Rage Preview

By Tom Bramwell Published 15 August, 2010

Cross platform.

We've spoken to various people from id Software during QuakeCon - Todd Hollenshead, Matt Hooper and the mischievous Tim Willits to name three - and there's one question we've asked all of them: Do they ever worry that people have forgotten about id Software? Haven't all these kids grown up playing Halo and Modern Warfare?

Nothing in their faces or their answers betrays any concern, but if they were harbouring self-doubt then the fact that more people turned up to see the Rage presentation than John Carmack's keynote address ought to be reassuring - and the fact they left the presentation screaming their support and adulation won't have hurt either.

Of course id is on home turf, but it's not hard to understand the fans' appreciation: Rage is being shown on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 simultaneously, one build each for three gigantic high-definition projections running behind lead designer Willits, who offers a running commentary on the action being played out by three of the game's developers.

Platform parity is an oft-professed goal and less frequent achievement, as Eurogamer readers know only too well, and it will take a more forensic examination to determine key distinctions between each version, but to the naked eye the PC version looks the sharpest by a slim margin - something Willits tells us is down to lower compression ratios.

Even so, the game's precisely sculpted canyons, rusting industry and slumping cityscapes coarse with crisp, unrepeated textures across all three formats, the products of John Carmack's "megatexture" architecture, while the game's 60 frames per second are as solid as the technology is unfathomable.

People sit around in Wellspring's bars dissing the mysterious Authority. The story will all be told in-engine.

Rage is another post-apocalyptic shooter - you can never have enough of them, at least not judging by ZeniMax's investment portfolio - but it's perhaps the purest example. Fallout is more about the game world (executive producer Todd Howard calls it the series' main character), while Brink is a manifesto for change in competitive and collaborative multiplayer. Rage is about shooting dudes in the face. Hard. A lot.

Willits' colleagues roam through trenches propped up with corrugated iron, switching between meaty shotguns, crossbows that fire electric bolts and sniper pistols using elegant weapon radials, while mission briefings appear as pages in a notebook, gone in a second. Other than that, and the unnerving levels of detail, there's little to disguise the simplicity of the action.

Ghost bandits are reminiscent of BioShock's splicers, vaulting, wall-running and pirouetting toward you to attack with blades and flying kicks; Wasted bandits retreat to cover and direct mounted turrets to suppress you, or swing pipes and wrenches overhead to clout you; mutants shamble and lurch, wielding rudimentary clubs. Shotgun shells snap their heads back, the boomerang "wingstick" clothesline them in midair, and the shoulder-mounted rocket launcher blows them to pieces. Fire, strafe, backpedal, flank.

Rage isn't exactly old-school, but it does refuse to accept modern conventions in some areas. You can carry loads of weapons at once, and movement is fast and steady. Willits reckons these things have become unfashionable "because Call of Duty sold like 30 million copies".

The detailed weapon and item customisation system, where goodies like spider robots, auto-turrets and RC car bombs can be assembled from blueprints and scavenged parts, looks compelling. Customisation shouldn't preclude Rage from spitting out gun ideas that cast long shadows - a mainstay of id's output since Wolfenstein - although designer Matt Hooper is realistic. "We'll have what you would expect with some twists," he says, "but it's hard to come up with the rocket launcher again."

It also has driving. When Rage was announced at QuakeCon 2007, fans complained that they didn't want a driving game, and id changed tack in future presentations. "We knew that we wanted to have a driving component to the game so we thought, let's make a racetrack," says Willits. "But we assumed that everyone knew we were going to make a first-person shooter - we're id, what else would we make?"

The first major town has an area dedicated to repairs, upgrades and races, and while the terrain we see outside Wellspring has a few roads and tracks to it, this isn't Borderlands, let alone the Capital Wasteland: the megatextured world is busy with mountains, bridges, trenches, shacks and brush. It feels ordered and linear; the game itself is described as "open but directed".

More on Rage

Driving, an "additive experience" to use Willits' phrase, looks like a work in progress too - the quad bikes' rigid suspension fractures the classy aesthetic, while a machinegun-mounted pickup, fronted by a snow-plough, bullhorns and bulging with air-scooped muscle, is skittish over terrain that it doesn't look comfortable navigating. Car combat is basic - auto-targeting weapons and lots of circling and backing up.

Rage is more comfortable, as is the QuakeCon audience, when Willits and company are tossing grenades through doorways, or catching a bandit between the eyes just as he's about to start a double-handed downswing with a lump of metal.

