The first title out of famed Doom and Quake creator id to be simultaneously developed for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Mac, Rage almost immediatelyre-ignited the Blu-ray vs. DVD debate between PS3 and Xbox 360 loyalists when it was first revealed.

And as that debate raged on, PC gamers were dragged into another one after the once PC-centric developer said that the platform was "more of the junior partner."

Even the debut of actual gameplay details did little to quell the vocal internet mob, with concerns about regenerating health, the game's keyboard and mouse controls being tainted by console controllers, and well, just about everything.

However, this doesn't seem to have fazed the folks at id. "The stuff that we've done before, I'm not worried about, and people shouldn't worry about that either," creative director Tim Willits told me after a demonstration of the game at QuakeCon 2009.

Then Willits and his cohort Matt Hooper, who's serving as lead designer, attempted to explained why. In the process, we touched on everything from the game's controls to stealth, downloadable content , the iPhone, and even the chance of a Fallout 3 nod or two.

Shack: What's the difference between a creative director and a lead designer?

Tim Willits: Basically, Matt does all the hard design work, and I do all the easy design work. Like, "make game fun, Matt." And he goes and makes it super fun.

Matt Hooper: He lays down all the ground work.

Shack: So who do I blame for the Xbox 360 version not stacking up because it's on multiple discs?

Matt Hooper: Not stacking what?

Shack: I'm kidding, I'm kidding. We've talked to Tim about that stuff before.

Tim Willits: One of the great things about the id Tech 5 stuff, and Matt can talk more about this, is the level designers, artists, animators, they only have to make one asset.

In the past, when we did the original Doom 3 for Xbox, there was a lot of rearranging of the assets. Having one unified asset base, one unified game code base, and then just having the separate [builds] has made life easier for us.

Matt Hooper: The biggest thing is just not having to worry about porting or taking out little bits of quality or anything like like that. From the design side and art side, we don't have to worry about that. I mean, we've been running well for a long time, and that's a big deal. Normally, when you develop a new tech, you run well near the end of the project. We haven't had to worry about that, so we can concentrate more on making the game fun.

Tim Willits: Yes, the id Tech 5, like John says, draws a lot of polygons really fast, and it does it in a very efficient manner. It's our job then to balance the AI algorithms to the effect system to the physics system to all that. The id Tech 5 engine is very efficient.

Matt Hooper: We've never had a design goal that, "oh the tech won't allow us to get there." What we're trying to do, the tech works exactly for what we're trying to push through.

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Tim Willits: The biggest challenge, for us, between the different systems, is getting the Live integration and PSN integration, and I'm not sure what, if we're going to go with the Windows Live stuff or go more traditional with that--that is actually the biggest thing that I worry about right now with with the game.

That's the one component that isn't the same on all, the network integration and the friends lists and all the different stuff like that.

And then making sure, I mean, thank God that the PS3 and Xbox 360 both have two shoulder buttons and thumb sticks in the same spot. Remember the GameCube controller?

Shack: Even the original Xbox controller versus the PlayStation 2. They both had the same amount of buttons, just in different places.

Tim Willits: So glad that it's all the same. It makes our job way easier.

Shack: It makes games, just from my standpoint, better. Did you guys ever play SSX?

Matt Hooper: Mmmhmm.

Tim Willits: Yes. Great game.

Shack: The Xbox versions of SSX ran and looked so much better, but since it was designed around the PlayStation 2's shoulder buttons, it just didn't play right on anything other than the PS2.

Matt Hooper: And a lot of your readers play with mouse and keyboard, and I read a lot of comments about--it's funny, because they think we abandoned that. Tim and I have been making games for that for thirty-plus years combined. It's not like we forgot about that, we've got that covered. That's the easy part.

The reason we mentioned the controllers is because that's the thing that's a little new for id, making sure it's right on all the consoles. The game will play awesome on mouse and keyboard.

Tim Willits: Yes, people definitely overreacted to that. To think that we would not make an awesome first-person experience and control interface is kind of silly.

Matt Hooper: Yeah.

Tim Willits: For us, we need to be practical in how we approach this. We knew that we would get the first-person down, we're not stressed about that. We've never done the vehicle stuff, so we did that first and we made sure that was awesome. We've done a lot of console work, but the internal team has never done a multi-platform simultaneous release before. So we need to make sure that we nail down the controller, because we haven't done that before. We need to focus on getting that done.

The stuff that we've done before, I'm not worried about. And people shouldn't worry about that either.

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