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id Software's RAGE To Ship With Mod Tools
id Software's creative director, Tim Willits, revealed to PCGamer that upcoming shooter RAGE will launch with support for modding and level editing.
"As for what you’ll be creating, that’s a little trickier; id's technology has moved on since you could fit hundreds of Doom levels on a CD. 'Building levels from scratch is more difficult,' says Tim, 'because we have a layer system in some of the levels. I can foresee somebody modding up Wellspring (a town in-game) and adding different characters, giving them different voice-over.' But if you've got the development skills to use it, the level editor will be there. 'It's built into the engine,' says Tim."
A new trailer has been released for the game as well. A recent interview with producer Jason Kim explained why they decided not to have a traditional FPS deathmatch mode and how id Tech 5 affected level design.
Finally, I can quickly change all voice over dialogue to my bad Sean Connery impression.
Given the recent fiasco of Sony, lack of hardware updates for PS3 / X360 in the near future, the fact that you can get better hardware for similar prices (and play with more eye candy on the PC), you have the choice of the controller, or the kb+mouse, with Steam and it's low, low prices, the fact that you can do other things on your PC as well, possibly at the same time, there's no reason why the PC should not be on the rise now and console market share declining...
The only problem is the huge diversity and lack of big players marketing PC as the ultimate gaming accessory, If HP/Dell got their heads around, they have enough selling power to market the idea, and maybe even promote some baseline performance standards (like high performance, medium, low/mobile) as opposed to 20+ SKU that each generation of GPUs have...
the trailer makes it look like a 10 year old game?
To each their own. Me, I think I spent more time making various swords, axes, maces and fine business suits for Fallout New Vegas than actually playing the damned thing. And actually did some hex hacking back in ye olde Fallout 3 days, before there was an official modding kit. I wish more games shipped with a modding kit built in, personally.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...does this game just look like practically every other game out there? I'm not enthusiastic about it. The physics of the car just looked wrong to me. I don't know, maybe that was still some early stuff, but for me to want this they'll have to do more. Lots more. And it's still a damn FPS. Enough already! The market is flooded with them, and none of them are any better than Doom 3 was. Ugh. Someone, please develop a new gaming paradigm so we can lose the FPS once and for all.
This game is dead on arrival to me. I was looking forward to a new "Quake" (read: multiplayer awesomeness) and it seems like they are giving us a single player only (for all intents and purposes) game instead.
Now, single player games are fine. I really like Mario, Zelda, a lot of the games on XBLA (Castle Crashers, Limbo, etc, etc) and I could name a ton more games that are fun single player/co-op experiences. That being said, id isn't a company I expect great single player games from. I expect great multiplayer games from them! Games with lasting power.
Sure, playing a great single player game could take 12 hours to complete, and another 10 to replay if it's that good, but multiplayer games can make me want to play for _years_. Quake 1/2/3, I don't want to know how many hours I put into those with friends on a LAN. When RAGE was announced, I was excited for new IP from id! What new things are they going to think up for multiplayer to push themselves ahead of all the rest in the competitive scene? It seems, so far, there are no dedicated servers! no deathmatch! and NO CTF!!! That's grea..... wait, what? The only multiplayer they are going to have is vehicle combat and co-op? Who is creating this game again?
No Dedicated Servers: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/95955-John-Carmack-Says-No-Dedicated-Servers-for-Rage
Co-Op/Vehicles with NO DM/CTF: http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/04/19/rage-multiplayer-modes-revealed-no-deathmatch-or-capture-the-flag/
Ok, so, it's pretty much a single player game only. I'll save my $60 thank you. I was sincerely looking forward to another AAA awesome multiplayer title. I guess if you want to play a multiplayer shooter, go grab CoD#12 or whatever they are up to now.. shudder.. id software is apparently removing themselves from the running. Movie style, linear games, seem to be the RAGE.. I think I'll get off my own lawn now..
I don't want to mod it, I want to play!
That's too bad, because ID really just wants you to mod it, and sell your mod as the next CoD... Kind of like the current generations of CoD, and many games (including BRINK) already do.
So this "game" is really more of a tech demo + limited GDK (game dev kit) to get people interested in licensing the engine for their own, much more innovative & fun games? Face it, ID's new bread & butter isn't making games, it's licensing the engine -- Hence all the "MegaTexture" and other such technical hype -- It's a flipping abstraction layer for texture coordinates & attributes -- Hell, even my Tetris clone has one of those, and is more extensible (bump-maps, electro-magnetic maps, particle emitting maps, temperature maps, combustibility maps, various sound maps (crush, overheat, chill, collide), etc) The number of METAtextures properties are not written in stone (like IDs are), their complexity is limited only by the speed of the CPU / GPU & amount of available memory / storage -- in fact, I call them Extensible-MetaTextures, and they can be described in XML...heh) -- However, only ID has the "MegaTexture" trade mark...
To me, RAGE is targeted at studios, not players.
Since Romero left, ID has just been pumping out engines to license with less and less content each iteration, but at least some decent competitive multi-player support -- now RAGE doesn't even have that... (Ergo, You can license ID Tech 5, and you won't be faced with users comparing the new features of your multi-player online franchise (CoD) as rehashes of RAGE. (Unlike how Heretic was a fun rehash of Doom, CoD6 won't be perceived as a re-hash of RAGE.)
P.S. I call them ID not "id" because that's how they introduced themselves to me in Commander Keen (Apogee scrolls up screen, then an uppercase "ID software" attribution appears)... First impressions stick even when they're no-longer relevant -- Sort of similar to how ID is still considered to be innovative because they have been very much so in the past... Even if they built a platformer again I wouldn't be interested, the guys that made Keen fun have long since left the building.
Doom3 shipped with editing built into the engine, so the fact that editing is built in is not much of a surprise.
The next big leap in modding will come when the UI for the editor is so substantial that it lets anyone (basically) build what they want.
Here's my point: running an editor used to be merely an exercise in visualization, and some game-engine arcana. Throw a brush here, brush there, texture that, toss in a light entity, check for leaks, and VOILA it was hello, world.
Now, due to the extraordinarily more powerful engines, and the ability of client systems to run more, simplicity is simply no longer tolerable. It used to be, for example, if you wanted to put a desk into a room, you put in a basic desk-shaped brush, and textured appropriately. Now you have to have a coffee cup, a desklight (with its own light entity), a chair, all breakable and movable. Even walls and windows all need to be breakable and have their own physics, etc.
Sure, it's trivia for professional modelers to build these things to suit, but this is also why AAA titles take hundreds and thousands of man-hours to create.
I believe that if they really want to see the modding community become as prolific as they were in the Quake2 days, they need to build into their engines a massive set of prefabs, and the ability to 'assemble' pieces from known articles, rather than having to design every last item (and property thereof) and texture from scratch. Leave the modders to be creative, and they will be.
-Styopa
Face it, ID's new bread & butter isn't making games, it's licensing the engine
I hate to break it to you but iD's bread & butter has ALWAYS been to get people to license their engine. While many of the games they've made to show off the engine have been great fun it doesn't change this fact.
Q1 wasn't that brown. There were levels that were very blue, and others that were quite green. It's only the first episode that was absolutely brown, which had a lot to do with reusing textures for an episode to be distributed for free, back in a time where modems were the norm, rather than the exception.
Then we saw Unreal, which was anything but brown.
The muddle of browns everywhere started a little bit later.