id Software Message Board older than one year ago

#quake In celebration of this weekend's QuakeCon and the 20th anniversary of id Software, id and Bethesda sent me the most hideous cake I've ever had sitting on my coffee table, and I shop at the Publix bakery. More »

Last week, Jeff and I went hands-on with the PS3 version of Rage, id Software’s October-bound first-person shooter. All told, we experienced more than two hours of post-apocalyptic action, driving, and exploration in a nuke-shattered world of exquisite visual detail and startling violence.

Afterwards, we spoke with id Software President Todd Hollenshead to discuss what made the legendary DOOM developer shift gears to a story-driven, open-world playground — and to learn more about the mysteries lurking in that sprawling wasteland.

Todd Hollenshead, President, id Software: “You have to sort of experience it, it’s very difficult to explain. The megatextures allow us to make the entire world unique. It’s all painted and modeled and because we’re streaming the textures, we’re not really constrained by system memory. We can have completely unique elements throughout the world without costing us performance.”

Sid Shuman, PlayStation.Blog: Any hands-on discussion of Rage must begin with its stunning visuals. Rage is easily among the best-looking first-person shooters I’ve seen this console generation — suddenly, Carmack’s Tweet about players mistaking the PS3 version for a high-end PC doesn’t sound so crazy. The sheer detail is staggering, with the shattered environments positively dripping detail: In my two hours of play I saw whirlwind of tribal etchings, battered street signs, skulls. Despite the visual fidelity and the large scale of the outdoor environments, Rage miraculously runs at 60 frames per second with no screen tearing. That’s an impressive graphical accomplishment.

Jeff Rubenstein, PlayStation.Blog: We’ve seen no shortage of end-of-days gunplay in recent years – Fallout 3 and Borderlands spring immediately to mind – but Rage establishes its own visual style from the opening moments. Considering the fact that a good chunk of Rage takes place in a devastated wasteland, the game is quite colorful: The outdoor sections are brightly lit and set beneath a brilliant blue sky. It’s evident that id Software took extreme care in crafting this detailed world. Everything wears the patina of age, looking grimy and worn-in. Like you said, it all scrolls by incredibly smoothly, which is especially important when the gameplay relies on aiming, shooting, and high-speed driving.

Todd Hollenshead: “You hear about The Authority early in the game, but you don’t know what it is. But they’re making high-tech weapons, energy weapons…my favorite weapon is the rocket launcher. It’s a staple of id weapons, but this one has a subtle little feature that you won’t see unless you get distracted for a while. If you let your aiming screen idle, it goes into a DOOM screen.”

Sid: id Software’s games have hardly pushed the boundaries of storytelling. But with Rage, it feels like the developer is out to dispel that reputation once and for all. During the opening credits, the asteroid Aphophis screams towards a fatal collision course with Earth. You are part of an elite group tasked with resurrecting humanity once the devastation subsides, and your group sleeps the decades away buried in a high-tech sarcophagus — an Ark. When you finally wake up, you find the Ark lies in ruin and your comrades are dessicated corpses. You exit the Ark, stumble into the blinding light…and are promptly attacked by roving mutants. Luckily, you get a helping hand from a passing wastelands traveler named Dan Hagar…who sounded a lot like John Goodman, didn’t you think?

Jeff: Turns out that it is John Goodman! Dan Hagar rescues you out of kindness, but he knows that an able-bodied Ark survivor is a useful asset for his rag-tag outpost. He presents you with a handgun and some coin, then sends you back into the breach to clear out the mutants who saw you escape. Since we were playing alongside each other, I noticed you jumped right onto an ATV and headed back out into the wastes, but I stayed behind to poke around Hagar’s makeshift town and speak with the townsfolk. A local woman trained me in the art of the Wingstick – a silent, lethal boomerang weapon – and gave me five of them as a reward. Next, I dropped by the local merchant’s hovel, where I picked up some grenades and a monocular, which turns your piddly hand cannon into an accurate, long-range firearm. By this point I was eager to try out the ordnance, and sped off towards the mutant den. How’d you fare with the default loadout?

