Rage Announced; Free Quake 3 Game Planned

id Software officially announced Rage, a post-apocalyptic shooter for PC, PS3, Mac and Xbox 360. The game was shown behind closed doors at QuakeCon 2007 in Dallas. Gamespot and FiringSquad have some info:

Speaking to a small collection of game journalists, Hollenshead explained that Rage was a deliberate departure from the corridor shooters that made id famous. Its gameplay will be "60 percent shooting and 40 percent driving" between villages in a postapocalyptic wasteland. Its setting will be a far future which has seen civilization decimated after a comet smashes into the Earth. Players will aid the villages' inhabitants in fighting both an oppressive regime and various mutants and monsters roaming the wasteland.

According to Rage lead designer Tim Willits, the game's title has a threefold meaning. "You're fighting against a post-apocalyptic goverment, so you're raging against the machine," he said. "Then there's driving combat, so there's road rage." Willits also said that "you can't spell garage without 'rage,'" and then revealed the game will have shops where players can extensively customize their vehicles.

Rage will have open-world elements, allowing players to exit their vehicles and explore caves and other parts of the landscape. The game will feature a single-player campaign that will clock in around 20 hours, but will allow individual missions to be played in co-op mode. No other multiplayer details were announced.

One of the most important aspects of id Tech 5 is the fact that id wants their game and all other games that use the technology to run at 60 frames per second on all four platforms (PC, Mac, PS3 and Xbox 360 and no a Wii version of id Tech 5 is not planned). That means that if a developer uses id Tech 5 they in theory will be able to make a game that will be released on all of those four platforms at the same time and perform at the same frame rate (in practice that might not happen due to how Sony and Microsoft have to approve each game for their respective consoles).



In related news, id Software unveiled its plans to form a second development team whose first project will be an slightly updated version of Quake 3. Titled Quake Zero, the game will be available for free--supported by advertising dollars--and run in a web browser on both PC and Mac.

Carmack then talked about what they are calling Quake Zero, a way to play Quake 3 Arena for free via a web browser and be supported by advertising. Carmack said this kind of game could be more popular and successful that the more conventional games that id is working on. id is now staffing a new second dev team to work on Quake Zero and later they will work on a full on id Tech 5 based Quake multiplayer title with all the bells and whistles.

Carmack said he has thought about going to Apple, who own everything on their console from the mouse to the driver API for their Macs and see if they can tune the latency while playing a game like Quake 3 Arena. Latency can be caused by a number of factors in games but Carmack said that with Apple's proprietary technology they could figure out where latency occurs in a twitch game like Quake 3 in their own hardware.

In another id Software related news, Steam News announces that a huge portion of id Software's back catalog is now available via Steam.