Rage 2 just had a brand new trailer that showed a good nine minutes of mayhem and destruction. This collaboration between id Software and Avalanche Studios looks to be quite utterly mad, with plenty of new gadgets and vehicles to create a spectacle with. Our guide hub includes all the known information about the game, such as the release date, trailers, and details on the special editions and pre-order bonuses.
]]>Id Software's 2011 post-apocalyptic first-person drive-o-shooter Rage is finally receiving a follow-up, publishers Bethesda announced today. They do not say much about Rage 2 beyond the fact that it exists, which was kinda already known following a spate of leaks over the past few days. But! Rage 2! That's good. The original game's carfights were a bit bland and the whole thing smashed into its ending like someone walking into a glass door but I really enjoyed Rage's shootybangs. Some splendid violence. And while Rage was very serious and brown, the tone of the announcement trailer--at least--is silly and colourful. Watch this.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I do wonder what Rage could have been without the ultimately empty open-world bits you drive around. Oh, I know automotive combat was a cornerstone of id Software's vision but it ended up a distraction on the side, creating expectations of an open world that it didn't deliver on. Aside from that, see, Rage is a fun bang-bang quest-y FPS.
]]>Update - I've borrowed on oldish GeForce and the game's now running fine. Definitely primarily an AMD incompatibility, presumably at driver level.
What time is it? It's WHINY MOANY GRIPEY O'CLOCK, that's what goddamn time it is. I'd hoped to have made decent inroads into Wolfenstein: The New Sequel* by now, but no PC code was available before release, and post-release the thing's all but unplayable on my system, even on its lowest settings. I'm not alone in this, but while troubles are reported on a myriad of systems, AMD-ATI graphics card users have been hit particularly hard. I even bought a Radeon R290 yesterday for the express purposes of this and Watch Dogs, but I'm looking at 10-20 FPS most of the time. It does spike to 40 on occasion, but not often or consistently enough to enjoy the experience. Even the Bethesda and Machine Games logos at the start play like a cellphone video from 2004. At least I'm not suffering from the crashes to desktop that many others have reported.
A few possible performance aids are below, but they haven't helped me.
]]>This is the latest in the series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills.
With the galaxy's biggest sci-fi movies using ever more effects houses and artists, it can be hard to pinpoint today's Ralph McQuarries and Ron Cobbs. They're out there, though, often known more by work than name. At the top of the pile is Stephan Martiniere, one of those illustrators and art directors whose work is so envied by just about any sci-fi project going that's he levelled up to 'Visionary'. Put simply, people want the stuff in his head on their books, in their movies, at their theme parks, and, as luck would have it, in their games.
Examples? In movies, Martiniere's applied his signature style (eye-popping 'Golden Age' snapshots of civilisations in overdrive) to the worlds of I, Robot, Tron: Legacy, Star Wars Episodes II and III, Star Trek, The Fifth Element, the Total Recall remake, 300: Rise Of An Empire, Guardians Of The Galaxy and The Avengers: Age Of Ultron. *and breathe...*
]]>John Carmack has officially packed his bags and taken a rocket car over to Oculus Rift, now his sole employer until he decides he wants to become the world's foremost expert on Hyperloops or something. So what better way to celebrate/commiserate than by playing maybe the last game he'll ever see to completion? Answer: there is no better way. If you are doing anything else, John Carmack will probably never be your friend or spend upwards of five hours giving you breathless life advice. Fortunately, RAGE is free on Steam this weekend. Details below.
]]>Somewhere in the deep, dark, distant future, there exists a world beyond Doom 4. It is a strange and alien place - one in which id has pried the bolts from its lips and... wait, no, it's never done that. Always "when it's done." Always. But still, there are more id games in this far-flung universe, and also I have cool cybernetic laser nostrils. I know, for I have seen it. Briefly, ever so briefly, id creative director Tim Willits took me there. Here's what he said.
