Rage Developers Reveal Further Details About Upcoming Game

UGDB.com: RAGE is your NEXT big title, but what are the things that make it exciting for you as a designer? Don’t you think that you guys have waited just too long to come up with a new IP?

Matt Hooper: Yes, the biggest thing about RAGE, and the thing that makes it new and exciting for me as a designer is that this is the first new IP that we make in id Software for over 10 years. If you guys are familiar in what we have done in the past, we have living in the Wolfenstein, Quake and Doom universes for a long time. So, John Carmack came up with a new technology, and he said “OK, we need a new IP, it’s been too long – there are all these things that we want to get on the gameplay side, lets just try to make this marriage - the technology and the gameplay, so that we just stop to live in our own universe.”
So, we wanted a new IP, and we wanted to do some things that are totally new – not just for us, but maybe industry wide… We haven’t seen some of these elements brought together and this is what we are doing right now. So, we are using idTech5, and one of the great things about that technology is the fact that we can uniquely texture the entire world, so we get a lot of visual diversity. And in the end, we wanted to mix the visual diversity with some gameplay diversity.

UGDB: What’s the story behind all this rage?

MH: An asteroid called 99942 Apophis [which is not fictional – in reality there is such a near-Earth asteroid; initial observations indicated a small probability (around 2.7%) that it might strike the planet in year 2029] is on its way to impact with Earth. All of the governments get together and start the “Eden Project”. They buried these life sustaining pods – which they called “Arks” – all around the world with just a few people, a dozen of people in each. The base idea is that at some predetermined time, they are all supposed to start ascending to the surface. And everybody will emerge to rebuild society and all to live happily ever after. But the things don’t go according to the plan… So, you emerge from your Ark in this wasteland, it seems that more people had survived, there are different settlers running around, there are bandits trying to attack you, some people have mutated, so there are mutants running around, too. You really don’t know what to expect and early in the game it’s a fight for survival. In the beginning you start working with Dan, one of the local settlers, and… There are a lot more elements of the story, which I cannot reveal at this time. But there is authority presence that happens later on, you will learn why you are important and what exactly is going on around you.

UGDB: How is the story going to be told – the way that Bethesda did it in Fallout 3 with dialog trees? And while we are on this subject, how are the NPCs going to treat the player and how are you going to interact with them exactly?

MH: When you move through the main story path, you will have a lot of set ups, the people will react in a different way to you; sometimes they will give you simple directions, for example… But we wanted to be as casual as possible in terms of interactions; we don’t want you ever to have to read more than a couple paragraphs of text. We don’t want to induce you to click on dialog trees; we keep it very action oriented and focused when we are telling the different stories. We allow the players some optional kind of a dig-a-little-deeper by clicking on the characters. You will get different parts of the story it makes it fell more believable this way. Some of the dialog with the people is optional. And a lot of the characters will just react as you move around the world.

Read More: http://ugdb.com/article/view/interview-rage-pc/