Id's future in the cloud

With Rage on its final path to its release in October, we took the opportunity to ask id creative director Tim Willits about the prospects for its trailblazing new engine, id Tech 5, which already stretches the current generation, and what form the next generation of gaming hardware might take.

Do you think that gaming will go to the cloud?
Oh yeah. So we have no clue where the next consoles are coming from - I have to preface my answer with that. But it’s not outside the realm of possibility to envision in the future a platform - and it may not the next year, but it may be in the next ten years or so - a completely cloud-based gaming system. Which would be great for everybody, because we could instantly update people, piracy would almost be eliminated. And then in id Tech 5, as you saw, everything is virtualised. Everything has to stream to you. So you played [Rage] on 360, right? You noticed how if you spun around real quick, the world took like a moment to come in?

Yeah, we thought that was probably signalling the swansong for the 360.
[Laughs] Well, just make sure you install it to your hard drive. Because if you don’t, you’ll be very... yeah. But imagine that on an internet scale - Rage could sit on a server somewhere, and instead of coming off a DVD, it comes off the cloud. You could easily see that jump.

Now its creative director, Tim Willits joined id in 1995 after making fan levels for Doom

How will the cloud affect the next hardware cycle? Will there even be a cycle or are we just facing just constant iteration?
Our plan is to iterate on this technology for many years to come. Look at all the games that Quake 3 still powers. We definitely do not want to do an entire new engine. There are lots of things in id Tech 5 which would benefit from a new rev of tech. You said it yourself. We just have a massive amount of data that we have to move from the media to the screen. On the PC, some people buy 16-core machines - what are you really going to do with those 14 other cores that sit there idly? The cool thing about id Tech is that you can take all those cores and put them on transcoding the textures and the information so things appear instantaneous. The entire machine can be utilised to push the tech to you, so you can get a really beautiful game. So yeah, there are definitely things in a new rev of platforms that we could take advantage of immediately.

Do you think things like the Wii U, with its peripheral screen, force creativity, or is it raw grunt that is more important?
The new peripheral definitely fosters creativity. It’s difficult to take a pre-existing game and tweak it work on a new peripheral; it’s always better to develop with the peripheral in mind. Our goal with Rage is to make it a cross-platform game, so when one system has a unique peripheral it does come down to choice - can we do what we want? Can we be successful enough targeting only this peripheral? A lot of tough choices come into play.

Look out for an extensive preview of Rage in our next issue, out August 30.