]]>Multiplayer Game Balancing AN-94: Damage slightly reduced. DSR 50: Rate of fire reduced. Ballista: Rate of fire slightly reduced.
You look at the patch notes, your whole body starting to go hot with rage. Your heart beats faster, your breath gets shorter. You HIT the Red Bull can from your desk, the murky liquid splashing your poster of Transformers-spoiling sticky-hottie Megan Fox across the arse. You stand and ram the back of your squadgy desk chair into the desk to hear it BANG, to get some relief from the rage you are feeling. You PUNCH the wall in frustration, and then hurriedly have to shake it hard because that was not the plasterboard part of the wall it was an actual stone brick. You SCREAM in anguish. "WHY?!" you yell. "WHY HAVE YOU MESSED UP MY VIRTUAL GUNS?!?!? HOW WILL I GET MEGAN TO LIKE ME NOW??!?!?!" You do a little sort of rage dance that makes you look like you belong in Populous.
]]>The now Zenimax/Bethesda-owned id have been eerily quiet since Rage met a mixed reception and underwhelming sales. I quite liked it, non-ending aside - it might have nothing on BioShock Infinite's visual majesty, but the people-filled non-combat hubs between its more tunnelish combat were more convincingly alive than Columbia's Auton population. In any case, Rage wasn't the combeback Carmack and co needed, leaving us hoping that the in theory forthcoming Doom 4 would be. Half a decade on, there's neither hide nor hair of it to be seen, and alleged sources close to the project have told Kotaku why that could be. Clearly there's something in it, as it prompted Bethesda's Pete Hines to acknowledge that id had indeed switched to making "a new version" of Doom 4 after an earlier one "did not exhibit the quality and excitement that Id and Bethesda intend to deliver."
]]>Bethblog has word that the Rage tookit has arrived on Steam, along with some serious documentation to speed would-be modders on their way. Carmack has some advice, too, tweeting: "Doing significant work will require patience, because internally we use a 300 core renderfarm for megatexture creation."
]]>For a while there, I thought we were going to find RAGE on some trashy "What ever happened to... ?" television special. It'd have been huddled in the back of a barely lit trailer, clad in a grease-and-sweat-stained bathrobe and wolfing down an entire carton of metropolitan ice cream. "I coulda been somethin'," it'd have said between chunky mouthfuls. "I coulda gone places. But then id got all distant, and everyone forgot about me." Then: warm salty tears, pitter-pattering into the sticky sugar soup below. That depressing reality, however, is no longer our own. After leaving RAGE untouched for a year, id's finally returned to its not-so-deserted deserts. The result? A brand new, six-area DLC tale called "Scorchers." Sweet, sweet deets after the break.
]]>It says something about John Carmack's status in the gaming industry that he can hold a talk that lasts for three and a half hours and the majority of watchers are simply delighted. So, if you've got nothing else on for the next 210 minutes, here is said relaxed, cheerful, full-throttle, ad-libbed and fascinating QuakeCon speech in full. id's brain o'brains chats about the problems with Rage and its messy PC launch, his love-hate relationship with the PC as a platform, those Oculus Rift VR goggles that are getting Kickstarted hearts all aflutter, Doom 3 BFG, 3D displays, just the tiniest smidgen on Doom 4 and, of course, a sustained stream of characteristically uncensored techspeak about the past, present and future of computing. Such as viewing images by firing laser beams directly into people's retinas. Er...
Impressively, as well as talking for so damned long, he doesn't sit down until the 90-minute point.
]]>While we're talking Id, there's something else that came out of E3 that you might find interesting. Bethesda frontman Pete Hines told Eurogamer that despite the lukewarm reception for Rage, they have big plans for it: "We're looking at doing some things with Rage. But obviously the first thing out of anybody's lips now when we talk about id is not, hey, what else is up with Rage? They're asking the question they've been asking for five years, six years, seven years, which is, where's Doom 4? What about Doom 4? As far as where we are with Rage, the future for that is still TBD."