Todd Hollenshead: “We didn’t feel like a deathmatch-style multiplayer mode fit with what we were doing. We wanted the multiplayer to be as unique as the single-player…doing deathmatch like DOOM or Quake would feel like we’re giving up a little bit, creatively. For multiplayer we have the vehicular Road Rage mode. We also have a cooperative mode that runs parallel to — but not on top of — the single-player experience. It’s a bit like Modern Warfare 2’s Spec Ops: same game, familiar environments, but remixed for co-op experiences.”

Sid: I was eager to dive into combat…perhaps a little too eager. Once I found the den of evil, I trudged through the gloom and picked off bandits using my low-powered Settler’s Pistol. The firefights were classic id: vivid, visceral, and deeply immersive. It didn’t take long before I learned how to revive myself upon death by solving a brief coordination puzzle; the better my performance, the more health I earn and the bigger the shockwave I released upon reviving. Inside the hotel, the Ghost Clan foes I encountered moved expressively, clutching at their wounds when shot, scrabbling across obstacles, and lunging at me with ferocious kicks. At one point I gut-shot a bandit and he dropped like a rock, then squirmed on the ground while defiantly squeezing off a few more shots. I also noted the game’s skin-crawling audio design: ghouls hissed “over there!” and “I see him!” while I tried to slink through the shadows. The entire experience was unsettling and deeply primal.

Jeff: And they conversed with such charming Cockney accents! But if the mutants sounded like English punters, they moved in a more simian fashion, closing in for the kill through a combination of tumbles and dives… one even swung along the ceiling. In many ways, I was reminded of BioShock’s Splicers: acrobatic and dangerous – and this is before I started running into another clan that was armed with assault rifles. These “muties” weren’t as nimble, but they were tough. It took more than one headshot to ship them off to dreamland. Later, I acquired powerful “Fat Boy” slugs, which turned the basic Settler Pistol into a one-hit kill cannon. Once the hotel floor was littered with corpses, I made the rounds, looting money, ammunition, and scrap items from the fallen. Though broadly reminiscent of Fallout 3, the inventory system in Rage is significantly streamlined; there’s no concern over hitting a weight limit. As the game progressed, I learned how to craft useless junk into useful tools like first-aid bandages and lock grinders. The whole process is simple and straight to the point – about what you’d expect from id’s first inventory system.

Sid: You definitely won’t be confusing Rage with a stat-heavy RPG, that’s for sure. But the open-world mission structure and detailed fictional universe give Rage a heft that’s rarely felt in first-person shooter campaigns. In addition to the main single-player quest, the final game will ship with racing challenges and optional side quests, while a vehicle-based competitive mode and a series of cooperative-tailored missions called “Legends of the Wasteland” round out the online multiplayer options.

Have questions about our experiences with Rage? Drop them in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer them!

#rage Rage opens with a glimpse of a fictional future once considered possible. More »

People have been arguing about violence in video games for as long as video games have had violence for people to argue about, and few titles have come under as much sustained fire as Id Software's Doom. It would stand to reason then, that John Carmack, a man who was instrumental in the game's development and the FPS revolution that followed, would be chief among those most affected by the debate's wide-reaching ramifications. Not so much, it turns out.

"I never took seriously the violence in video games debate. It was basically talking points for people to get on CNN and espouse their stuff on there," he said, speaking with IndustryGamers. "In the end it didn't matter, it didn't make any impact on things. I never felt threatened by it and it turned out not to matter." Carmack also believes that violent games help calm agressive players and are, in-fact, good for us: "If you go to QuakeCon and you walk by and you see the people there [and compare that to] a random cross section of a college campus, you're probably going to find a more peaceful crowd of people at the gaming convention."

People have been arguing about violence in video games for as long as video games have had violence for people to argue about, and few titles have come under as much sustained fire as Id Software's Doom. It would stand to reason then, that John Carmack, a man who was instrumental in the game's development and the FPS revolution that followed, would be chief among those most affected by the debate's wide-reaching ramifications. Not so much, it turns out.

