QA: The Rage Guys

by Kevin Gifford
August 26, 2009 00:00 AM PST

id Software's best and brightest talk to us about the most original project from the company in years.

QuakeCon may be playing host to assorted Bethesda titles, John Carmack's annual tech talk, and thousands of sweaty nerds piled into a room playing Team Fortress 2 instead of sleeping. But the real darling of this event is Rage, id's newest project and one that marks a major departure for the developer -- not just in its colorful, vibrant look, but in the sheer variety of gameplay the team has in the works.

To get a better handle on all this, we sat down with creative director Tim Willits, lead designer Matt Hooper, and art designer Stephan Martiniere earlier.

How's QuakeCon been for you?

Tim: It's a super-awesome event. A bit of trivia here: I am the only id Software employee to have attended every QuakeCon since the first in 1996. John Carmack's wife had a baby one year, so he missed one. (laughs) I think there's only three or four people who've been to all of them at this point. But it's a great party for us. We've got 5000 of our fans here -- I mean, how great is this? It's the world's largest free LAN party; it's volunteer-run -- we have an executive staff that helps out, but the bulk of work is done by volunteers. It really gives us a chance to touch base with our fans. We go to E3 and GamesCon and places like that, but there's so much noise and so many other games to cover -- meanwhile, QuakeCon is ours. It really is awesome.

Could you tell me a little bit about the early stage of Rage's development? Did it pick up where Doom 3 left off?

Tim: Well, after we finished Doom 3, we worked on the Xbox port and then helped Raven a bit with Quake 4, so it wasn't a direct connection. After that, we actually started work on a different game which was codenamed "Darkness" at the time. It was moving along well enough, and John [Carmack] was working on the technology, but unfortunately it just wasn't shaping up the way we liked. So I talked with the guys, and we came up with a new concept, which was Rage. One of the great things about id is that we're small and we have the ability to change direction quickly. If we were a 300-person team, it'd be impossible to switch gears like that mid-project. We didn't lose any time technology-wise, since that takes so long to develop anyway, and the time we lost creating assets wasn't too bad.

Matt: For us, we've always been about linear first-person action shooters. That's what we like to play and make; it's what we're good at. But this is something new, and it's also our shot at something new -- if we had been making RPGs all this time, we probably would've done something far different with this open world. So even with the similarities that some people are seeing, it's going to be a totally different experience, both in tech and in gameplay.

Tim: For Rage, we wanted to make an original IP, and I knew we wanted to make it different. We didn't want to stray too far from what we do best -- first-person, moment-to-moment action -- but we wanted to add on top of that. That's where we came up with vehicle combat and racing, and since the MegaTexture technology lets us create a much larger, more detailed world, the best way to get across a world that big is with a big-ass muscle car with guns on it. So then we thought that if you wanted to do that, then we needed a setting that fits with it. We chose a post-apocalyptic setting because it's grounded in things that people can relate to -- cars, guns and stuff -- but it also allows for a science-fiction element that we couldn't have otherwise.

You start out Rage largely alone in the world. How free are you to explore it on your own terms?

Matt: That's kind of a difficult question, but I think I've found a way to explain it. We said it's "open but directed," but even that had people saying "What the hell does that mean?" I think a better way to put it is that it's like the games we enjoy playing. It's like you're in an action movie, and you've got some say in which way it goes, but the main story is always going to be there. Conversely, it'd be frustrating if the player couldn't alter his world at all, so we have lots of different offshoots -- that's kind of the open part of it. This manifests itself in how the world unfolds. We give the player what we think he can digest at any given time, and in the beginning when you're still on foot, the world's going to seem really big. Once you get the four-wheeler, it starts to expand a little more, and it gets even bigger once you find a more capable vehicle. You're learning all the way through. We don't want to overwhelm the player with too many choices, so we give them something new all along the way. That's kind of our design goal.

Let's say you have a bandit base and you go in and shoot everyone up. We can't just lock away that environment for the rest of the game. We allow the player to go back in there at will, but maybe mutants take the place over later on, or maybe there're a few survivors. That's another sort of openness. You don't have to go back there, but if you do, we don't want to do something lame like block it off. We give you a chance to maybe find a few items and have fun on the way.

On the topic of vehicles, you seem to spend a fair amount of this game in your car, driving across the wastelands. Is that a move on your part to put id's game design in a new direction?

Tim: Absolutely. We needed something different. Doom was demons, Wolfenstein was Nazis, Quake was aliens; and if we did the same thing with Rage, it would've been mutants. The car and racing stuff gives it a more unique feel from our other games. Being successful and popular is great, but it also puts you into a box, and you need to keep your fans happy by playing within that box. For Rage, our box is that FPS stuff and we still have it, but we wanted to make that box bigger. The vehicle customization stuff is centered on things that work within the game; we don't have too many frivolous upgrades here. It's all functional stuff. Some people may just want to put better guns on their cars and not worry about steering and suspension, but others may want that, and it's totally your choice.