]]>What's for dessert? Probably some kind of pudding that we cobbled together from elements gathered while we were out exploring. It's lucky people left all this stuff laying about or we'd never satisfy this raging hunger...
]]>This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I've gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below.
]]>So on the ball is RPS that the first post even slightly related to spooky goings-on we've run this week comes a full day after Hallowe'en. That's just our shtick - spurning pagan festivals is what we do, as is being too lazy/non-cynical to compile 'TOP TEN SCARIEST NOSES IN VIDEOGAMES' posts to farm traffic.
]]>And in the game! Ahaha! Ah. My little joke about Determinism there. What this is really about is how I feel after playing Rage, which is a feeling not uncommon to gaming throughout the ages: the feeling that the options a game presents are actually an illusion. Read on for ramblings...
]]>Lists! Two of 'em, in fact. But what do these lists do? They compare the top-ten selling PC games of last week on Steam with the top-ten selling PC games of last week at UK retail. What could we learn from them? Nothing, probably. Apart from which game companies became slightly richer over the last few days. Well done, those companies.
]]>Question to the floor: how's everyone doing with Rage at the moment? There seem to be mixed reports as to the efficacy of the recent patch - for some it did the trick, for others (especially on ATI cards - our own John Walker claims the game is still more or less unplayable on his 5850) it didn't help the glitching and texture pop-in, and others still have claimed it made things even worse. Carmack claimed on Twitter yesterday that id are still monitoring forum reports, and suggested those experiencing difficulties browse said forum for help. They're worth a check, even though it's massively tiresome to have to do so for a game you paid good money for, as there are a raft of fixes and tweaks doing the rounds - most of which at least involve only the relatively simple act of downloading a replacement config file.
]]>Again! Again! It's our theoretically regular comparison of Steam's top ten best-selling games over the last week with the same at UK retail. Will Rage have stormed its way to the top despite the outrage and buck-passing surrounding its technically-troubled PC launch? Or will foot-to-ball have conclusively proven that an Englishman's national sport is more important to him than pretending to be a time-lost survivor of a planet-wide apocalypse? And will retail be a mess of Sims games while Steam is a confusing muddle of pre-orders, deeply discounted returning titles and new entries? Take my hand. Where we're going, there be tables.
]]>id's legendary robo-brain John Carmack has broken the developer's rather inadvisable silence about the mucky state of Rage at launch on PC last week. Apology? Nah? Accepting blame? Nah. It's all ATI's fault that id released a game designed for future rather than existent drivers, he says. Oh, and the reason the game, once working, is still not as super-shiny as we might have hoped is because "We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games." Here we go again.
In happier news, the first Rage patch is out, and thank the god of textures, it introduces a much-needed graphics settings menu to the game.
]]>Rage, the first id game since - careful now - Doom 3 - came out on Tuesday in American climes, and is due in the retailer-oppressed UK tomorrow. After initially losing a day to the PC version's notorious technical problems, which ultimately led to picking up a different graphics card and manually tweaking configuration files, I've since been haring my way through its wastelands and tunnels, on foot and on wheels, and I'm ready to offer my verdict. Return to form, exploring new frontiers or compounding age-old problems? Let's find out, stranger.
]]>Alec and myself are busy playing Rage, and rather enjoying it, actually. That said, we had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the damned thing working ok. We both used the fix detailed here in combination with enabling the GPU transcoding thing, while also updating drivers (particularly important for ATi cards). This seems to address most of the texture pop-in issues, and apparently ups the texture res, too. You'll ideally need a card with 1.5gb VRAM to get a step up in texture quality, and if you have 3gb or more it's reportedly possible to go higher still, although this article on the Geforce site said they found no immediate differences. Anyone with enorm-VRAM able to confirm?