"I never took seriously the violence in video games debate. It was basically talking points for people to get on CNN and espouse their stuff on there," he said, speaking with IndustryGamers. "In the end it didn't matter, it didn't make any impact on things. I never felt threatened by it and it turned out not to matter." Carmack also believes that violent games help calm agressive players and are, in-fact, good for us: "If you go to QuakeCon and you walk by and you see the people there [and compare that to] a random cross section of a college campus, you're probably going to find a more peaceful crowd of people at the gaming convention."

#rage In the latest behind-the-scenes video for Rage, the folks at id Software explain how they created hordes of lifelike, realistic, thinking and feeling enemies for you to tear into little pieces. That's why they build them up, buttercup. More »

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.)(more…)

#totalrecall Time for another "before they were famous" here on Total Recall. Last time we looked at Bungie, creators of the Halo franchise. This time? We're looking at id Software, the team behind Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake. More »

When id Software releases a new IP, it’s more than a big deal — it’s an event. The veteran development studio behind classics such as Doom and Quake is preparing to unleash its next big shooter, Rage, this October. And at E3 2011, the storied studio presented a wildly diverse group of missions from the post-apocalyptic adventure to try out on the PS3 version of the game.

First things first: Rage looks fantastic. As id Software’s graphics guru John Carmack recently stated on Twitter, Rage may very well surprise gamers who expect the PS3 version to play second-fiddle to the PC version. Rage is one of the sharpest-looking games I’ve seen in a long time, with the developer’s new id Tech 5 engine really stealing the show. Walking around Rage’s post-apocalyptic wasteland should seem like a gloomy experience, but the game’s slick visuals and smooth-as-butter animations and framerate incite awe more than anything else.

Throughout Rage’s expansive single-player environments, players can talk to many characters in order to take on new missions. The first mission I checked out was called “The Missing Parts,” and it begins with the player character in an outrigger settlement (one of many disparate groups in the wasteland) searching for buggy parts that were stolen by bandits. This eventually leads to the bandit hideout, where Rage’s gunplay takes the spotlight. Players can equip a number of weapons and augment these weapons with special ammo types found throughout the game. The bandits stood no chance against my pistol’s “fat boy” slugs, but equipping a modified shotgun for close-range combat proved equally effective.

Played on the DualShock 3, Rage ‘s control setup will be intuitive to anyone who’s played a PS3 shooter. Zoom and Fire buttons are naturally mapped to the L2 and R2 buttons, respectively, and players can quickly scroll through their weapons cache with a click of the square button. Navigating the in-game inventory is a breeze, making ammo modification and inventory management practically painless. Sub-weapons like grenades and a deadly throwing knife (the “Wingstick”) are easy to handle, and the equipping the grenade even adds a visual arc (a la UNCHARTED 2 LINK) so players can accurately aim their deadly explosives.

Rage also sports some rowdy vehicular gameplay where players can hop into a dune buggy to traverse the wasteland or take part in combat races. The E3 demo race featured a fairly straightforward track design littered with booster packs and weapon pickups. Buggy races look to be a fun diversion from the more shooter-centric gameplay that forms Rage’s core experience.

There was a ton of Rage to see at E3, including a sadistic fun-house meets Running Man-esque TV show called “Mutant Bash TV,” as well as an encounter with a Cloverfield-sized monster in the sprawling Dead City section district, but to give too much away would spoil the surprises awaiting gamers when the game hits the PS3 this October.

#fanart This is not a knock on the original, iconic Doom box art, gorgeously illustrated by the late great Don Ivan Punchatz. This is just a tribute. But some may consider it a "fix" of artwork that grace id's early '90s shooter. More »

#bignumbers Brink has some shocking large numbers connected to it. More »

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.(more…)

#requiredmemorylane Gearbox Software, the developer controlling the reins of Duke Nukem Forever, revealed the official minimum specs required to play the game on a PC today. That's an important milestone that lets us know Duke Nukem Forever is one step closer to actual release and it helps us answer the question "Can my PC handle that much Duke?" More »

A look back and forward at the engine from the masters of Doom!