id Software and Bethesda's post-apocalyptic shooter/zany kart racer Rage features a real cast of characters, as seen in the trailer below. Well, we'd classify maybe three of the people in the video as "characters," and the others as "horribly mutated, grotesque meat targets."
#rage
Video game handhelds are getting a run for their money, and they're getting it from smartphones. But are they good enough as dedicated handheld game machines? Most serious games would offer a curt "no". More »
If you've been eager to show off your rocket-launching prowess to the public, you'll be delighted to hear that a large group of them will gather at QuakeCon 2011 from August 4 until August 7 (yes, in 2011). Joining the annual and famously festive fragfest -- running on what event organizers have dubbed a "world-class network" -- requires only that you register, and then take your computer to the Hilton Anatole hotel in Dallas, Texas. The event is open to the public and attendance is free.
If you're particularly keen on lugging around a monstrous rig (or your Pentium III 800MHz with 128MB RAM, for that matter), you'll also have the opportunity to see and play upcoming games from Bethesda Softworks -- the publishing label of Zenimax, which acquired id Software in 2009. This year's QuakeCon will conclude just over a month before the North American debut of post-apocalyptic FPS Rage, currently slated for release on September 13.
The "2011 trailer" for id Software's Rage has a good mix of vehicular combat and first-person shooting. While not particularly revelatory, it's always nice to have a new excuse to see id Tech 5 in motion, right?
#screens
Bethesda has given the website for id's upcoming sandbox shooter Rage a striking new facelift, and they celebrate by capturing the essence of the game in three new screenshots. More »
The mutant bashing in Rage is now more serious than ever with the addition of leaderboards, achievements, gyroscope support, mirror mode, and more for your iOS device.
Over the weekend, a massive update for Rage: Mutant Bash TV - id Software's iOS-based on-rails shooter for the iPhone and iPad - made its way to the iTunes App Store. Perhaps most notable is the inclusion of support for Apple's Game Center service, featuring leaderboards and achievements so you can compare your mutant-murdering abilities with those of your friends.
Other improvements encourage you to bask in Rage's beauty: Museum Mode lets you casually stroll through the levels, mutant-free, taking in all the sights. Look, a collapsed wall. Charming! 2nd Display Support lets you link your iThing up to your television using an Apple component cable (480p) or an Apple VGA cable (720p), so you can get some big-screen appreciation for all those polygons.
But our favorite enhancement is surely "Gyroscope Support" - forget about tilt-based aiming, it's all about the virtual window-style now. Grab yourself a swivel-based office chair, park it in the middle of your room, and peer through your 3.5" window (or 9.7" for you iPad owners) into the 360°, megatextured alterna-world of Rage. Find the update notes after the break.
#review id Software, the studio behind Doom and Quake, is bringing its upcoming first-person shooter Rage to Apple's iOS with Rage HD. Rage is impressive looking, and so is Rage HD. But how does it play? More »
Now that Rage: Mutant Bash TV has landed on the App Store, id Software's John Carmack is already talking about what's next for the developer on Apple's iOS platform: more Rage. Specifically, a game focusing on the driving aspect of Rage on consoles and PC (shown in the above screenshot).
"I think we have a really good idea of what we can do in this format, and I'm really excited about getting onto the next game, getting onto what we can do with another slice of Rage," Carmack told Joystiq today, going on to say: "Taking some of the wasteland material and having riding along in the dune buggies, jumping over ravines, that kind of stuff. There's more graphics stuff that we can bring in and add yet another level of improvement and polish to the visuals." If all goes as planned, the game will hit iOS before Rage arrives in stores.
"I would like to do a Quake Live derivative for iOS, maybe focusing on the lightning gun, and call it 'Lightning Arena' or something, that would be a full roam-around FPS game," he also said, talking about ideas for future iOS titles from id. "I may yet push for that, because I've got things I want to try there, both from a networking technology standpoint and what we could pull out of that, but I just don't know when the hell I'm going to find time for all of this."
#idsoftware
Rage HD has been a contender for best-looking iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch game since we first saw it this summer. Today, you can download it for $2 and see for yourself. Or watch videos of us playing it. More »
Bethesda's upcoming id Tech 5 engine has us pretty excited. It continues the long-standing rivalry between Epic's Unreal Engine and id's storied Doom and Quake engines. However, the battle is very different this time around -- as both engines vie to create the prettiest game for Apple's iPhone.
John Carmack showed off a quick iOS prototype at QuakeCon earlier this year, but IGN has managed to secure video of actual gameplay. Rage: Mutant Bash TV is not a port of the console and PC shooter Rage. Instead, it's an arcade-styled rail shooter that has you shooting mutants with a variety of weapons. As you'll see in the video (embedded after the break), the game doesn't seem to offer much in terms of nuanced, thought-provoking gameplay.
But, that's not really the point, is it? Mutant Bash TV is certainly pretty, an unbelievable accomplishment for cell phone gaming. Oddly, if you have a VGA cable, you'll be able to output the game to your TV and play it on the big screen. Nothing like playing a handheld port of a console game on a TV, right?