]]>Why, that's the most boring headline I've ever written here. Still, it's late, I'm tired, I've spent half the day unsuccessfully trying to track down an NVIDIA card so I can play Rage without feeling nauseous, but now I don't have to because ATI have put out a fix for the unhappy state of the game on Radeons. Unlike the first supposed fix, this makes things better rather than worse.
]]>Good news! Rage is now on my PC, and I have begun to play it. I am excited to be doing so, based on what I've played of the game previously.
Bad news! I'm seeing quite a few technical problems on my PC. To the point where I'm not sure I can keep playing. Sounds like I'm not alone either.
]]>Yeah, all this malarky about pre-order bonuses leaves me a bit uninterested, and I tend to gloss over such news. This one, however, had me say "Aw." And also "C'mon." You know in that imploring, almost disbelieving way? The double barrel shotgun in Rage is only (so far) available if you pre-order, and therefore get the Anarchy edition. So a post-apocalypse game, by Id, where the sawn off double-barrel shotgun is only available as a bonus item.
Really? C'mon. There's a bunch of other pre-order items, if you care, and they're illustrated in the video below. (Worth noting: Bethesda tell us that we won't be getting any early access to the PC version of the game, so we can't review it before it comes out, so we can't tell you whether or not to pre-order! Ha.)
]]>Just in case anyone was worried that Rage might end up just being Slightly Miffed, the launch trailer, which you may have seen on a televisual device, has come along to remind us what the game is really about. Angry music and mutants being clobbered. Of course, there is actually more to it than that but it’s important to emphasise that the following things will be happening: giant mutants will clamber toward you threateningly, vehicles will flip over and explode, and balloons will deliver explosive payloads to incredulous enemies. See below for proof.
]]>It's a simple enough demand, I think. Yes, id, we've been increasingly impressed with the constant trickle of promotional trailers you've put out for Rage over recent months, and you've proven that Mr. Carmack is fully capable of talking the talk. But are you big enough to take on outside feedback? Will you listen to our plea? We think it's about time for the Commander to return to our screens, and some form of DLC for Rage seems like the perfect opportunity.
]]>It's often the case that companies release one trailer that gives away more about how a game will actually play that all the other trailers combined. I get the feeling this might be the one for Rage, which really does seem to convey a lot about how the game is going to look and play, present its UI, and everything else. Perhaps it's something to do with being able to see a player's viewpoint and at the same time seeing him from the perspective of his buddy, but I'm getting a really good sense of how the game will deliver itself from this. Take a look and see if you agree.
]]>Immediately after sitting down for a surprising hour with id's forthcoming shooter Rage, I collared creative director Tim Willits for a quick chat. Covered: how close to finishing the game id are, how they hope to do DLC right, how people are playing the game in different ways, how... noteworthy he found some of the game's female voice actors, and Rage's 'imperfect is good' approach to character design.
]]>While Dishonored was the best thing I saw at Gamescom by a long shot, bagging the bonus invisible award of ‘most pleasant surprise’ was id's soon-to-be-released Rage. I feel like I’ve been seeing Rage forever by this point – so many trailers, so many preview events, even some hands-on time. And I’ve always thought of it as this fast, dumb, relentless, obvious thing – which, it transpires, is because I’ve always been shown it as if it is. I’ve been shown or dropped straight into fighting, rather than approaching the game at the pace it’s designed to play at or nosing at the world it's built. Now, I feel completely different about it.
]]>Aha! I am not sure this video had surfaced while I was posting yesterday, but here it is anyway, below, via Bethblog. It covers Rage and the tech behind it, what Carmack thinks of the PC as a platform now, Doom 3 code being released, and lots of tech jabber about various platforms and games (even some mentions of Doom 4 tech) that you may or may not understand or care about. Nevertheless, one of our finest traditions.
