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DanJW

Rage: more quakecon news

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This actually has me pretty stoked. I'm all up for some post-apocalyptic road-warrior goodness from iD. Between this and Fallout 3, 2009 should be a rad-tastic year.

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My first thought was a generic "hey, cool". My second thought is that it's still technology-driven design - they wrote a terrain engine, and if you've got miles of terrain, you need vehicles, and then you've got what they've described so far - "racing and shooting in a wide-open environment!"

I'm gonna need more details before I get excited about it, but I'm gonna put the cynic hat aside from here on out, and keep an open mind. I'm confident that the bloody nose that Quake 4's poor sales gave them will act as a catalyst towards them being a bit more interesting and a bit less derivative in the future.

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I get the feeling of Mad Max and Interstate 76.

This could very well be one superb game.

At least the hype is very fucking good, I'm completely sold.

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There is not so many details about the game so it's difficul to judge it right now.

However I'm really impressed by the technology (see here). It's difficult to really review an engine just with some videos and comments but it seem really powerful and give lots of freedom for the artists.

The doom3 engine was not really successful with third parties developers, but with the bad press around Unreal engine with the lawsuit by SK it seems that the id Tech 5 can have good chances to convince lots of developers. Plus even if Crytek what to suppoprt consoles, at the current time there is nothing "real".

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Yeah, thats a really nice toolset. I'm of the opinion that having good tools for your level designers and environment artists to work with greatly improves the game.

Also I think he said there that the toolset will ship with the game. Woot!

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Doom. Halo. Prey. Haze. They. FEAR. Rage.

Totally stands out from the crowd.

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Quake.

Heheh, well id have always had that naming strategy. It's other people that have copied them.

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Honestly, it's pretty smart. As soon as your name gets over two words, people are so much less likely to remember it. The example that was pointed out to me lately was the new movie The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. Yeah. I had to look that one up on imdb as I couldn't remember which coward it was. The people I was discussing this with couldn't even remember whether it was "assassination" or "death." Compare that to the simplicity of Rage and all of a sudden Id seems brilliant.

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Doom. Halo. Prey. Haze. They. FEAR. Rage.

Totally stands out from the crowd.

They?

My first thought was a generic "hey, cool". My second thought is that it's still technology-driven design - they wrote a terrain engine, and if you've got miles of terrain, you need vehicles, and then you've got what they've described so far - "racing and shooting in a wide-open environment!"

I just don't know what's being advertised here. Is this a racing game? Is it a shooter? Like you're comment states, the trailer apparently shows both shooting and driving. I'm confused about what the game will turn out to be, even though it looks like it's pretty far into development already.

I kind of feel like I could be excited about it if I knew if it was a racer or a shooter, or even both, but I don't even know what I'm looking at here.

I'm gonna need more details before I get excited about it, but I'm gonna put the cynic hat aside from here on out, and keep an open mind. I'm confident that the bloody nose that Quake 4's poor sales gave them will act as a catalyst towards them being a bit more interesting and a bit less derivative in the future.

I liked Quake 4 alot! ;(

It was fun because it was so derivative. Quake for was a good old-fashioned arcade experience, with a predictable boss at the end of each level and that didn't stop it from being any less exciting. Plus the level and enemy design was a HUGE (HUGE) step up from Doom 3.

Though the pacing was nothing new, the enemies were varied and the levels were well designed.

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Doom. Halo. Prey. Haze. They. FEAR. Rage.

Totally stands out from the crowd.

I think those are all great game names. Scott Miller or someone wrote something a while ago pointing out the value of one and two syllable game names. I'd sooner have them than some eight word monstrosity with a couple of colons.

I'm of the opinion that having good tools for your level designers and environment artists to work with greatly improves the game.

I don't think it's just a matter of "greatly improves". These days, if you even want to finish making your game, good tools are pretty much mandatory.

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I'll also chime in with support for Quake 4. While nothing spectacular, it was a very solid shooter that I enjoyed immensely. Also, not really Id so much as Raven, but that's beside the point.

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Carmack's comment about adding vehicles and terrain to id Tech 4 (i.e. the Doom3 engine) because players wanted them suggests to me that he has an incredibly simplistic idea of what makes games fun. It's almost as if he previously had a checklist for every game he made that looked like:

  1. guns
  2. monsters
  3. corridors

Now he's realised the market has changed and the new checklist looks like:

  1. guns
  2. monsters
  3. corridors
  4. vehicles
  5. terrain

This isn't really id Software-bashing, nor is it Carmack-bashing -- I have a lot of respect for his technical knowledge and skills -- but he came across as very naive about making games as opposed to game engines.

That said, his stated dislike of the complexity of ET:QW strikes a chord with me.

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People say that about Carmack every time he speaks about something. We know by now that he's an engineer, not really a games designer. I mean listen to his voice. He's even nerdier than Bill Gates. 'People' and understanding them are not his strong point. Why do you think he talks about 'the artists' in such reverent 'your's is an arcane knowledge' tones?

edit: also, despite everything, I am really into terrain and landscapes in games these days. Maybe it was WoW that did it to me. Plus, if id can do for vehicular combat (which in most games that feature it is rather clunky) what they did for run-and-gun, then that can only be a good thing.

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Also keep in mind that nothing is set in stone yet. Nothing of what they've shown so far is final. They said that they haven't designed the main character yet. They still aren't sure if it's going to be a racing game with some FPS shooting bits or an FPS with some racing bits. All we've seen so far is the engine. Nothing of the actual game yet.

Read more about Rage in this excellent preview on eurogamer

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Carmack is definitively an engineer but I think he somehow really understand game design too. Of course not on a large scale (like new concept or something) but how to make a game fun and enjoyable.

For example Q3 was a really simple game, no complexe game design rules, really straightforward, but the physics, the pads, weapon ballance, everything was well crafted to make the game fun to play.

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I don't know if Carmack is a good engineer.

He is a good programmer (specially realtime 3D), but I have my doubts on his engineering skills.

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er... I mean software engineer...

And just because you launched a rocket into the air doesn't make you a good engineer. It's not like they managed to launch a small car into the air.

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elmuerte considers only people who can build a car blindfolded with their tongue good engineers.

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Of course, he'd only do so if someone told him that's what people wanted.

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