Shack: It also, from a different standpoint, seems like it could also serve as a proof of concept for other developers that the tech can support a wide range, not just the kind of corridor fighting id is known for.

Todd Hollenshead: John is confident, and I'm confident as well, that if I sat down and said, "John is working on the rendering engine, and it's awesome, and you'll be able to do amazingly high detail on indoor environments," you'd be like, "Well, I'd like to see it, but I can believe what you're telling me."

Now, if I told you we were going to do that stuff with vast terrain rendering, and I didn't show it to you, I think there would be more skepticism about it. What we tried to do, especially at the WWDC thing, was to show things that would be surprising. I don't think it would have been as big news if we had just shown things you hadn't seen in an indoor rendering engine before.

If it wasn't explicitly communicated there, it is when you see how the camera works, where you go through the race, then you fly upstairs, then you fly downstairs through the halls and you see the vendor. In the same map, you have the same amount of facial detail on this character as you do on these vast outdoor areas.

Shack: Will the whole game be playable with co-op, and will it be online on consoles?

Todd Hollenshead: I expect that we will be online on the consoles. It is a single-player, story-driven game with co-op capabilities, as opposed to a game where co-op is the way in which it's built then there's a different version of the game that's not as fun by yourself. We're trying to design the game so it's fun to play by yourself, and if you have somebody you're playing with, it's potentially more fun if you like that sort of thing. But it's not designed as a two-person priority.

Tim Willits: You aren't going to play through the entire game in co-op, and the reason is--the game is going to take you fifteen, twenty hours to play through, I don't know--because it's hard to find a friend who will play with you that long. Our plan is to do something along the lines of, through Xbox Live or whatever system, you can find someone who can go on and do some co-op missions. If you finish a few, you can go do something different yourself, then go find someone to do the rest. It's not like you and I are going to start together, then save.

Shack: Is there any kind of versus multiplayer?

Todd Hollenshead: Probably not really. I'm hesitant to talk, because it's not really implemented yet. That question was asked to Tim, and he said it's too early to tell. There's no deathmatch in it now. If you put two people in the same time, they can shoot at each other, but there's a whole bunch of different stuff that goes into that versus a cooperative campaign.

Tim Willits: I'm leaning towards--well, I don't know, I can't say.

Shack: People who have followed PC gaming for a long time are often familiar with stories of early id design documents incorporating all sorts of gameplay elements that ended up being pared away in favor of the core, intense FPS stuff that id is known for. Are there any connections or parallels between those efforts and Rage?

Todd Hollenshead: To tell you the truth, I haven't read the game design document that Tim has put together for Rage, because that's just not part of my job, and honestly as a fan of what we do I just like to see how everything ends up in the game itself.

With game design documents, you really do kind of blue sky things from the start, then you figure out what you can make work. Some of the stuff seems like great ideas, then in practice it just doesn't work. That's why we've learned over time that some of those ideas aren't best to share because they become disappointing to people who think, "That would have been a really cool idea." And you know what? It probably was a really cool idea, but when we actually put it in the game, it either didn't work or it did but it was only fun for five people or whatever.

I've seen--probably the most notorious one is all the stuff that was in the original Quake design. A lot of that stuff just wasn't all that fun. One group of people really wanted that dragon at the end, and because there wasn't a dragon at the end, they were totally pissed off about it. But if they had never heard about the dragon, they wouldn't have missed it. The design decision was, "How does a dragon fit in with this stuff?"

Ultimately, at the end of the day, you can't kitchen sink all this stuff--but at the beginning, you kind of can, then you can throw out the stuff that doesn't work.

Tim Willits: You know, Romero did some crazy interviews long ago about the game design documents. I mean, I've been with the company for a long time, as you know, and there's always stuff--as any developer would tell you--in the initial game design. If you shoot for the stratosphere, you still end up really high. Nobody ever--and if they tell you they do, they're lying--nobody ever gets every feature they planned in.

It really hasn't been that out of control for us. I think historically, if you're referring to the Romero days, that might have been him being, uh...you know what I mean? [laughs]

Shack: As far as the two DVD expectation, is that related to the size of the MegaTextures?

Todd Hollenshead: That's a question for John, primarily. Well, I can say on the size of stuff that if you give the artists an unlimited data budget to use, they tend to soak it up [laughs]. You could put more content in than will fit, and we expect the data size is going to require multiple discs. There are some engineering questions that we haven't yet fully addressed, because when we run on the consoles right now we're going off of the hard drive. I know John has a solution in his mind for all that stuff, but I don't know what it is.

Shack: I know that some PS3 games actually have an install option. Would you use that?

Tim Willits: I don't know how that stuff works because I'm not an engineer, but there will of course be a significant portion of the game on consoles that is streamed off the optical media. To get that streamed into memory is probably more of a compression issue. Just to give you a very general idea, I think the uncompressed data on the WWDC demo was something like 30 gigs, and they actually compressed it into a few hundred megabytes.

There really is a combination of two important technologies working together, which is bleeding-edge compression and John's texture streaming solution. They work hand in hand. If you blaze through the level by slowing down the time scale, you can load everything super fast, it just won't load all the super-high detail right at first.

Shack: Thanks for talking with us.

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