]]>Mr Carmack was up on stage at QuakeCon last night, and he was talking Rage and PC. Getting the PC version up to speed has, apparently, been one of the sticking points for Rage's development, which has taken a few years now. Interestingly, release might not be the end of the that particular line of development, either, because Carmack has revealed that he's already started a new project, and the “research engines” that this new project produces could be added to the PC version of Rage down the line. Quite what this means isn't clear, but apparently he has a "firm" plan to release this update to PC, as well as a high-quality texture patch. It's fascinating to see Carmack getting excited about the PC again, a platform whose power he called "crazy". Increasingly, I suspect, the words out of the mouths of Carmack and other tech gurus are going to be about the untapped potential of the PC, particularly as the archaic specs of 360 and PS3 begin to frustrate those developers who are still interesting in pushing their technology. There's a bit more detail on Mr C's talk here.
I've also posted a big old Rage trailer below.
]]>Quakecon 2011 kicked off yesterday, and included another of John Carmack's traditional incredibly long and bewilderingly technical talks, delivered at an audience primarily there to repeatedly frag each other but prepared to sit through all this talk of doohickeys and megawotsits due to their sheer love and respect for the godfather of FPS. If they were also primarily there in the hope of Doom 4 being unveiled at last, they were disappointed. Carmack made it clear that 2011 is all about Rage - which, all of a sudden, is due for release in two months.
Soon after that, he revealed, id will release Doom 3's source code to the world.
]]>(Click the images in this feature for full sized shots.)
I am a ark survivor! A proud child of the late Mother Earth, dispatched into hypersleep to escape the meteor inbound to pummel Gaia. Our deep-buried pod is one of hundreds of such! When we wake we will show that mankind has learnt from the mistakes we made on our original home. We shall spread enlightenment and humility through the stars until the heat death of the universe! I have a spanking new jumpsuit!
]]>It now seems certain that video previews for Rage will never end (not least because Carmack was again quoted talking about Rage 2 this week...). Even after the game has been released we will, for as long as live, see talking heads from Id pop up to tell us about the value of the story, or the open world, or - in this particular case - the enemies that you are inevitable going batter in bloodied carcasses with a double barrelled shotgun.
Ah, but it's cleverer than that. This isn't Doom, you know: the ranks of the enemy contains a sinister cabal called The Authority, and they mean business. Shooty business. They're not interested in talking to the monsters, no sir. And they've got more than sharp sticks. But what are they doing? What do they want? Well, that's the point of the game's story, I think. There's also another glimpse of that gigantic mutant and some details of the animation system in here. Excitingly, we sent our one of our sinister cabal to take a look at Rage recently, so we'll be able to tell you a bit more about the whole thing at the start of August.
]]>"Open, but directed," says Tim Willits in this latest look at Rage, referring to the way the player will have scope to explore the wasteland, while being directed down particular paths to complete individual missions. That seems to be generally how folks like their open world, too. Some scope for poking about and exploring, but generally a storyline to follow, too. In fact, the more we see of Rage, the more this seems like Id really know what they are doing.
This latest bit of footage also previews the multiplayer vehicular combat, which looks pretty solid (although personally I've never found a vehicular combat game that I've stuck with for any length of time, no matter how amusing it initially might be.)
]]>Rage's continuing series of video trailers continues today, with a new trailer showing off some of the weapons in Rage. I'm sure they've been showing off the weapons for a while now, it's not news to me that the game has a shotgun in it anyway. Click onward for the video.
]]>Ha, the latest Rage diary has Id's Tim Willits uttering one of those phrases that (fortunately) tend to only come from the lips of game designers: "...then we had to decide how to destroy the planet." In this case, of course, it was a convenient asteroid impact in the 2030s which sets the scene for Rage's ruined world one-hundred years later. Yeah, I think you know the sort of thing, but anyway this latest trailer-diary, entitled "The Dawn", has loads of new footage and some of it is quite spectacular - that ruined/infected skyscraper is a thing of beauty.