#shooters
The studio behind Chronicles of Riddick is working on a new "AAA title for gamers" using the technology behind upcoming titles Rage, Doom 4 and Quake, Zenimax said today. More »
#idsoftware
The creators of Doom and Quake are bringing their latest creation, Rage, to the Xbox 360, PC, Mac and PlayStation 3 next year. They're also bringing it to the iPhone (and Android?) as Mutant Bash TV. More »
#ruhroh
A Canadian high schooler playing Warcraft III gloated a little too much over a recent victory, and his opponents found that so unsporting they decided to do something even more unsporting: track him down at lunch and beat his ass. More »
The acquisition of id Software by Zenimax Media brought with it a slew of strong brands, but perhaps the most important is its 2011 game, RAGE. During an interview with GI.biz, id Software creative director Tim Willits brought up how important the game is to the developer internally: "There is a lot riding on it, we need to make sure it's great. Don't f**k it up!"
But it's also pretty important to Zenimax that id be allowed to take its time. "I can tell you that if we weren't part of the Zenimax family, we'd be trying to rush this game out," Willits revealed. "So it's so nice being able to say, 'let's ship it next year, let's get the multiplayer awesome, let's get the game as great as we can make it.' Without their support, I honestly think that RAGE would not be as good as it's going to be."
For Willits and id, the game isn't so much going to be a singular experience -- the developer is looking to create an overall experience where the goal is to make the player "feel that things happened before you got there and that things will happen after you leave." Star Wars is referenced as influence, yet Willits also mentioned possible DLC tie-ins and two different iPhone games as additional means to flesh out the universe.
Another indication of RAGE's importance internally is how many people id has working on it: over 60 people. "Quake 2 we did with 13. Quake 3 with about 23. Doom 3 with about 38, I think, now on Rage we're past 60, and that's just the Rage team. It's still small, but it's big for us."
#idsoftware
There are people who are excited about Rage, the next game from id Software, makers of Doom. And there are people who say they don't get it. It's a first-person shooter. With car combat. What are these people missing? More »
id Software just announced during a QuakeCon live presentation that Rage will be hitting store shelves on September 13, 2011 in the US and September 15, 2011 in Europe. Kotaku reports on the release date via its liveblog, highlighting one of the reasons the game still has another year of development time -- the Xbox 360 version crashed during the presentation.
If you're really itching to jump into Rage's universe, the iPhone/iPad version of the game will launch sometime this year. The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC versions will not, however, arrive until next September.
#idsoftware
id Software's next big shooter, Rage, built on its next big engine, id Tech 5, now has a ship date. Get ready to wait a little longer for Rage, for it won't be out until September 2011. More »
#quakecon
Stephen Totilo is live at Quakecon sitting in as three developers walk the audience through the latest on id Software's upcoming shooter, driver, role-playing game Rage. More »
What's the common thread between American McGee's Alice, Call of Duty and Quake 3? They were all powered by id Tech 3. Like Unreal Engine, id Tech was heavily licensed amongst third parties, used in a wide variety of console and PC games; however, it seems that id (and new parent company Bethesda) is no longer interested in pursuing the middleware market.
In an interview with Eurogamer, id's Todd Hollenshead said that Rage's id Tech 5 is a "competitive advantage and we want to keep within games we publish." Certainly, the awards the game picked up at E3 -- including "Special Commendation for Graphics" -- provide testament to that claim. From Bethesda's perspective, the engine is simply too good for anyone else to use. "We're not going to license it to external parties," Hollenshead explained. "If you're going to make a game with id Tech 5 then it needs to be published by Bethesda, which I think is a fair thing."
By restricting id Tech 5 to Bethesda games, id has essentially exited the middleware market, which is largely dominated by Epic's Unreal Engine. "Epic's made a good business out of that so kudos to them," Hollenshead said. "But I wouldn't change the way we've done things."
Never one to back down from a challenge, id's technical wunderkind John Carmack has somehow - we imagine with the aid of The Dark Arts - managed to condense its latest game onto the iPhone. Revealed during the live keynote at the annual QuakeCon in Dallas Texas, Carmack revealed that id's delivering a version of Rage (replete with MegaTextures and a 60 frames-per-second framerate!) onto the iPhone. While the demo was given on the iPhone 4, he said it could run on 3GS and looked best on iPad.
The game came about from an experiment with something on the Wii and, in keeping with that experimental model, Rage for iPhone won't have a four-year dev cycle: It will be out this year, before Rage, and it will be cheap, in keeping with the iPhone App Store's model. A second Rage iPhone game will be released alongside the release of the PC/console release next year, and Carmack is still "spot-surveying" the Android market to determine if it's worth supporting. He said it won't happen "this cycle" but he'll reevaluate in about six months. More news from QuakeCon as we hear it.
#quakecon2010
During his keynote speech at QuakeCon 2010, id Software's John Carmack demonstrated Rage on the iPhone, running at 60 frames-per-second and able to "kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2." More »
