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First Person Shooters (Games) Games

id Software's RAGE To Ship With Mod Tools 94

Posted by Soulskill from the roll-your-own dept.
id Software's creative director, Tim Willits, revealed to PCGamer that upcoming shooter RAGE will launch with support for modding and level editing. "As for what you’ll be creating, that’s a little trickier; id's technology has moved on since you could fit hundreds of Doom levels on a CD. 'Building levels from scratch is more difficult,' says Tim, 'because we have a layer system in some of the levels. I can foresee somebody modding up Wellspring (a town in-game) and adding different characters, giving them different voice-over.' But if you've got the development skills to use it, the level editor will be there. 'It's built into the engine,' says Tim." A new trailer has been released for the game as well. A recent interview with producer Jason Kim explained why they decided not to have a traditional FPS deathmatch mode and how id Tech 5 affected level design.
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id Software's RAGE To Ship With Mod Tools More

id Software's RAGE To Ship With Mod Tools

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  • I don't want to mod it, I want to play!

    • Then you had better be prepared for Todd Hollenshead to show up at your house with a gun and demand that you drop down the console and type 'id studio'. Expect it.

    • To each their own. Me, I think I spent more time making various swords, axes, maces and fine business suits for Fallout New Vegas than actually playing the damned thing. And actually did some hex hacking back in ye olde Fallout 3 days, before there was an official modding kit. I wish more games shipped with a modding kit built in, personally.

      • Re:To each their own (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Gaian-Orlanthii ( 1032980 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @10:38AM (#36048216)
        You haven't been around before the days of 'Unreal' and 'Quake' have you? Map editors and modelling tools were common back then.

        • Well, I couldn't even model a cube in ye olde Unreal and Quake days, so it made little difference :p

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xest ( 935314 )

          I agree, many games always have and still do have mod tools built into them.

          The problem is the learning curve has drastically steepened, back then anyone could pick up the tools with a little bit of effort, now it takes a much bigger investment in time to learn and be able to produce something, and just as AAA development costs have increased the burden on modders has increased- you now need bigger mod teams than ever before and historically it was often difficult enough to find even 5 trustworthy people fo

      • I had a ton of fun in highschool making new levels for Descent. I don't think the editor (Devil) shipped with it, or was even endorsed by the creators of the game, but I sure had a lot of fun with that. Descent3 shipped with an editor out of the box, although I never did as much editing on that as it was way more complex the the one for the original Descent. Descent was fun in that it didn't follow a true 3D model, so you could do things like have a door in the middle of a room, that led to a bigger room.

    • I don't want to mod it, I want to play!

      That's too bad, because ID really just wants you to mod it, and sell your mod as the next CoD... Kind of like the current generations of CoD, and many games (including BRINK) already do.

      So this "game" is really more of a tech demo + limited GDK (game dev kit) to get people interested in licensing the engine for their own, much more innovative & fun games? Face it, ID's new bread & butter isn't making games, it's licensing the engine -- Hence all the "MegaTexture" and other such technical hype --

      • Face it, ID's new bread & butter isn't making games, it's licensing the engine

        I hate to break it to you but iD's bread & butter has ALWAYS been to get people to license their engine. While many of the games they've made to show off the engine have been great fun it doesn't change this fact.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Thing 1 ( 178996 )
        So it's still British Petroleum to you, too?

  • Finally.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by upto0013 ( 1144677 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @03:13AM (#36045180)
    Finally, I can quickly change all voice over dialogue to my bad Sean Connery impression.

  • Things are looking good for the PC (Score:5, Interesting)

    by elh_inny ( 557966 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @03:14AM (#36045188) Homepage Journal

    Given the recent fiasco of Sony, lack of hardware updates for PS3 / X360 in the near future, the fact that you can get better hardware for similar prices (and play with more eye candy on the PC), you have the choice of the controller, or the kb+mouse, with Steam and it's low, low prices, the fact that you can do other things on your PC as well, possibly at the same time, there's no reason why the PC should not be on the rise now and console market share declining...
    The only problem is the huge diversity and lack of big players marketing PC as the ultimate gaming accessory, If HP/Dell got their heads around, they have enough selling power to market the idea, and maybe even promote some baseline performance standards (like high performance, medium, low/mobile) as opposed to 20+ SKU that each generation of GPUs have...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by N1AK ( 864906 )
      If you 'already' own an Xbox/PS3 then you can't buy a PC for the same price. If your console breaks, you've still got the games library so are likely to stick with it. You quote lack of hardware updates as a flaw, which is odd given that most people who buy consoles find the idea that they don't have to consider hardware upgrades a massive bonus.

      Consoles are doing well because people can buy it, stick it under the TV and 'know' it will run anything branded for that console without any worries about perfo

      • Re:Things are looking good for the PC (Score:4)

        by Gadget_Guy ( 627405 ) * on Friday May 06, 2011 @07:43AM (#36046322)

        If you 'already' own an Xbox/PS3 then you can't buy a PC for the same price.