(I also love the juxtaposition of Matt Hooper saying the words "deep and meaningful story" as the player shoots a red exploding barrel on screen.)
]]>How does Rage fit into Id's history? Bethesda attempt to explain in a new video, which you can see below. There's some new Rage footage, but also footage of a bunch of classic Id games, providing a bit of perspective on where Id went after Wolfenstein. The video has Carmack, Hollenshead and others doing a bit of talking, and there's a crumb of insight on the megatexture tech, and how that will - apparently - be exploited properly in Rage.
Rage is starting to look interesting, I think.
]]>Heartening news from Sir Carmack, lord of pixels: preliminary id design discussion about the next Quake game has turned up a hankering to return to the Gothic, semi-fantasy setting and vibe of the original Quake. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty damned bored of bio-mechanical environs and beasts after id Tech 4's quad-whammy of Doom 3, Quake IV, Prey and Quake Wars, so something potentially a little weirder rather takes my fancy.
]]>Code guru, hobbyist rocket scientist and co-founder of iD Software John D. Carmack has been tracked down at E3 by PC Gamer, and they were rewarded by a rather excellent twenty minute interview. With him, obviously. Want to know what he had to say about consoles holding back iD's work on the PC? Of course you do. It's after the jump.
]]>It doesn't seem right, watching two of the calmest developers you will ever lay eyes on talk about a game called Rage, but that's exactly what you'll find after the jump. Apparently intercepted on their way to a bikram yoga class, these two were happy to spend plenty of time answering questions about The Authority, the corporate future-bastards you'll be fighting in Rage alongside all those grubby mutants. I'm not sure, but I think this game looks prettier every time they release footage of it.
]]>QuakeCon. QUAKECON. QUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE-A-CONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN. Just saying that name makes me laugh: truly, it is the most testosteroney of all gaming conventions. If QuakeCon and BlizzCon were ever to merge, terrible, terrible things would happen. Fortunately, id's being owned by Bethesda these days means there's no risk of that happening. QuakeCon '11 isn't far off - the doors open August 4. It's going to be a big one, because that date means it's a mere month before RAGE finally ships so doubtless there's going to be a ton of exciting hands-on access for atendees. And could it maybe, maybe, pretty please maybe entail a first glimpse at Doom 4?
One way to find out (actually there's two, but 'watching the internet around that time' scarcely seems like making an effort): pre-register now.
]]>Reports have been coming in that the next game from Id Software might just be using the little-known "first-person" format to deliver its particular brand of post-apocalyptic action. Well now we actually have proof! This most recent video (carefully embedded below by our technicians) proves, without any doubt, that Rage is a first-person shooter videogame. They said it couldn't be done, and they've only gone and done it. For more evidence please refer to our recent hands-on preview article.
]]>And here we were, thinking that an id game might have no multiplayer mode, purely because they'd stubbornly refused to talk about it for years. Non-surprise, non-suckers! At the info-event that led to yesterday's word-splurges about Skyrim, Prey 2 and Rage singleplayer, I also witnessed the first reveal of the semi-free-roaming shooter's other modes. Back to deathmatch classic, or up to new things?
]]>I don't want to do overkill on the latest id game, but I've got a ton of info here and one massivo-post wouldn't be anyone's idea of a fun time. The hands-on preview is here, but while I pen the next chunk (about the finally-revealed multiplayer modes) here's a trailer of one of the major singleplayer missions to be getting along with...
]]>It's more complicated than I'd suspected. But then I'd suspected something about as complicated as pouring milk into a glass, going on recent id form. The result is something that both does and doesn't feel like an id game - it's got the almost slippery high-speed movement on their pre-Doom 3 titles, it's got a certain tangible familiarity to weapon-faves such as shotguns and machineguns, it's got scampering mutant-monsters that seem to pop out nowhere and swipe at your back. It's also got wide-open spaces, a crafting system, puzzles of a sort, optional objectives and freeform roaming. It's id but it idn't.
