New details about id’s upcoming shooter Rage have been revealed, along with a statement by John Carmack that the game is designed first and foremost to be played on consoles.
Rage begins when the player wakes from suspended animation deep beneath a landscape left shattered by a major asteroid strike. The world above is a desert wasteland filled with bandits, mutants and a mysterious group known as “the Authority,” which will eventually become the focus of the game as players investigate who they are, what they’re doing and why everyone is so scared of them.
The latest issue of Game Informer says the game has a heavy focus on “car racing and heavy weapons building,” with weapon upgrades, multiple types of ammunition and an engineering system that allows players to build things like sentry turrets and remote-controlled bombs if they have the proper blueprints and parts. Cars in the game will also be customizable, with upgrades available for both mechanical and combat systems; vehicular combat will be a big part of the races and power-ups and ammo will be spread around the various racetracks.
And despite id’s well-established roots as a PC developer, Carmack said Rage is being designed for the controller, not the mouse. “The largest chunk of our market’s going to be on consoles,” he said. “I mean, yes, you can use the mouse for it but it’s critical that the controller be the way that we design the game.”
He also noted that id is having some difficulty determining how to make the game fit onto DVDs for the Xbox 360. “We would love to set the thing up where it filled one Blu-ray disc versus three DVDs, which is about the right mix, but the game just… We can’t cut it into a third like that,” he said. “We can cut it into two pieces. We’ve got two large wastelands on there. We just couldn’t make an arbitrary cut.”
Rage is currently in development for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac and PC. No release date has been set but the game is expected to launch sometime in 2010.