        If you can read this sentence, then you probably own a PC already too.

        I use a PC for gaming rather than a console for exactly that reason - I already needed to own one. I have an old, very cheap Dual Core system with a Radeon 5750 which I got to be cheap and quiet (and not heat my whole house up like my last PC). Even with such a low spec system I don't have any worries playing games because I use a low resolution monitor (1680x1050) and just use the mainstream default game settings. Games happily work fine on it and look about the same as a current gen console. If I play a game that is a few years old, I know I can turn up the graphic settings to max and get much improved picture quality.

        This is particularly useful when revisiting old titles. If you do that on a console (assuming that your next console can actually play your old games) you will get exactly the same quality as you saw when you first played. When I upgrade my computer, all my old games get upgraded too.

        Finally, I like PC gaming for the same reason that you prefer console gaming. It doesn't connect my TV. That means I can play my games without interrupting anyone else in the house from watching TV or a DVD.

      • One thing you are missing is how consoles have really, really, really, lowered the bar on what a gaming PC needs to be. Anything that came out in the last 2-3 years with any middling to decent video card will run anything. You can build an AMD rig with an upper level video card for $600 or so that would play anything on high/max settings.

        Ofc, the sitting in front of the TV factor is huge...you're right about that.
      • It's a poor argument to make if you're implying that people just want a box that works the magic stuff, as an example of tech success.
        Anyone who bought Ultima Underworld or Ultima VII back in the early 1990s got specific instructions on dealing with memory allocation issues and boot-sequence protocols in the in-game manual. Along with game instructions and a fairly detailed world history.
        That's an education, my friend.
        These days, manuals (pamphlets!) spend more text reinforcing your legal obligations pert

    • there's no reason why the PC should not be on the rise now and console market share declining...

      You buy the Kinect comtroller as much as to watch your kids at play as to play yourself.

      Console gaming is family room gaming. No matter how good the online component, it will always be secondary in this market.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by splict ( 1024037 )
      I think Valve could do very well by marketing a Steam "console." Combine a small PC, slick case, good GPU, simple UI, and run Windows games. Give the PC world a single standard spec to target (people who want to could still buy better or cheaper computers). All purchases go through Steam.
      • Interesting... but hitting a $300 price point would be hard... even if they raised that bar to $400, the license for Windows would still be hard to push into a level of hardware on such a box... a dual-core Cortex A8 combined with nvidia graphics might be compelling at that price range ($300)... but would still take some efforts to support... though Valve is in a better position than a lot of companies, especially if they eliminated any upfront fees for developers.

  • It seems that we've come full-circle back to "brown".

    I thought we had left that with Q1. D3 may have been way too dark, but at least they used some bright colors now and then. I blame the recent Fallout games. I love them, but they seem to have kicked us into a heavy steampunk-rust-brown fad.

    Actually, the game looks pretty decent; it's just that an all-brown color scheme gets boring after a while.

    • >>I blame the recent Fallout games. I love them, but they seem to have kicked us into a heavy steampunk-rust-brown fad.

      Fallout 3 was very dry, brown and unappealing. Fallout New Vegas at least had a little bit of color and water in New Vegas itself, and mixed it up with the Biology Vault, and some snowy areas.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RsG ( 809189 )

      I don't think we ever left "brown" as the FPS colour of choice.

      Or, more generally, brown/grey/muzzle-flash, alongside the occasional light tan crate. This seems to be the entirety of most AAA developer FPS colour-schemes, with the odd exception (and even those are just slightly more varied ).

      Go look at the myriad of modern warfare style games, or absolutely any game where "space marine" is a rough description of the protagonist. You get the occasional exceptions, but by and large the environments will be

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by godefroi ( 52421 )

        Have you ever noticed that while ID may be extremely adept at producing game engine technology, they're colossally bad a producing games? Not a single one of their games has been enjoyable, since, oh, ever.

      • The Halo series has a space marine (no quotes needed) protagonist and had plenty of bright colors. Dead Space wasn't that dull either. You might consider Crysis to be a "space marine" game or a "modern warfare" type game and that was loaded with bright colors.

    • Re:as brown as Quake 1 (Score:4, Informative)

      by hibiki_r ( 649814 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @01:37PM (#36050454)

      Q1 wasn't that brown. There were levels that were very blue, and others that were quite green. It's only the first episode that was absolutely brown, which had a lot to do with reusing textures for an episode to be distributed for free, back in a time where modems were the norm, rather than the exception.

      Then we saw Unreal, which was anything but brown.

      The muddle of browns everywhere started a little bit later.

  • the trailer makes it look like a 10 year old game?