]]>The blog elite over at Big Download have spotted a new Rage trailer that shows off all of the game's weapons. What would an FPS be without guns, eh? An FP, that's what. And who wants to play that? Freaks and wellfare fraudsters, that's who. Take a look after the jump.
]]>There's a new trailer out for Id Software's forthcoming wasteland shooter, Rage. It's below. It shows off the great big, beautiful environments, the remote control car, the vehicular combat and, of course, the men getting shot. That's something that Id have some experience in portraying, and I think it shows.
The game is due September 13th (US) and September 15th (EU).
]]>id have relaunched the website for their forthcoming outdoors-but-still-brown shooter, RAGE. You can plan ahead like a loony and pre-order a copy for the 13th September, when they're saying it's coming out. Which frankly scares me, id giving out release dates. What has Bethesda done to them?! It has to involve electricity and hats with wires sticking out. There's three new screenshots, which are like bloody golddust for this game. The last time any were officially released was May 2010. Twits. So you can see them all giant and print them out and use them as duvets if you click on them below. (They're quite big.)
]]>One last snippet of news from Quakecon. They've set the release date for Rage in UK for September 16th 2011.
]]>I'm not going to make a habit of linking to wallpaper releases, obviously, but I think the update for Id Software's latest on Bethesda Blog might be worth an exception. They have all the normal sizes, as you might expect, but also two 25,600×16,000 images, and a marginally smaller 25,600×9,080. You know, just in case you decided you wanted to print out these wallpapers for some actual walls.
]]>My wish is their command. And my wish was for new Rage footage. G4 has obliged, with two videos of footage and gibbage.
]]>As promised in the post below, here are four new shots of Rage - a game we've seen very little of so far. But then it's id, and therefore it's remarkable to have even these. We're very hopeful to see some sort of game footage video out of this E3. Imagine it! Seeing Rage moving! The last time that happened was August last year. Before that, July 2008. In the meantime you might want to try looking between the pictures below very quickly. The very, very impressive pictures. Mega-textures seem to be working.
]]>“We didn’t want to do another Doom, another Wolfenstein, but we knew that at its core it had to be a first-person experience.”
It's a line I heard lead designer Tim Willits say twice during last week's Rage demo, plus over a dozen variants on that theme: his lure to unsure packs of journalists who'd almost forgotten Rage existed. By id standards, it's not been long in the making - but it's been long enough that I can't help but approach this latest demo with a very different mentality to those first videos back in 2007. Borderlands has been and gone, Fallout 3 has been and gone, Bioshock 1 and 2 have been and gone. This Winter, we'll have another post-apocalyptic combat game to join those teeming end-of-the-world ranks. It's created by id - Doom id, Wolfenstein id, Quake id. And, let's be honest, Doom 3 id. How will they win our love back?
With prettiness and bullets, mostly.
]]>GameTrailers is watching... The all-see floating tendril of the internet that is the GT cameras found its way in front of Id Software's lead design chap, Tim Willits, who looks a decade younger without his moustache. He's talking about Rage: the setting, the protagonist, the weapons, and all the extras that Id hope will make this more than a standard-fare FPS. It's interspersed with some footage, mostly recycled, but with some weapon action I don't recall seeing before. Clickwards for more.
]]>Bethesda have also been showing off their newly-acquired Id Software game, Rage, which will now hit in 2011. (Note the teaser sites that EA spawned are vanished. Poor old teaser sites.) Mr Meer has seen it in action and should have some comments about it later. In the meantime you can click for grande versions of these here apocalimages.
]]>Once we get past early summer things get a little hazy. We enter a nether-realm of shifting dates and unclear prophecies. By then we'll also have a whole bunch of games I haven't previously mentioned show up in the intervening months, stuff that we didn't have release dates for to place them in our line-up. This final post in our preview attempts to survey them all. To the future! (And check out part one and two if you haven't seen them already.)
