Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.)
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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. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, Eurogamer posted a story about how PCs are better than everything else, including new babies and planets with rings. Well, those weren’t quite their words, and nor were they of Mark Rein, VP of Epic, but he said something close. He in fact said that, “We’re at the stage in the life of the consoles where the PC has shot by them in terms of capabilities.”

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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.
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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.
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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.
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