d has both a rich history in games and game development. Their latest focus Rage and their latest engine id Tech 5 have been shrouded in mystery. We hopped at the chance to sit down and ask company execs Tim Willits and Todd Hollenshead some burning questions. We dive into everything from the game world to the development issues and even a little Doom for good measure.
Q: We’ve got a glut of games that take place in dystopian environments full of brown rocks. What makes Rage stand out from those?
Willits: As Todd said earlier, when we announced the post-apocalyptic setting, people thought of all these other games and movies and stuff. Like the first-person genre, we blaze the trail. The reason that we picked this setting is that it allows us to place the game near enough to the present day to have it familiar with people and have it easy to understand, but set far enough in the future where you can have this sci-fi element to it, which gives us the ability to have these over the top weapons, have some unique gameplay modes and gameplay elements, and we’re not constrained to modern day ballistics or a certain time or a certain place. It gives us the freedom to be more creative.
Todd Hollenshead: Crazier-looking enemies…
Willits: Yeah. So that’s the reason we picked the post-apocalyptic setting.
Q: You mentioned being trailblazers with the shooting. How hard has it been working with the racing portions to make sure they’re up to the same level as what you’re famous for with shooting?
Willits: The racing aspects and the driving aspects are there to support the first-person action core of the game. When we announced the title and some of the things we showed were heavily focused on the vehicle stuff, it was because it was very unique and very new and it showcased some of the very large areas that we have. But the game is not a racing game. And it’s not Twisted Metal done by id Software. It’s a first-person action game. It has more elements of adventure in it, and it has some exploration that’s built up around a much more in-depth story. But at its heart, it’s a first-person shooter.
Q: With Quake 3’s engine, you licensed it out like crazy, but that seemed to slow down with the next engine. With id Tech 5, are you going to push this out to other developers if they’re interested and focus on licensing again?
Hollenshead: We get this question a lot. With the Doom 3 stuff, I think that the engine was really a PC-focused engine at a time when a lot of the market was transitioning into a multiplatform approach. We didn’t have a deliverable PS2 or PS3 version of the engine until actually just recently. It got a little bit out of phase. It was less of us saying that we were stepping away from the technology licensing approach. It’s not really accurate to say that with id Tech 5 we’re making a new emphasis in technology licensing. I think id Tech 5 is a better engine-license candidate for its time, earlier than the Doom 3 stuff was, because of market dynamics and other things. I think that the fact that, for us, we’re able to put out the three big next-gen platforms—PC, 360 and PS3—plus also supporting the Mac at the same time, though I don’t know if the size of that market is particularly relevant to most people who are interested in licensing engines. But I do see that as a very compelling aspect of the technology. Plus the fact that not only can one team develop multiple SKUs, but that the visual detail is absolutely amazing. It’s going to be difficult to find a game—I guess some people could argue as to this game has this or this game has that feature or whatever—but I think if you look at side-by-side visual comparisons, the id Tech 5 is a category leader from where we stand today. Having said that, the game hasn’t come out yet, and it’s easy to say that while stuff is in development. That’s really for licensees to decide.
Q: Have you found developers for the PS3?
Hollensead: I think the programmers will tell you first that it’s a pain in the ass to work with. They have said that it’s a pain in the ass to work with, but at the same time, that’s our job—making games—and the strategy that we wanted was to have a game that worked on all the platforms. John, to his credit, came up with a technology solution that allowed us to do something unique, which is to have one source base for the media, not source for programming source, art source. Once you solve that problem, then the dominos start to tumble about multiplatform and crossplatform simultaneous development. Yeah, the PS3 is kind of the one that the programmers cherish the least about going, “OK, there’s a problem with the PS3, let’s go find this.” But at the same time, one of the things that we find is that when we’re working on all these platforms simultaneously is that if a problem pops up on one, given that about 95 percent of the code base is the same across the same across all of them, is it’s likely that it’s a problem that exists on the other ones but just hasn’t manifested itself. I think at the end of the day that when we’re getting close to shipping the day, we’re going to find a lot fewer problems in the QA process as you complete the game, because there just aren’t that many latent bugs that we haven’t seen as it gets propagated out to PS3, 360, PC, Mac, that these issues may not be readily apparent, just because the programmers are used to working with one sort of system that they bring the game up on, these things get fleshed out and hopefully at the end of the day make for a cleaner completion process. But that remains to be seen. One of the things to note, too, is that the people who complain that the PS3 is hard to work with, they have technology that’s built, they add on to it, they add on to it, they add on to it. One of the things that’s unique about id is that we start basically from the ground up on every technology. It would be very difficult for us to take Quake 3’s code base, after it’s been modified for the past 10 years, and stick it onto the PS3. Yeah, there are challenges to it, but now that John Paul and those guys are in the code, it’s not as hairy as people originally said it was.