]]>Here's what Bethesda say: "RAGE will be published by Bethesda Softworks, (a) ZeniMax subsidiary. As a result, Electronic Arts Inc will not be involved in the sales and marketing of RAGE. The ongoing development of RAGE is unaffected by this development." Thoughts on this below.
]]>You know what? I'm feeling lazy. I'm going to say that id's Rage is looking like the midway point between Fallout 3 and FUEL. This half-arsed device allows me to indicate that it's post-apocalyptic, involves shooting creatures in wastegrounds, and racing cars through dust. But it's also incredibly unhelpful because it leaves behind notions of FO3's turn-based combat, or FUEL's mechanical world. It's Borderlands with driving, okay?! Oh, it doesn't help, does it? Everyone stop doing it. Instead, take a look at the trailer that's just emerged from QuakeCon and coo and ooh at how impressive it all looks.
]]>Polish games mag CD-Action (who, according to these videos, seem to have their own drink?) have posted an enormous John Carmack interview to the web, and we've reposted it below. In it Carmack chats about Rage, stepping away from graphics to work on player experience, the problems of contemporary developments, the challenges of modding in the "post-Doom 3 era", and so forth. Thanks to Pat at VG247 for the heads up on this.
]]>Via Shacknews, we see some new shots of Rage from SIGGRAPH 2009, where a talk given by id Software senior programmer J.M.P. van Waveren included a whole bunch of stuff about the "virtual texturing" in the new engine. There's a handful of environment shots on there, and they look incredimentary. This could well be the next game you build a new PC for. The full PDF is here.
]]>QuakeCon saw, at last, the release of some official screenshots of FPS Rage. And guess what. Only one of them's brown! Click on the pics for bigger versions.
]]>Eurogamer wrote up the Carmack keynote over here, in which he covers future tech and Quake Live stuff. The trailer, which you can see after the jump, is essentially the same footage as the E3 trailer, but with another section tacked on the end. It shows some kind of battle-racing tournament feature, with some shots of the racing itself. Hard to be sure how it'll play off any of this, but it's all Id Tech 5, and looking fairly amazing.
]]>We're not out at this year's QuakeCon, currently turning downtown Dallas into a frenzy of happy meatheadness, because we all have a pathological terror of large, whooping Texan men. Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell is a far bolder fellow than we however, so he is out there, and already he's wheedled some tasty facts on id's next game, Rage, out of project lead Tim Willits. Who has apparently shaved off his moustache, which by my maths makes id 75% more attractive.
]]>Dear RPS Readers,
Thanks for the interested comments in response to my first post! They have warmed my heart and girded my loins for the rest of the week. Straight after filing my first report I had to dash (well, walk leisurely) across downtown Los Angeles to get to the EA press conference, held at the Orpheum Theatre – a truly gorgeous restored vaudeville theatre where they shot the theatre scenes for Last Action Hero. Which wasn’t as thrilling as accidentally ending up at Union Station (where they filmed the police station scenes for Blade Runner) yesterday, but interesting none the less. In a round about way that sort of sums up EA’s press conference, too. Not hugely thrilling, but unquestionably interesting.
]]>id's upcoming freeformish shooty-vehichley game in action, apparently now featuring Tusken Raiders and Him With The Face From The Goonies. The big news is that EA is publishing it, id having broken from long-time publishers Activision. Ooh, there's probably some fun gossip behind that. Something to do with Quake Wars not doing so well, perhaps? Or resistance to the Acitivsion-Blizzard merger? Sorry, sorry, I'm being horribly scurrilous. It was probably just a big huge EA cheque.
]]>And it's a vehicular shooter. The game will be based on Carmack's new graphics engine, which makes use of the innovations that made Quake Wars' large maps possible. There's even going to be some co-op multiplayer. Gadzooks.
]]>
![קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]](https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/honkai-star-rail-bronya-fu-xuan.jpg?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]")
