While the smattering of trailers have teased us with the prospect of speeding through sprawling, dusty canyons and gunning down mutants, id has been pretty tight on details about its upcoming title, Rage. CEO Todd Hollenshead and creative director Tim Willits have cautiously highlighted a few details about the game – its post-apocalyptic environments are larger and its gameplay more freeform than in previous id games, and the additional driving component is an obvious departure. We sat down with the pair to ask if the classic id run-and-gun action can still cut it.

So, the new franchise, the greater choice, larger worlds, driving and so on – is this a sign that the shooter has moved on since the early days of id?

Todd Hollenshead: What makes a great FPS game isn’t the same as it once was, but it has the same basic concept today: the FPS combat experience has to feel good. The weapons have to feel unique and when you use them they have to feel powerful, and you need enemies to be threatening and act in believable ways. Of course, to build a whole game around it requires more than just that core step, but if you don’t execute on that then I don’t think you’ll have a very good game.

Has the criticism you received over Doom 3’s use of old-school game techniques such as monster closets prompted you to look into new mechanics?

Tim Willits: Well, after Doom we started a new IP that was more of a classic horror shooter – but John Carmack’s technology allowed us the flexibility and power to do so much more. With the megatexture technology we are able to build these vast canyons and cliffs and whatnot and so the decision to work on Rage was driven by the power that idTech 5 gives us. And we wanted to go for a new genre. We have Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, and we want to keep them all as separate games. And speaking of idTech 5 technology, one of the great things about it is that we can use the same assets and the same development team to work on the PC, 360, PS3 and even the Mac, and all those are being developed internally. In the past we’d work on the PC version and put an outside developer on the console versions.

The last iteration of idTech didn’t proliferate like competing third-party engines – why do you think that was?


Todd Hollenshead

TH: To be frank about it, there were probably a couple of reasons. Number one was that it was really PC-centric at a time when the demand for engines was in transition from bi-platform to multi-platform. Also the fact that the Xbox version came out but there wasn’t a 360 version until later and it wasn’t as good as it probably should have been. Then there wasn’t a PS3 version until much later. These are just market dynamics. But then the engine was written to do Doom 3, it wasn’t really written with the primary focus being licensing. There are some other things as well. It was tricky technology to work with – you have to be very clever as a level designer with respect to how you light things. And it was a very different process from how you work with idTech 5 or many competing technologies or the Quake III type stuff. It made it less approachable. It took us a long time to learn it effectively – although it was very powerful when you learnt it.