id: All Versions of Rage Scaled Back as Concession for Xbox 360 (Update)

 Update: Looks like this one got blown out of proportion. Willits, after a glance at his inbox, released the following statement: "During my talk at Austin GDC I mentioned that we originally wanted to have around five or six smaller wasteland environments but later decided instead to have two larger wastelands - mostly because we were going to be shipping on two DVDs for the 360 and felt that it would play better with one large wasteland on each disc so there would be no loading between wastelands.  Not loading levels while you drive around is a much better decision regardless of platform.  There was NO CONTENT removed from RAGE because of the 360--NONE AT ALL. Moving from multiple wastelands into fewer but larger wastelands was a far better decision and is actually giving us more gameplay in the game.  We feel the 360 is a great platform and will provide a fantastic Rage experience."

So, nothing to see here. Move along.  

Carmack and co. already tempered the force of this blow at QuakeCon, but a punch in the mouth is still a punch in the mouth, no matter how many fewer teeth are scraping the bottom of your glass of milk afterward. Said id Software lead designer Tim Willits at the Austin Game Developers Conference:

"The PC is limitless in the amount of data you can put on it.The PS3 has about 25GB. But the Xbox 360 roughly has 6 to 8 GB of data. We're hoping we can squeeze the game down to two discs for the 360 version."

"I wouldn't say the overall story was changed in any way in order to fit on the Xbox 360 version," Willits explained, "but how the player experiences Rage's story has been altered."

Foremost, he said, the game's overall structure has changed significantly. Whereas before, Rage featured "several" wastelands in which players could run race and gun, now only two remain. Don't worry, though; the two wastelands have been split into multiple, hardware-friendly instances, so it'll be just like traveling through multiple areas!

Somewhat perplexingly -- though probably in order to wave the game out the door by "When it's done" instead of "When your great grandchild begins balding" -- id elected to take the razor to all three versions of the game, as opposed to merely the Xbox edition.

This, it would seem, is only the beginning of a very slippery slope.