There's still no word on multiplayer, beyond the usual spiel about "a very talented group of guys working on that", but Willits hints at separate co-op again. "That's the most fun, and that's a logical thing to think. I won't confirm that."

He also says downloadable content will follow the game's newly minted 15th September 2011 release. id may have invented DLC to some extent with its patches, mod tools and point releases in the nineties, but it's a newbie again in this day and age - Doom III, released in 2004, predated the current trend of expansions and premium map packs. As part of ZeniMax and sister studio to Bethesda, however, id has lots of expertise to draw upon. "We haven't finalised any DLC plans, but we know it's important," says Willits. "It's been important to Bethesda. We'll do it, we just don't know what we'll do yet."

For now though, as it pretty much always is with this storied developer, it is all about that graphics engine. Staring into the screen and struggling to pick out a single repeated detail, 60 times every second, is almost disorientating. If the kids don't know who id Software any more, they should do by this time next year.

Rage is due out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on 15th September 2011.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (51) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Daeltaja #1 2 years ago

    I'll read this in about 8 months time.

  • StooMonster #2 2 years ago

    "We'll do it, we just don't know what we'll do yet."

    So long as they don't excise content from the game so they can sell it separately that sounds reasonable to me.

    Definately looking forward to Rage, and wondering how the racing sections are coming along.

  • 3william56 #3 2 years ago

    If the claims hold water, the tech sounds mighty impressive (and may finally kill off those interminable DF Face Offs). Sounds like it might also be capable of pushing 3D at full resolution and 30FPS or more, which will be a big boost to 3D gaming.

    I'll just be waiting until they license it to someone with a more interesting game concept than post apocalypse shooting mutants in the face. Hard. A lot.

    1982 called. They want their game design back.

  • rotmm #4 2 years ago

    "I'll just be waiting until they license it to someone with a more interesting game concept..."

    Except id are no longer going to licence their tech... for use by Bethesda developers only.

  • UncleLou #5 2 years ago

    1982 called. They want their game design back.

    Wait a second, there were games in 1982 where you shot mutants in the face, hard, a lot?

    I've wasted my childhood. :-/

  • Dizzy #6 2 years ago

    I didn't know platform equality was an important goal? I prefer games to tailor to a specific platform. The fact that you could barely see the difference of the pc version says enough really.
    Edited by 1 at 16/08/10 @ 08:48

  • TheTingler #7 2 years ago

    I'm really looking forward to this... at least, I have been for years. And I've still got another year to wait?! No wonder they say Doom 4 won't be out long after!

    And I'm sorry to say, but when I saw that screenshot that is linked to the E3 video on page two I thought "why did they put a Doom 3 screenshot there?"

  • Deckard1 #8 2 years ago

    Matt Hooper? As in hooper drives the boat chief?

  • LHH #9 2 years ago

    To hear the release date is lat 2011 I'll just forget about this until next summer

  • photoboy #10 2 years ago

    I love id games, I'm one of the three people who really enjoyed Doom 3, so I can't wait to give this a try. It's good to hear a developer say they're going to match their control scheme to the one used by a fairly popular title, as I hate fumbling around pushing the wrong button to reload whenever I start a new shooter. It's also really cool that they're offering the option to play with health packs or with recharging health. I think I'll go old school and play health pack mode when I get it!

  • Negotiator #11 2 years ago

    So its got great graphics, what about gameplay?

  • Praetorianer #12 2 years ago

    Hey photoboy, I am #2! Who's the third one?

  • schnide #13 2 years ago

    15th September 2011? When I first saw that, I thought it was a typo. Hyping the game this much with over a year to go leads me to think that interest will peak now and fatigue by the time it actually comes out.

  • Goodfella #14 2 years ago

    I'm interested in the tech but the game itself I couldn't care less about.

    Post apocalyptic world, seriously. *shakes head*

  • DoctorFouad #15 2 years ago

    very interesting

  • Harlequeen #16 2 years ago

    I thought brown was out of fashion.

  • gorf #17 2 years ago

    must admit I was a bit dissapointed with the preview video. just going round dingy corridors shooting stuff didnt really showcase the game engine to any great extent. Wish they had some exterior wasteland videos to see what Carmack has really achieved

  • CaptainQuint #18 2 years ago

    Looks visually spectacular, but I see my suspicion that the game will be a linear experience appears to be right. There's a good reason don't forget, why Borderlands had an engine change during its development.

