PC Previews

Beautiful game engines for less than beautiful beasts roaming beautifully grimy corridors. From their birth in 1992, this has been the id way. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake: grim, grimmer, grimmest. However, if up until now their artistic direction was based solely on Event Horizon, then Rage marks an influx of new DVDs onto the id film shelf.

Surviving a near extinction level event in an ‘Ark’, you are thawed out by an untimely earthquake to find you’ve been woken too early, and the world is a wasteland populated by mutants, scavengers, and tailors who used to make clothes for Judge Dredd’s Cursed Earth storyline.

Our friends down the hall at [Maximum PC] had an opportunity to speak with id co-founder John Carmack after the big EA press conference yesterday (where id surprisingly announced a partnership with EA to publish Rage). They grilled the legendary game developer (and part-time rocket scientist) about id's post-apocalyptic shooter, the state of gaming graphics, and what his plans are after id Tech 5. Rage looks be a drastic

This is running in real-time? On a 360? Right now? What? That’s not typical over-eager preview hyperbole – those were my actual thoughts while id’s Tim Willits and Matt Hooper walked me and a gaggle of press through some early moments in Rage.

I knew it was going to look spectacular. It’s id. It’s the developer that, as they put it, “invented first-person shooters,” and Rage is their Next Big Thing...

Despite our previous story about its multiplayer modes, RAGE is a single player game, through and through. But beyond the fact that it looked a lot like Borderlands with a more realistic art style (post-apocalyptic desert setting, buggies, lots of guns), we didn’t know a lot about how it would really play. Now we do, and sheer variety of things to do surprised us...

I got a chance recently to not only play Rage for over two hours, but also interview president of id Software, Todd Hollenshead. It was interesting to hear the thoughts of a guy who’s seen and been a part of the evolution of the first-person shooter, especially right after I played Rage, which clearly has learned from the very developers who id originally inspired with its own work. The difference between id’s last game, Doom 3, and Rage, shows a developer not afraid...

This is id Software’s first properly new game since 1996. Just think about that. Various versions of Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein have marched from id’s Texas offices over the past 12 years, yet the team’s creative muscles haven’t flexed on anything fresh for more than a decade.

The world is a post-apocalyptic dustbowl populated by mutants and proud retro-fitted scavengers with fast, growling cars, deadly makeshift crossbows and upturned woks for hats. You, the unwitting outsider, emerging prematurely from your Armageddon-proof panic room, find you’re somehow better at surviving in this hostile environment than those who’ve been living in it their whole lives.

A lone man struggles to the surface from a vault deep underground, wearing the garb of a long-dead civilization. Earth is an arid wasteland, packed with warring bandit tribes and mutants, as the survivors of a world-wide disaster struggle to stay alive day-to-day. Call us crazy if you like, but we’re sure we’ve been here before...

Let's just put a stop to all of the comparisons to Fallout 3 and Borderlands right now. Rage is a different beast. You're not earning XP by shooting ghouls after pausing gameplay in VATS and you're not making a combat shogun with acid-spewing shenanigans. No, id Software's Rage focuses less on gimmick and more on arming you with reliable weapons for your wasteland warfare. We just demoed Rage's Dead City mission here at E3 and came away blast happy...