Published , by Charles Singletary Jr
Published , by Charles Singletary Jr
Rage 2 is a going to be a beast all its own with open-world exploration, vehicle combat, and more. The first-person shooting, though, is of a specific brand that studio director Tim Willits and the rest of the id Software development team wanted to remain faithful to. Willits calls it "id-style combat" and told us during a Quakecon 2018 roundtable that achieving that style "was a huge milestone.".
"There is not a pile of code that we just hand someone and it makes first-person id-style combat," Willits said in response to a statement on how the shotgun in Rage 2 functions basically the same as the one from Doom. "It is really a, a secret sauce of mysterious things that revolves around feeling."
Replicating id-style first-person combat required additional steps because the team was working on a new engine, as well. The collaboration with Avalanche involves moving the Rage experience over to the Apex engine, which was also used for Mad Max. "Every engine just works differently," he said. "What you do in a frame and how the physics interact with different systems. It's all different."
"We worked with Avalanche to kind of start with a big clay ball and keep shaping it and shaping it and shaping it," Willits continued. "'Yeah, that sounds not quite right' or 'that animation is a little slow' or 'the fall off is a little bit too much' until it got kind of shaped into id software first-person combat. It was a huge milestone for us. Different people from id and even Bethesda and Avalanche came together to make that happen. But it's a gut feeling. There's no science behind it."
Willits further stated "yes, 100%" when asked if that focus was intentional throughout development. "When we set out to make Rage, the first thing I wrote on the board is "more crazy than Rage - id-style combat," he said. The shotgun gameplay from the nine-minute exclusive video above starts at 3:51 if you want to compare it to the shotgun play that we witnessed in the Quakecon 2018 Doom Eternal trailer.