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MPC: With the combination of driving and fps gameplay, what’s fun and exciting that we should look forward to that we haven’t seen before in games?
MH: The thing you haven’t seen is really the mix. We’re still id software and we’re still making this intense, action shooter game. Those moment to moment, finely crafted action sequences – running around with the coolest weapons and shooting guys – that’s still there. We invented that and we’re still going to do that really well. Just around the office everyone likes a lot of cool games. What we did was pull in these different elements that don’t detract from the action but add this little bit of flavor, and the vehicles are a part of that. The vehicles are almost an extension of your FPS avatar – you’re “running” around with a vehicle. It has armor on it, it carries a cool weapon, you fire that weapon, and the other car blows up in a cool satisfying explosion. It’s not as far removed as you would probably initially think. It all feels really good together.
By virtue of getting in the car and going to the next cool shooter environment, that separation allows us to do wildly different things in the different areas around the wasteland. It’s almost like the coolest 3D interface you’ve ever had in a game. You go back to town, talk to these cool memorable characters, get bits of the story, buy your next weapon, maybe take a little twirl around the track to prove something with your car, and basically just get ready for that next shooter experience. We think it’s a good mix. There’s nothing really like it which is scary at some times.
It’s hard to describe all the different elements because at first it seems like they don’t fit together. The main thing is that it’s always an action game. It's always going to be fun and arcade-y. Now were doing a lot of things that we haven’t pushed for in the past; we have all of these cool story elements. The story is so unique and diverse.
We talked about the tech, the virtualization of all the textures and how you can uniquely edit any surface in the game. We almost have that same thing on the gameplay side; we’re trying to make these really unique and diverse environments, really unique and diverse characters and story. It has some roots in things that can resonate [with people], like a giant meteor comet smacking into the earth. On top of that are all the different factions you are fighting against. It should be a really cool experience which always goes back to that unique and diverse [design]; from the technology to the gameplay fidelity.
MPC: It almost seems like what a single player MMO experience would be like. Going out and exploring this giant world, having cool stuff to do and having actual journeys to get there and not being a straight linear experience.
RD: You do have some choice so you don’t have to do things linearly. The other thing we really want to try to get really right is the vehicle combat because vehicle combat has always just kind of sucked. We are trying to make the car a true extension to your avatar where you can do some cool stuff with it. We tried to show some of that in the [preview] video, that we want it to be intense and fast paced. That way it’s a little more memorable. You take a mission to go out and do something and you may encounter some of this stuff and have to fight your way through a little bit. We don’t want that [style] to overwhelm the game but we want that to be something that is very fun and very memorable for players.
MPC: How much of the game is straight, designer created interactions and how much is dynamic? Or is there a mix between the two?
MH: It’s kind of a mix but were still doing that fine-tuned shooter experience. A lot of the action, even with the vehicles, is going to be that way. We want to have that crafted “moment to moment” feel. It doesn’t mean that you might be driving through a wasteland and see a plane that’s crashed on the side on a hill and then get out of your vehicle to explore it. There’re things like that in the game, but you always know that you are on your way to do the next mission. There’s definitely an exploration feel going on but it’s pretty direct and so it fits both needs. The people that want to explore and get their fix, and than the guys that just want to plow through and have that really straight forward experience can do that too.
MPC: One of the things John said last night was that ‘modern games coddle the gamer’. It’s a gentle shepherding through this single player experience. Are the hardcore gamers going to be able to take hours and hours of punishment instead of fun if they want that?
RD: We haven’t got to the point where we’re tuning different difficulty levels. One of the things that Matt and Tim [Willits] do really well is pointing out stuff. They’ll get some gameplay idea to one of my guys and we’ll talk about it and what they conclude is that they’re smashing the player over the head. They’re really great at saying ‘you know what, people hate dying’ and we want to make it challenging but we don’t get into that repetitive ‘I have to do this again’ [frustration].
I think Matt and Tim are doing a really great job at fostering that [balance] throughout the gameplay. But I would assume that whenever you get up to the hardcore nightmare levels that we end up getting into the game that they’ll be really, really tough. We haven’t balanced for any kind of driving gameplay before. We know how tweak the first person stuff, so [driving] will be a work in progress for us.
MPC: When you make a giant open-world type game, a lot of the challenge and a lot of the concern from other developers I’ve talked to in the past is that they build a whole lot of really awesome content that nobody sees. What do you feel about that and what are you doing to prevent that from happening?
