According to an Insomniac Games developer, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart‘s Rivet was almost named Ratchet.
As reported by IGN, during the Lombax Lessons: A Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart GDC talk, Insomniac’s lead designer Mark Stuart explained how the team created the Lombax from another dimension, Rivet, and discussed how the team decided on her name.
“For a while we switched to her just being named Ratchet,” Stuart explained. “After all, she and Ratchet are technically dimensional counterparts. Ratchet is a non-gendered name.
“This stuck for a while, but ultimately made every draft of the story very confusing. For example: ‘Ratchet needs to rescue Clank from Ratchet, who doesn’t trust Ratchet and has a long history battling Nefarious.’ At a time where story treatments were being rapidly iterated on, it was hard to tell what dimension you were in, but also which Ratchet you were talking about.”
The team also discussed naming Rivet “Ratchette” but determined that the name was “too diminutive” and “reducing her existence to a gender-swapped Ratchet.”
Stuart also revealed that Rivet’s codename was originally switched to Gadget, but members on the development team who grew up in the ’80s thought it was too close to other characters of the same name, such as Inspector Gadget.
In terms of Rivet’s character, Stuart said that Insomniac wanted a strong, female protagonist, but “Rivet needed to be pure cake like Ratchet. We wanted Rivet to be core gameplay. Her inclusion was meant to be inspirational representation and not a bonus mechanic. In fact, in the final product, she makes up about 50 per cent of the playtime.”
In other news, PlayStation has officially confirmed that it is rebranding PlayStation Plus to have three tiers.
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