Trivia / Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal

• Acting for Two:
  • James Arnold Taylor reprises Ratchet from the previous game, but he also voices various other characters in the game. Three such examples are Galactic President Phyronix, the Professor that narrates the Qwark vid-comics, and the Annihilation Nation announcer.
  • David Kaye voices both Clank and his evil twin Klunk.
  • Jim Ward likewise returns as Captain Qwark, but also voices Skrunch the Monkey in this installment.
• Christmas Rushed: The game only had a year of development time (3 months preproduction, 9 months of actual production) and a good chunk of its development was spent on the new online multiplayer mode and getting the Galactic Rangers AI and the dev teams new Phoenix level editor to work at all, and while the final game is far from unpolished, its obvious that they cut quite a few corners in design. The single player mode is very scaled down; levels are much shorter and have fewer branching paths, the enemy variety was extremely downsized to save on art and animation time, several assets from the previous games (i.e. enemies, vehicles and music) are recycled, and a lot of content from the previous games (i.e. racing or fighting tournaments, space travel, grinding on rails, Giant Clank) got heavily downplayed or axed altogether due to the focus on multiplayer swallowing up a lot of the dev teams programmers and designers.
• First Appearance: For Dr. Nefarious.
• Troubled Production: According to a podcast with Mike Stout and Tony Garcia, the game's development was very turbulent, hence the heavily scaled down and rushed feel of the content. One example was getting Insomniac's new propietery Phoenix level editor for the game functioning, as well as the Galactic Rangers A.I. to work, which took the entire development timeline to get right and it was reportedly a nightmare the whole time. The new multiplayer mode also forced the dev team to give up valuable programmers and designers, making the workload even more unbearable. There was a genuine fear that the game was going to be a flop, with one of them going as far as saying the game was seen as a disaster until mere weeks before it went gold, with the dev team scrambling before then to even make the game presentable for release.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game's original default control scheme was going to be a Lock-Strafe mode to make it clear that the game's focus was more on combat than platforming, but when players complained about the controls being abruptly changed from the previous games, they changed the controls back to normal, but included the Lock-Strafe controls as an option.
  • There were originally going to be racing courses, including one on Florana using the Turbo Slider, but this was cut due to development time constraints, but one of the unfinished tracks can be played via the Insomniac Museum, and a voice clip left in the game makes an offhand mention of the scrapped race course. The Hovership and Turboslider also had substantially different designs early on. There were also two beta Qwark vid-comics that didn't make the cut, but are still playable.
  • The Qwark Vid-Comics were initially planned to be done in the style of the Mega Man X games, but a more traditional side-scrolling action platformer was done instead.
  • The game console was initially meant to be the Insomniac Game Pyramid, but it was replaced with the VG-9000 for unknown reasons. The IG game pyramid can still be found in the game's Insomniac Museum.
  • The Galactic Rangers were original supposed to speak in a typical robotic monotone, but they eventually decided to give them more expressive voice acting.
  • There was originally supposed to be a six eyed Tyrranoid enemy in the game, but it was cut for unknown reasons, presumably to save time and work.
  • There was going to be another Reflector puzzle near the end of Marcadia, but the dev team, who already had trouble getting the other spider/laser puzzle to work, just couldn't figure out how to make it work, so they replaced it with a Titanium Bolt that needs the Gravity Boots instead.
  • The Giant Clank boss fight was originally going to have a puppet-like Stylistic Suck approach to its look, but when it became clear it would've been too difficult to get working, they settled on a more standard giant monster model instead.
  • The color font for the menus was originally going to be blue like in Going Commando, but it was changed to orange very late in development.
  • Spaceship levels were initially planned to return and would've been done in the style of the Gummi Ship levels in Kingdom Hearts II, but they never got past the prototype stages because they were such a huge development time sink to make in the previous games. They were eventually featured in this style in Tools of Destruction.
  • The Warp Pad was initially meant to be a much more flexible gadget which let you drop a teleport spot anywhere the player wanted, but it was added so late into development that there was absolutely no time to accommodate the game to keep it from being a game breaking gadget, so it ended up being heavily nerfed to what amounts to a key used twice on the Thran Asteroid level.
  • The part before you reach Qwark's bedroom was originally going to have a cutscene pointing out the crevice in the wall nearby, but it was so late in development that there was no time to animate it, so they programmed an in-game camera move to point it out instead.
  • The Dr. Nefarious fight in Deja Q All Over Again was originally planned to be much more difficult, but was toned down because even the game's testers found him too hard to beat.
  • The Hacker puzzles were meant to be harder as well, and were toned down for similar reasons as the above.
  • The Mama Tyhrranoid fight went through some changes as well, and likewise got toned down in difficulty—for starters, you originally weren't going to be able to damage its turret once it lowers to fire at you.
  • Unused audio found on Up Your Arsenal's disc reveals that a cutscene revealing Skidd was explicitly turned back to normal (and was on the news talking about it) was planned, but wasn't animated.
  • Mike Stout briefly toyed with the idea of having Chairman Drek resurrected with some sort of hackneyed explanation, but the idea was immediately shot down by the rest of the dev team.

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