  • Irien #19 2 years ago

    The licensing situation does seem a bit odd. ID Tech 4 only seemed to have a handful of customers, compared to previous generations, whereas Unreal Engine seems to power almost everything. You'd have thought they'd be making it easier for devs to get going with the engine, rather than increasing the hoops that have to be jumped through...

  • Xardan #20 2 years ago

    Looks like this could be the best looking game on consoles.

  • FogHeart #21 2 years ago

    Changing fashions be damned, I'm going to keep occupying these virtual post-apocalyptic worlds until I get a real one to fail miserably in. It's where my (foggy) heart is.
    Edited by 1 at 16/08/10 @ 11:14

  • mashk #22 2 years ago

    The engine looks better than the game. Shame they aren't licensing it out. UE3 has become far too ubiquitous.

  • neems #23 2 years ago

    Has Borderlands scuppered this game? "Quick, hold it back another year, maybe everybody will forget about that other post apocalyptic desert / wasteland open-world shooter with cars."

    As always, the tech sounds interesting though. Imagine if Carmac was involved with people who made good, interesting games?

  • spekkeh #24 2 years ago

    I didn't know DigitalFoundry did previews now.

    Anyway, an FPS where you shoot generic people in a scenery that goes from darkbrown industrial to lightbrown industrial and back again. Man I can't wait. It must have been three hours now since the last game that featured that came out.

  • digoutyoursoul #25 2 years ago

    everyone knows the PC version will be superior from a technical standpoint, its a compliment to the 360 and PS3 that despite having aging gpu's they can still pull off a quality looking game at 60fps, especially the 360 which gets embarrassing abuse on it
    over the internet, especially that dogshit bag N4G. Great preview, thanks EG.

  • Pehmu #26 2 years ago

    Nice engine. The game itself doesn't look all that special though. But what can you expect from id Software? They've always been a group of engineers, not visionaries.

  • mcreddie #27 2 years ago

    Why preview something more than a year away? Wtf is the point?

  • UncleLou #28 2 years ago

    Wow, this thread is sure full of whining. "Too brown", "tech demo", "why preview it at all". O_O

  • I\'mListening #29 2 years ago

    Sounds like the blonde at the bar - all looks but no brain

  • Skire #30 2 years ago

    I don't think that it's necessarily such a bad thing that many games are running on UE3. When I look at my games collection Batman, Borderlands and Mirror's Edge all use UE3, but they don't even look remotely the same.

  • Plewt #31 2 years ago

    Hey whiny man-babies, grow the fuck up.

  • Pehmu #32 2 years ago

    Plewt: "Hey whiny man-babies, grow the fuck up."

    Yeah, fuck.
    Btw, what does growing up has to do with Rage's generic-looking gameplay & environments?
    Edited by 1 at 16/08/10 @ 11:48

  • CaptainQuint #33 2 years ago

    I'd be more interested in seeing what Bungie could do with this engine, rather than id themselves.

  • Plewt #34 2 years ago

    @Pehmu

    It doesn't and you know it perfectly well which means you're now just trolling.

  • Pehmu #35 2 years ago

    Plewt: "It doesn't"

    I understand. It's just we're not allowed to say we're not happy with the way Rage looks.
    Edited by 1 at 16/08/10 @ 12:16

  • Plewt #36 2 years ago

    Really? Says who?

    You're trying to hard.

  • litote #37 2 years ago

    Is there something more pointless than to whine about "whiners"?

    With this demo i found myself (again) in an other doom or quake corridor (design, game play ), and i have fears that the game will be just a bit better that the last wolfenstein.

    The engine does seem to do great things, but it does not blow you away like crysis did, and character animations and model are heavily reminiscent of doom 3. Seems very conservative on the whole.
    If i remember correctly, the great step forward should be doom 4 (graphically), pc only and/or (maybe) next gen console.

    But rage is coming sept 2011!! crysis 2 in march 2011... Maybe we just expect too much from ID, or they just got the Blizzard syndrome:Developing old looking follow up to same old fashioned franchise whenever they please.

    ps: of course, rage is a new franchise, but is also an FPS ID wise
    Edited by 1 at 16/08/10 @ 12:33

  • Plewt #38 2 years ago

    Yea and see how bad Blizzard are doing these days. Damn those bastards for working on what they want and not what I want.

  • Trigga_Tybalt #39 2 years ago

    is it just me or is he playing rage very slowly in the video to avoid putting the engine under stress and showing v-sync errors?