    • So, I'm not the only one. It looks poor, visually. The levels look like a step backwards too. Somehow they've managed to take a game with some limited outdoor stuff and yet turned it into a corridor shooter.

      The deployable turret stuff and remote control vehicle looks good and will probably be taken up as a standard FPS game mechanic.

      We'll have to see how much vehicle driving there is and how closely it's integrated into the main gameplay. Beyond that, it looks like id is going to do what it always does: rel

    • Which 10 year old game would that be?

      While the facial animations and motion capture may not but up to LA Noire standards, they are certainly more detailed and natural than most 3D games on the market at the moment. Especially with regards to the ragdoll and impact animations when enemies are getting taken down. In any case, character animation has never been one of id's strong points.

      I think what you may be missing is the extraordinary amount of detail in the outdoor environments. The unique shapes and t

    • Because although id makes great graphics they do not have things like visual design and the 'soft skills' that make great video games (think portal 2's voice acting and animation). So they always score in the technical department. Unfortunately the whole graphics curve is leveling off now as we reach photorealistic games and graphics no longer impress anyone. Also from what I am reading RAGE uses OpenGL? Whops there goes the whole hardware tessellation from directX 11. So really this game will bring nothing

      • Hardware tessellation isn't limited to Direct 3D. Whatever you can do in Direct 3D you can also do in OpenGL.
        That said, the game isn't using it because it's targeting console-level hardware.

    • What bothered me most about the video was that it is an advertisement for a video game, but proceeding the advertising video, there is a freaking advertisement for the Marines...WTF, I want to see one advertisement, but have to sit through another one to watch it?

  • Come on.

    Oblivion was good. But we are older now.

    The car in the video was on dirt and preformed like it was on flat tarmac. Im sure the kids will love it. John your peers will think you better stick to modular rockets. At least armadillos have armour.
     

  • Is it just me, or... (Score:3)

    by fudgefactor7 ( 581449 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @07:08AM (#36046060)
    ...does this game just look like practically every other game out there? I'm not enthusiastic about it. The physics of the car just looked wrong to me. I don't know, maybe that was still some early stuff, but for me to want this they'll have to do more. Lots more. And it's still a damn FPS. Enough already! The market is flooded with them, and none of them are any better than Doom 3 was. Ugh. Someone, please develop a new gaming paradigm so we can lose the FPS once and for all.
    • It wasn't exactly the physics I noticed, but the abrupt handling. I really expected a higher level of realism, not just to the graphics but to the vehicles. The truck stopped, started, and reversed much quicker than a driver would maneuver an actual vehicle. And that high 3rd person camera might be best for playing, but I'd rather it had been mounted lower as if on the vehicle, or were less precise as if being filmed from the air. Old game conventions stand out more as realism increases.

  • Was excited.. Not anymore.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rotide ( 1015173 ) on Friday May 06, 2011 @07:17AM (#36046106)

    This game is dead on arrival to me. I was looking forward to a new "Quake" (read: multiplayer awesomeness) and it seems like they are giving us a single player only (for all intents and purposes) game instead.

    Now, single player games are fine. I really like Mario, Zelda, a lot of the games on XBLA (Castle Crashers, Limbo, etc, etc) and I could name a ton more games that are fun single player/co-op experiences. That being said, id isn't a company I expect great single player games from. I expect great multiplayer games from them! Games with lasting power.

    Sure, playing a great single player game could take 12 hours to complete, and another 10 to replay if it's that good, but multiplayer games can make me want to play for _years_. Quake 1/2/3, I don't want to know how many hours I put into those with friends on a LAN. When RAGE was announced, I was excited for new IP from id! What new things are they going to think up for multiplayer to push themselves ahead of all the rest in the competitive scene? It seems, so far, there are no dedicated servers! no deathmatch! and NO CTF!!! That's grea..... wait, what? The only multiplayer they are going to have is vehicle combat and co-op? Who is creating this game again?

    No Dedicated Servers: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/95955-John-Carmack-Says-No-Dedicated-Servers-for-Rage [escapistmagazine.com]
    Co-Op/Vehicles with NO DM/CTF: http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/04/19/rage-multiplayer-modes-revealed-no-deathmatch-or-capture-the-flag/ [pcgamer.com]

    Ok, so, it's pretty much a single player game only. I'll save my $60 thank you. I was sincerely looking forward to another AAA awesome multiplayer title. I guess if you want to play a multiplayer shooter, go grab CoD#12 or whatever they are up to now.. shudder.. id software is apparently removing themselves from the running. Movie style, linear games, seem to be the RAGE.. I think I'll get off my own lawn now..

    • Nothing wrong with single player games, IMHO. Aside, Quake ended with Q2.

