Rage, id Software’s first new shooter property since 1996’s Quake, has been in the making for the better part of a decade, design director Matt Hooper has revealed. “About six years,” he says, time spent on pre-production and id Tech 5 included.
Three of those years have been spent on actual production, during which “everything” about its design has changed.
“Part of it was technology; part of it was what we wanted to do on the design side,” Hooper explains. “We used to have six little chunks of wasteland with discrete opportunities. Then we went with two giant but more integrated chunks. We’ve been back and forth, and we moved environments around.”
“We found that with some of the more opportunistic things for the player, like little modular sewers, he can go in and achieve something even without a specifically-crafted job that he has to do”; opportunities that keep popping up: “[A sniper mission is] something that we’re putting into the game just because the world looks so beautiful up high, and there’s a sniper rifle. It just fit, so we’ve added those things in.”
The title is “constantly changing,” Hopper adds.