  • makeamazing #40 2 years ago

    So its a mix of Fallout3, Borderlands and a racing game.... count me in, sounds ace :)

  • Plewt #41 2 years ago

    The video is from E3 and not Quakecon which the preview is from.

  • UncleLou #42 2 years ago

    Is there something more pointless than to whine about "whiners"?

    Whining about whiners who whine about whiners. To answer your question.

  • Judas_Priest #43 2 years ago

    Hmm, it makes me wonder somewhat. I have always thought, just by reading about the specifications of the two consoles, that the 360 and PS3 are equally capable; Rage is definitely supporting this view of mine.

    It does though suggest something rather worrying. If a developer, not focusing on just the 360, can make a game that for the most part looks and runs better than any 360 exclusive; does it suggest that 360 developers are not as talented (at least in terms of engine dev) in comparison to the likes of PS3 1st party dev's who almost always come out with amazing products?
    Edited by 2 at 16/08/10 @ 13:48

  • Hotel_Moscow #44 2 years ago

    mickey thats it burout paradise a racing game 720p gran turismo 5 racing game 1080p@60fps

    modern warfare 2 600p 60 fps

    killzone 2 720p 30 fps

    now look at the games you mention and whats happening in each one as the game plays and then you have youre answer rage and modern warfare 2 arent the best looking games of this gen when you look closely gamers have the in ability to see these things and are just blinded by the thought of a game they dont have

  • Pasco #45 2 years ago

    I hope that the people complaining here that id games never had good gameplay are 15 years old max. Either that or they are dumb.

    To the people complaining about the post-apocalyptic world: what do you want from a new id franchise? Aliens? Demons? Kirby and Pokemon?

  • JensonJet #46 2 years ago

    I know it's too early to make specific comments and I'll reserve final judgement once I get to play it but I already feel clear about how combat will play out. What stands out about games like Left4Dead, Medal of Honour, Borderlands, etc., the more popular recent shooters is a nice blend of big open world and smaller tighter areas to fight in. For some reason the id crew seem convinced that the best battles are in tight corridors and small rooms. I think this is to the detriment of their games. They also seem to have a preference for enemies with no regard for their own preservation. I accept that mindless zombies or animals are likely to attack full on, but it seems a missed opportunity to not have enough fights where the enemy use tatics, and so can the player with larger, more open areas.

    Undeniably this game looks good, it's controls will no doubt be as slick as the best shooters, but I think the maps and combat areas look as contrived, as tight, as the usual id games. While I've always disliked the Halo franchise, it was at least capable of creating memorable fights with more open maps, an AI that wasn't always dumb and suicidal and encouraged tatics, occasionally. id have yet to prove they can create that type of combat for me.

    I'm happy about what they get right, but always left a little disappointed that they could do much better with a little attitude change to AI and map design.

  • SlapLaB #47 2 years ago

    Looks boring as hell - seen it, done it, and now in 60fps!!!

  • dirtysteve #48 2 years ago

    I know there' just been a big id event (disappointingly, the big reveal was for iPhone!), but can we put a moratorium on this game for a while? it's a bit over-saturated. Also, I wants me some Elder Scrolls 5 news (maybe saying this will make a positive announcement happen.) Although judging by this, they'd hype it up for a 2015 release.

  • litote #49 2 years ago

    "Is there something more pointless than to whine about "whiners"?

    Whining about whiners who whine about whiners . To answer your question. "

    Or, whining about whiners who whine about whiners who whine about whiners?

    by the way: if you dont like what someone says, instead of contradicting him ,do you always say: "stop whining, you troll/ fanboy" etc?

    i think many here trust id talent pretty much, but when every other developer try to underline creativity and originality in their new game, ID seems to be content with the fact that we know they are making a solid shooter...well, how unexpected.
    I look forward to it anyway, i am sure there is more to it than corridors. finger crossed.
    Edited by 1 at 18/08/10 @ 10:40

  • TitusCrow #50 2 years ago

    My interest has waxed on this game and is now - I'm afraid to say - starting to wane a bit. The video and the way the enemies attacked filled me with dread a bit, but not in a good way. They looked mechanical and brainless, all with basically the same simple attack pattern and no tactic.

    I fear this game might have nice graphics but slightly dodgy AI and design, leading to a game you wish you could like but don't really like that much, a bit like doom 3.
    This game looked great 2 years ago, I'm not so sure it will have any thunder left in a years time.

  • Mar27w #51 2 years ago

    graphically speaking i found this game much more impressive than the crysis2 videos that have been shown albiet i havent seen either up close and personal properly yet