Trivia / Ratchet: Deadlocked

• Christmas Rushed: If the extremely repetitive enemy variety, small weapon roster, short length and a particularly nasty showstopping bug didn't give it away, Deadlocked was clearly rushed so there could be a new Ratchet game ready for the 2005 holiday season, and some major development setbacks did not help with this.
• The Other Darrin: Melissa Disney was replaced by Nika Futterman as the voice of Courtney Gears.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The reason Merc and Green don't have legs is because in their initial designs, they did have legs but they unintentionally kept getting stuck in the players way due to flaws with their pathfinding A.I., so the final game had them become hovering robots instead.
• Troubled Production: According to Mike Stout, Deadlocked was an even harder game to make than Up Your Arsenal (itself having a turbulent production) and basically broke the dev team behind it. They were operating on the same period of time to make it as the previous two Ratchet games (3 months preproduction, nine months full production) but the first few months were spent on three attempts to retool the game, leaving only 9 months left to get a finished game ready for the 2005 holiday season. Making matters worse was that the Deadlocked engine was built almost entirely from scratch as opposed to reusing the engine of the previous games and, like UYA, had to be built with multiplayer in mind, forcing the main gameplay variety, enemy lineup and length to be even more scaled down than the previous game.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The initial idea for the game was Ratchet & Clank: NEXUS (not to be confused with Into The Nexus), but it only got to the concept art stage before it was cancelled and began reworking into Deadlocked.
  • According to a podcast with developer Mike Stout, Deadlocked was also going to be a vehicular combat game in the vein of Twisted Metal, but one and a half months into development, Jak X: Combat Racing was announced and Insomniac thought it made no sense to release their own driving game right alongside it, so the game was heavily retooled into an on-foot combat game. The vehicles in the final game (the Hoverbike, Landstalker and Hovership) were a holdover from this version of the game. The story was also different too, and was rewritten a few times and wasn't finished until late in development.
  • The initial retool of the game tried to make the gameplay an expansion of the battlefield missions in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, but with bigger maps, less linear gameplay and the ability to solve different objectives in the same mission. They tried it for a couple months, but they couldn't figure out how to make it work, so they once again retooled the gameplay to be more linear.
  • There were originally going to be 12 weapons in the game instead of 10.
  • Gold Bolts were considered to be put in the game at one point, but the extremely open nature of the level design made it extremely hard to hide them without reworking the levels all over again, and because the game was past beta stage at that point in development it was too late to add them anyway, so they were dropped and they simply put in more Skill Points to compensate for it.
  • The HUB area was originally meant to be larger and have NPCs in it, but time constraints forced it to be scaled down and simplified.
  • Merc and Green (who were also holdovers from the scrapped Ratchet racing game) were supposed to have legs, but they couldn't get them to work due to issues with their pathfinding A.I. making them unintentionally obstructive to the player (i.e. you couldn't push them out of the way if they got between you and an enemy), so they made them hovering robots instead.
  • There are cut voice lines hinting that Ace would have used flash-bangs and a morph-o-weapon (one of the signature weapon archetypes for the franchise, but never used by enemies) during his boss fight. Likely cut because it would have bordered on making him an SNK Boss.