratchet & Clank, NPCs all over have plenty of reason to charge us for the items and information we need to make progress throughout the game. And thus, our money sink is still in effect. However, unlike Spyro, we already have something to spend our hard-earned bolts on… weapons!
In other words, our bolt count is being taxed both to make the story progress and to upgrade our armor and arsenal. The fact that we spend on weaponry invalidates the need for the game designers to charge us for raw progression. It wasn’t until Going Commando’s release that this was something they learned, and it is the last game to impose those kinds of money gates.
You’ll see this and other such lessons learned as well, but this was the one that always stood out to me.
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