I have been looking through the Plus XP archive and I have realised that me being the keen FPS player I am, I haven’t mentioned anything about Rage yet. Now seeing as id software is one of the grandfathers of the FPS genre and they have indeed been working on Rage for a long time.
So what is Rage? Are we going to see if this is the next FPS marvel from the original creators of the FPS genre? Well sit back and find out.
What we know of the story of Rage so far is that an asteroid has hit Earth turning it to a barren waste land. You play a character that has been kept in an Ark. An Ark is a group of people who have been put into cryo-sleep so that when the asteroid dust clears you can get started on rebuilding civilisation and the world. When you wake up you realise that things have not gone to plan. Firstly the particular Ark you were in has malfunctioned and you are the sole survivor and secondly the Earth has turned pretty non salvageable, mutants in habit the waste land and civilisation has taken a turn for the worst just to survive.
You may be thinking that this game is on the same sort of card as say Borderlands or Fallout 3. But this is id software we are talking about, and these guys know how to innovate games. Rage is more than a bog standard FPS game. It is an open world FPS which also relies on a lot of classic Quake and Doom style FPS game play coupled with the innovations to customise your own weapons, vehicles and gadgets. A perfect example here is that you can build and RC car bomb, meaning you can control a radio controlled toy car equipped with a bomb and detonate it into a pile of unsuspecting enemies. It’s little ideas like this that will make Rage fun and unique from all the rest.
That’s not all though, I did mention vehicles, and you get the opportunity to build vehicles from scratch meaning that your vehicle will be your very own creation. There is a lot of scope for customisation in this game which I am certainly looking forward too.
Rage is built on a brand new game engine built by id called the idTech5. id boast that this game engine is based on terrain and buildings that have literally been hand sculpted by the designers. What this means in literal terms I am not to sure but it seems to me that they may have imported sculptures somehow into the game engine. I’ll do some more reasearch into that and I’ll get back to you.
One of the things I am most excited about in Rage is the enemies. id are notorious for creating a variety of enemies. From what I have seen they have not skimped out here either. The AI in this game is amazing, there was some game footage I saw where the player was fighting against a clan ninja clan of sorts, and these enemies were jumping off walls and bridges to get to you, they were even wall running and doing back flips to dodge your bullets. This literally had me jaw dropped. There was also another piece of footage where the player was fighting against a gang of mutants and these enemies were more savage, animalistic types. So you will get a lot of enemy variety which I cannot wait for.
id have also said that they have incorporated a new pain mechanic into the AI system, meaning that enemies will generally react to where you shoot them. Why hasn’t anyone done this before? I am fed up of seeing some FPS games where an enemy is running at you and you shoot them in the leg and they are completely unphased by it. After seeing some gameplay and the pain mechanic in action I am actually pleased to see enemies holding their arms or legs in pain. Sure they are hard asses and will keep trying to kill you but it’s nice to see them experience pain.
So Rage looks like its going to one hell of a game. And before you guys out there say anything, this game was actually announced back in 2008 so pre dates Borderlands, so don’t start the whole Borderlands clone thing. Oh and unlike Duke Nukem Forever. Rage has a definite release date of September 2011. Thank god for that. It also got IGN’s game of E3 so its bound to be pretty good at least.
Garv
