Rage team to move onto Doom 4

id Software's Rage team - including co-founder John Carmack - will turn its attention to finishing long-awaited shooter Doom 4 as soon as Rage is ready this October.

"As soon as Rage ships, the core tech team moves over to start making things happen on the Doom 4 project," Carmack told Gamespot.

Production on Doom 4 began back in 2008, although little has been heard of the game since. "We were really feeling the pinch before this. If you've got 50 people working on a project, it's not useful to have all of them on day one on there; you really want to have a smaller team building things. Then at the end now, we would have a hundred people on the team."

Still on the subject of Doom 4, Carmack noted the game's single-player was pegged at 30 frames per second. Rage fizzes along at a smooth 60 FPS, but that figure comes at a price. "You can't have 30 guys crawling all over you at 60 frames per second at this graphics technology level because it's painful," Carmack explained.

"For Doom 4, the single-player is going to go 30 frames per second on the consoles. So we can have 30 demons crawling all over you on there. But the multiplayer is still going to be 60 frames per second, so it has the quality feel that Rage has."

While Doom 4 remains on target for release on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, id Software's next project - most likely Rage 2 - will be "cross-generational".

"The expectation would be that it's not a brand new engine for Rage 2, since you want people to be able to concentrate on the design," Carmack stated, before mentioning "the project after Doom 4, the next major one, will be designed to be cross-generational".

"We want to have a media strategy session - that we can have something that ships in the quality of Rage on current platforms but actually takes advantage of the next-generation platforms."