      • We all have our own, but Q3 perfected deathmatch IMO. But I never played any single player in Q1 or Q2.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by xhrit ( 915936 )
          Quake Wars has no deathmatch, instead it has some of the most complex and rewarding multiplayer objectives available in a video game. After playing QW, mindless deathmatch games seem so boring.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by doti ( 966971 )

        1. multiplayer quake is Quake III Arena

        2. there will be a new multiplayer-only quake using rage engine (tech 5), and also a doom4 (single player)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by torgis ( 840592 )

      I guess if you want to play a multiplayer shooter, go grab CoD#12 or whatever they are up to now.. shudder..

      Meh. If you're looking for a shooter with good maps, weapons, and teamwork that requires some strategy to play, check out Battlefield: Bad Company or Battlefield 3 when it ships later this year. I don't know why everyone has a colossal hard-on for CoD series. I've played them all and they can be entertaining, but extremely one-dimensional. Maybe that's what the kids like these days - fast-paced arcade shooters - but give me something from the Battlefield series any day.

      I grew up playing shooters, starti

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rotide ( 1015173 )

        You know, I loved, LOVED desert combat. Spent tons of hours learning to fly heli's alone. Battlefield 1942 was great all alone as well.

        That being said, there are two companies I refuse to purchase from, Sony, and EA. The whole BF franchise sits with the latter. I'm going to have to respectfully decline the invitation to play those games, unfortunately.

        Obviously my choice. Sad to say the only options for multiplayer ("good" multiplayer, anyways) is Activision's CoD #x or EA's Battlefield #x.. sigh.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by torgis ( 840592 )

          Agreed. Desert Combat was the most fun shooter ever designed. I spent, oh I dunno, hundreds of hours playing on the "Apache Wars" servers learning how to fly vs planes and other choppers. Some people had supernatural levels of skill in an Apache. A few dozen hours there and I would get kicked from normal servers for "cheating" while in a chopper just because I shot down a few jets. There was nothing about that game that wasn't awesome. If you get bored flying, you could be infantry, or armor, or just

          • BC2 is a pretty great game, but I feel like the battlefield series has lost a little bit of its charm. In BF1942, there was just always the goofiest stuff happening, which I guess broke immersion a good bit, but it really amusing. Planes crashing into all manner of things, ships doing weird stuff, people getting run down by all manner of vehicles.

            BC2 just seems to have way less of those unexpected moments, and when they do happen they seem to happen so fast that it's hard to tell what's going on. Plus a lot

  • ...shipped with forge (level editor) and anvil (physics editor)

    We has an absolute blast making our own levels, and there was a large community of level builders. A few projects (aleph one for example) actually built entirely new scenarios. There was also the ability to create custom weapons.

  • Doom3 shipped with editing built into the engine, so the fact that editing is built in is not much of a surprise.

    The next big leap in modding will come when the UI for the editor is so substantial that it lets anyone (basically) build what they want.

    Here's my point: running an editor used to be merely an exercise in visualization, and some game-engine arcana. Throw a brush here, brush there, texture that, toss in a light entity, check for leaks, and VOILA it was hello, world.

    Now, due to the extraordinarily more powerful engines, and the ability of client systems to run more, simplicity is simply no longer tolerable. It used to be, for example, if you wanted to put a desk into a room, you put in a basic desk-shaped brush, and textured appropriately. Now you have to have a coffee cup, a desklight (with its own light entity), a chair, all breakable and movable. Even walls and windows all need to be breakable and have their own physics, etc.

    Sure, it's trivia for professional modelers to build these things to suit, but this is also why AAA titles take hundreds and thousands of man-hours to create.

    I believe that if they really want to see the modding community become as prolific as they were in the Quake2 days, they need to build into their engines a massive set of prefabs, and the ability to 'assemble' pieces from known articles, rather than having to design every last item (and property thereof) and texture from scratch. Leave the modders to be creative, and they will be.

    • I'm a bit confused here. I don't know anything about the game and have no interest in it. But how is it even remotely interesting news that they will have a common feature that's been around for decades?

      • Because, for various reasons including the ones that the parent post described, a lot of games these days are not shipping with mod tools.

        This isn't groundbreaking info by any means, but it is a nice thing, and I'm sure plenty of people who like playing around with game modding are happy to hear about it.

        • Yes, this is the point of the post.

          When are we going to see more multiplayer games designed as multiplayer from the start rather than leaving it up to the mod community?

          Great to see mod support. That's the thing about ID, that great sort of attitude.

          However, there might need to be more than this for it to be really successful.

          For example, melding strategy more with the FPS, linking to Facebook... able to game on your mobile phone when you're not shooting... things like that.

          It's Quake5 to me. Building on th

  • Nice blend of some great franchises. I am eagerly awaiting it. Spider drones look awesome.

  • If you don't have a premium membership to The Escapist, you can see the HD version of the video here:

    http://www.gametrailers.com/video/the-shrouded-rage/713567 [gametrailers.com]

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