Rage Interview

At publisher Bethesda’s recent Gamers Day event in Paris, legendary developer id Software finally showed the Xbox 360 version of post-apocalyptic first-person shooter RAGE being played live. It looks absolutely stunning – perhaps even the best-looking game of all time. After the heart-pounding presentation, with our tongue still flapping somewhere behind our head, we caught up with lead designer Tim Willits to get the skinny on the game’s delay, the 360 version being spread out over two discs, and more.

Q: RAGE is a hugely exciting game.

Tim Willits: Did you enjoy the presentation?

Q: Yeah. It was the first time we’ve seen RAGE properly, as a real playable game being played live on the Xbox 360.

Tim Willits: Yeah it’s more together. It’s much better, but still not yet out there.

Q: When the game was being published by EA, it was slated to come out this year. When Bethesda bought id that was changed to TBC. You announced during your presentation that RAGE will now not come out until some time in 2011. Why has the game been delayed? What’s taken so long?

Tim Willits: One of the great things about Bethesda and working with Zenimax is, in the past we worked and released it when it’s done, but there were always pressures to try to get it done as quickly as possible – some internal, some external. The great thing about being a part of the Zenimax/Bethesda family is they’re like, listen, you guys make the best game you can make. We won’t get in the way, and we’ll get you what you need. So John Carmack [Technical Director] can focus on making awesome, and we can focus on making the game as great as we can.

We’ve actually added some stuff that we weren’t planning on having. But we were like hey, we have this opportunity, we have more resources, let’s see if we can go better on this. Ultimately that works out better for the fans. Then plus we also looked at our line-up and where things were slated to ship, which also has some input. But really the big factor is they’ve given us the opportunity to do better stuff and to make it even more polished. If we screw this up it would be horrible. It is a brand new IP. We have a lot riding on this and we need to make sure it’s awesome.

Q: You talk about having a new opportunity under Bethesda. Is it an opportunity you didn’t have when the game was being published by EA?

Tim Willits: Our relationship with them is obviously much different than our relationship with the same company that we are now, because we’re all one family now. But it was different. It’s much nicer now. It doesn’t have anything to do with EA, it’s just that we internally have the people and the resources. We’re able to build up the Doom team, for instance. So they are leveraging the same technology. They’re learning all the things that we learned and they’re able to take advantage of that. Fans will see much faster turnaround times at id because we have two teams working on awesome stuff.

Q: The game was announced in 2007. Was that too early?

Tim Willits: Well, John had some awesome tech and he was going through it. You know, we’re id. We like to talk. John loves to talk about what’s new and exciting. People know that historically we’re small and it takes us forever to make games. But they all have to be good, and that’s really important for us. We have good momentum, it’s a huge installed base, people are eager for something new. I think we’re in a good position.

Q: The game will be released on two 360 discs. Is there anything that has been held back from the game in order to make sure it fits on two 360 discs? A Blu-ray disc is about three 360 discs, isn’t it?

Tim Willits: I think it’s 19GB, something like that. And then it’s 16, I think, for two. They’re not full nine gigs. They’re eight, for those guys. No. I mean really, there has never been a time when we said we have to remove that map that we already made because it’s not going to fit on the 360. But we’ve structured the story in such a way that at the end of chapter one, or the first part or whatever you want to call it, there’s a nice logical separation. So even on the PS3 and the PC you’re not going to go back to Wellspring. Once you’re done with all the stuff in Wellspring you’re moving on to Subway Town and next part of the game.

Q: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand RAGE won’t have dedicated servers.

Tim Willits: Yeah, John mentioned that at the last QuakeCon, and the guys are working on the multiplayer, so I’ll reiterate what John said. He said most likely probably not.

Q: How come?

Tim Willits: Just because of the nature of the consoles. When you start a dedicated server, it’s a dedicated machine and we feel that the accessibility and the challenges that we faced with our previous games lead us the conclusion that going with more of an open client server architecture works out better for us.

Q: I want to put something Randy Pitchford has said about id to you.

Tim Willits: Oh boy.

Q: He said: “They’re in this kind of ‘generation plus’ mode, and nobody knows what the generation beyond this one is going to look like.”

Tim Willits: Yeah but it takes us forever to make games. If you want an explanation from Randy you need to ask Randy that, but I wish him luck.

Q: I think his point was more that the 360 and PS3 lifecycles are going to be longer than any previous console lifecycle, and the games you’re making are so good graphically that you’re going to have to make them work on this generation rather than the next generation of consoles.

Tim Willits: Yeah, okay I guess. Maybe he was doing some magic at the time. He was pulling a rabbit out of his hat and he got distracted and said something silly. One of the great things about id Tech 5 is, and John feels and he’s said this before, that it’s very scalable upwards. He says when the Xbox 720, or 4, or whatever they call it – we don’t know what it is or when it’s coming out – but John’s pretty confident that it’ll scale right up. Plus, John’s also talked about how pieces of id Tech he wants leverage in iPhone and iPad stuff. He’s gone both directions with the tech. So I think that we’ll be fine when the next consoles come out.

Q: We were hoping that Doom 4 was going to be at this event. When will we see more of it?

Tim Willits: Oh wow, yes! Oh boy. You’re going to have to ask Kevin Cloud [id co-owner] that question. My focus is on making RAGE awesome! Yeah, those guys are busy working on it. But that goes back to that whole Zenimax Bethesda thing. In the past we have never been able to do that, which meant, we’d finish RAGE, John would say, I have this new idea that’s awesome! So he’d start on a new technology and we’d start a new game, and then it’d take as long as it takes. That’s because what we did in the past worked for us, we’re small, it took a long time, what does it matter? But now, you see the Doom team can work on tech, we can work on the next RAGE game, and then John now can actually develop technology that’s separate from the game. We can do games around technology. You work for a year on something and then you find out, okay, this tech is not going to work or we’ve got to change it and stuff, then throw it all away. Most times we spend four or five years working on a game, but really we make the game in the last 18 months. So we can try to get the technology developed while we’re working on other games, it’ll just work out better.

RAGE is due out on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2011.