Shack: Speaking of Rage, how's the PlayStation 3 version coming along? Last we heard, it was running a bit slower.

Todd Hollenshead: That was actually, who was it, Edge Magazine, I think, took--honestly, they took it out of context. The reality is, it's the same media on all the platforms, so the game is going to look amazing on all of them. It's the same geometry, the same art.

The PlayStation 3 is the last of the three that we work on--it's basically PC, 360, PS3--because it has a little more...you know, tricky to engineer with it, it will typically lag behind in framerate than what the other ones are, because you just don't put the elbow grease into the programming polish to keep it as fast [at that point].

When the game ships, they're all going to run 60 hertz. In fact, there's reasons to believe that, because the way we do certain things, the technology is a little bit better for for the PS3 than it it is for the 360. It's a coin-flip as to any...I think that 99% of people [will] not be able to tell--there's not a nickel's worth of difference between the PS3 and 360 [versions] and most people won't be able to tell any. Nobody knows, it's literally up in the air if you're going to make a subjective call on this one looks better or whatever than the other one.

I mean, run speed, you can put a stopwatch on it and know how many frames you're dropping or running, but both the console SKUS are gonna look great, and of course the PC is not sort of bound by the microprocessor that's in a console box.

Shack: Not to mention hard drive space.

Todd Hollenshead: Yeah. The look-up speed on the PC hard drive obviously is going to be faster than reading off of a DVD or even a Blu-ray.

Shack: What's mod support looking like for Rage?

Todd Hollenshead: You know, we really haven't talked about that very much. I mean, I would imagine that, as we have done with all of our games, and you know, honestly it's something we may [have] to sit down and have a discussion with [id owner] ZeniMax about. We've always released the game source and a sample for people that want to create their own content.

Rage content creation is a lot different than what we've done previously. It is going to be difficult for amateur developers to make art in the game, just like it was difficult for people to make Doom 3 art. Rage is probably even that much moreso--you don't have to do all the normal maps and that stuff, like you did in Doom 3, but just the texture density and variety and being able to use the tools and all that stuff. We do have some stuff that makes our guys fast, but there's a fairly steep learning curve that the mod guys are gonna have to get over.

When everybody was making Doom mod files and stuff like that, it pretty much was like, "oh you do this, you do this" and kinda everybody got it. Then we we switched to Quake, which was true 3D, [and] it was totally different, and it took a while for people to figure out you've got to do it a different way. I think this is probably as big of a difference there, at least, if not moreso.

Shack: What's the DVD situation looking like with Rage on Xbox 360?

Todd Hollenshead: We'll probably have two DVDs for sure, and then the question is, will multiplayer be on a separate disc or not? Will we have to go to three?

We believe may be able to get the whole game on two DVDs. The current fallback is, if we can't, the multiplayer may--you have to come up with logical breaks, well, really, practical breaks.

It makes no sense for a player to swap that disc in multiplayer, right? That's fail. They have to keep one disc in during multiplayer, can you just put all the multiplayer content on one DVD? Even if it's duplicative of some of the content you have on the other single-player DVDs.

Shack: Does the fact that you can install Xbox 360 games to the hard drive help at all?

Todd Hollenshead: Yeah, I mean. People with hard drives, I think, will have better performance on the 360 because we'll be able to save off to the hard drive and the read speed is so much faster. I don't think it really saves us any media, because we still have to play on the Arcade units, the ones that come without the hard drive. Why they sell those, I have no idea. I think Microsoft even regrets it.

We do want to be able to run on all the [Xbox 360] systems, so if you've got an Arcade unit, then we've got to think, "okay, we can't install massive amounts of data." If we can't guarantee that, then we have to make sure that we have a fallback, so that could push us to three. I mean, hell, it could push us to four, I don't know.

Best case, we get it all on two, and then we'd be good. We don't think there's any way to fit it all on one. Maybe two single-player and one multiplayer, hopefully not four or five. At that point, we might have to start making decisions about compression ratios and things like that.

The Rage discussion continues on the next page.