With Rage, id Software is going in all sorts of new directions. Vehicular combat, racing, adventure components--it seems like a brand new world for the longtime FPS-exclusive studio, but CEO Todd Hollenshead and Tim Willits assure me that the game is grounded in id's existing pedigree.

I sat down with Hollenshead and Willits to discuss Rage's design elements both new and old, gameplay and setting inspirations, new attitudes to development, co-op and multiplayer, how everything in the game interconnects, id's infamous design documents, and more. Read on for this comprehensive interview on id's next big thing.

Shack: Rage arguably combines more divergent gameplay elements than any new id property since Wolfenstein. Some of the post-apocalyptic setting influences are obvious, but did you have any influences from the gameplay side there?

Todd Hollenshead: That's a good question. I don't know how much my answer is in tune with anybody else's. The story creation and everything like that is pretty much on Tim's side. When you get into some of the details of the implementation, there are different comparisons we look to. For our stuff on the FPS aspect of it, it's not like we need inspiration--we feel like our stuff is what's driving a lot of that area.

For other areas, MotorStorm was an influence, and I was a big PGR3 fan, and of course we have some other guys who are racing game fans. But the driving side of it isn't intended to be a racing simulation like PGR3 or Gran Turismo. It is intended to have the feel and response that you would expect, and one of the things we had to prove to ourselves internally is that we had the capability to drive around in vehicles and have that be a significant aspect of the game and fun.

You have to have some higher design concept and some story--those are necessary elements--but the important elements of the game are the moment to moment interactions, and if those aren't fun, the game isn't going to be fun. We wanted to make sure that driving around over the wasteland in the cars is fun.

A lot of that stuff, our very first run was not very good. [laughs] But we worked quickly, and we had some stuff to compare it to, with some fans of the genre. We're not trying to be that [genre], but we need to get the feel and to know it's fun. I think we've now proven we can do an excellent job and have it be a fun activity in and of itself. There's the driving, then you can do actual races--because, as Tim says, in the future only NASCAR fans survived. [laughs]

Tim Willits: Rage's foundation, definitely, is first person shooter, because that's what we do best. But we wanted to change what people expect from an id first person shooter. All our IPs offer something different--Doom is a dark and spooky corridor shooter, but this has larger environments, outdoor environments. In the game, I went through and wanted to do all the fun things in other games. I've always loved the settings of the post-apocalyptic worlds--Fallout, Road Warrior. I can talk about the setting later.

There's obviously the first person shooting, then there are the driving games that are more arcadey. For me, I'm not a big Ridge Racer fan. The driving isn't going to be like that, it's going to be more like MotorStorm, more like Burnout. I really want people, when they play the game, to say, "You know, it wasn't what I expected from id, but I had a great time doing it."

As far as the more open world, it's nonlinear but still story-driven. It has adventure elements, but I hate to say adventure because then people think of Monkey Island, and it's not an RPG. I wish there was some word in between RPG and adventure, where you have an inventory. You'll be able to drive around the wasteland and get out wherever you want. If you see a cave, you can explore it. You might meet a band of mutants. Now, when you're in an actual circuit of a race, we make it so you can't get out--but you could, technically, get out. We don't change the technology.

It just gives us a chance to make a game that has all the fun things we like to play. So far, it's been a heck of a lot of fun. We have these things called Rage Cups. They're like milestones. We have these competitions--Time Rage Cup, First Person Rage Cup, combat stuff. We have a day where everybody competes, and whoever wins gets the Rage Cup until the next milestone.

Shack: Is this in the actual game, or--

Tim Willits: No, no. This is something we do internally, because we want to continually remind ourselves that everything needs to be fun. When you make this internal competition and guys compete against each other, they see what's fun and what's not fun. It helps us focus. It's something we've never done before. Because this is so new--we haven't done vehicle combat before at id, we haven't done racing before--and that stuff is hard.

No game developer should look at another genre and say it's easy to do. They're all hard. We have to continually test and playtest to make sure it's fun, because there's so much risk. Like John said, when you're spending millions on something, and you're making something you've never made before, it's scary. We engineered these competitions to refocus on the fun factor of the game.

Shack: You mentioned you could talk about the setting a bit.

Tim Willits: Oh, yeah. That's important to mention. It's set in a post-apocalyptic world. I know there are many games like that, but the reason we picked that was this: it grounds the game in kind of a modern setting, slightly in the future, and it helps players identify with what's going on, but it gives us the freedom to add some of the fantasy elements. You know how we like the fantasy elements. When those fantasy elements appear, they're larger than life, whereas in Doom it's pretty much all fantasy.

Then I've always loved that Road Warrior stuff, because the lines between good and evil, right and wrong get skewed as people try to rebuild society. It gives us a fun setting. It's funny, there are a number of games coming out in the near future with nuclear war, or Earth is striked by a comet. We were joking at work, "Man, Earth gets beat up in the next few years." [laughs] But it does give freedom to be a little more creative.