MH: There’s the [main] storyline and then there’re little offshoots from it, but we’re not worried about it. There are some things that people will never see, but that’s why you just have to be smart, production wise – where you’re spending your art time. That’s actually one of the cool things about the tech: it allows us to put a lot of detail in the areas we care the most about. (For instance) the player is going be in the town a half a dozen times, so we need to make that the coolest and [as] best a looking area as possible.
It’s a weird thing for people on the outside of development because they look at a four maybe five year development cycle and they calculate ‘ok there's 20 levels and there’s five years, so it took that long to build a level,’ but it’s really not that way. It’s that last year where you do all the cool stuff and you put it all together. We want to make it as cool as possible for the people that do explore. And if they only see 20 percent of the extra stuff, we’re fine with that. I think that’s what makes games cool; maybe they tell their friend ‘Hey did you see that thing here?’ so you get that cool word of mouth from people on message boards. It’s why we’ve always had Easter eggs.
MPC: What is Rage doing on multicore CPU’s?
RD: We’re doing a lot of work on the SPUs (Synergistic Processor Unit) of the PS3; we’re using multicore pretty heavily. We expect on the PC it would run on a standard CPU, so I don’t believe we will require a true multicore. We are also doing a lot of threading for a lot of things. Most of that work is going into the PS3 and the Xbox360, although the PC certainly takes advantage of it. It’s just that on the PC you’ve got a much beefier main processor so we’re able to thread that stuff off and not stress as much about thread priorities like we do on the PS3 and the Xbox360.
MPC: Does the work that you do with the threading stuff on the consoles carry over to PC?
RD: There are certain elements that carry over, especially between the Xbox360 and the PC. The PS3, due to the nature of the SPUs, has a lot of specialized work that’s going on, but the general concepts carry over. We just have to take an extra step on the PS3 to get the performance that we need.
MPC: If you’re running the game with a quadcore or multicore CPU, is there a benefit in performance or image quality?
RD: We hope to be completely stable at 60hz across all platforms. Since the consoles are our primary target they are dictating a lot of the decisions. This is pretty far out, but I can predict that we may be able to throw some nicer effects and physics explosions, but that’s all just speculation at this point. It will definitely perform better on multicore CPU systems, it’s just how we surface that to the players to make it a neater experience. We are architecting this for the consoles primarily. The PC (users) are certainly all first class citizens; it’s just that we want it to look and feel the same on everything.
MPC: Rather than run the loop and thread it out, are you doing different subsystems on CPUs?
RD: We run sound, the renderer, background streaming, and we’re a bunch of the collision detection in their own thread these days; we have a lot of threads going on. Again, it really comes back to prioritizing and figuring out the best way to organize and maintain that on the consoles.
MPC: What about sound? How are you guys handling sound in Rage and Doom 4?
RD: We’ve got backends for all of that stuff. Doom 3 had a full software audio renderer and we’re using hardware for most everything now. We can always resurrect the software portion but we’d really just like hand that off.
MPC: Why no OpenAL on the PC?
RD: That’s not a concrete decision yet. Using the same format as on the 360 gives the two platforms parity. And there are a couple of features with the XMA stuff that we liked. We could end up basically back on OpenAL with everything; we’re still kind of back and forth on that.
MPC: Are you using external or internal physics?
RD: Internal, we don’t use any third party.
MPC: How close to true physics are you doing? Super fun or super real?
RD: We are doing super fun, as you saw from the explosions yesterday. With Doom 3, we have a really, really good physics guy and Doom 3 had good physics. We’re not trying to necessarily compete with the physics-only companies, but we have a very good physics system. Since we license the tech as well we want to give people something that’s very competitive so it’ll be a very competitive and fun physics system.
MPC: What are the benefits of doing it internally?
RD: If we have something break we understand all the code and know how to go fix it.
MPC: How about Rage as a benchmark?
RD: Like past id games, there’ll probably be settings on the PC that you can crank up and run it at whatever hertz you want. Currently, there’s a command you can run in real time and run at 30Hz, 120Hz, 87Hz – whatever you want. I doubt we take it out, but 60Hz works great.
Comments are closed on this article
BlancheMellony
April 26, 2011 at 11:41am
I started to play Rage right after the release date. It has a great multiplayer platform and me and my friends were delighted. I wonder if they use a cloud computing software because the game was very hard to hack. Still, the price of the CD's were quite affordable.
