Grass-roots social media campaigns, transmedia projects - even an iPhone game tie-in. Creative director Tim Willits is making sure that the whole world and his dog will get to see and touch the game before its release on 4th October, and as a result he’s expecting to reap a lot of rewards from the company’s first cross-platform game. In my interview he explains some of the deeper elements of the game beyond the 2 hour demo that I experienced last month, along with a sound analysis of the games industry.
SPOnG: I played a good chunk of the opening of RAGE, and things seem a little bit linear despite the promise of an open world. Quite directed. Does it all open up?
Tim Willits: Yeah. Well, there’s a main path. You do have some choice in which path you might want to take, but generally it is a directed experience. Your big choices come from doing the side quests - the sewer missions, poster missions, sniper missions, racing, some of the side missions that you pick up at the bar... or you can go find Crazy Joe. He’s always got stuff for you. So it’s very open and broad, but yes, there’s a narrative.
Tim Willits: No, I mean it’s a... the core experience is that story. So people who have been able to play even more than 2 hours love the fact that there’s a story, love the fact that they know what to do, and like the fact that they can do all these other things. I had one journalist who said that he actually spent more time racing in RAGE than the racing game that he had to review! He wouldn’t tell me what that game was though!
Those things are very exciting to hear. We call the game ‘open, but directed.’ There is a narrative, and I think those side aspects really add value to that. And gamers today love all that stuff. We have a collector card game, which actually has a shocking amount of depth to it. That actually came from one of our card-collecting-mad programmers - he built this entire system in his spare time. I kept telling him, ‘stop working on that because I’m not going to put it in the game,’ but he was adamant that it went in.
And people appreciate those types of things. They like that we’re taking the time and effort to do something that is a little bit off the beaten path.
SPOnG: That must be a pretty cool work environment, to have programmers that launch in with their own ideas that add to the experience?
Tim Willits: Yeah, well my management style with the team is to keep it flat. Give people the creative freedom to be ninjas. You know when you give a ninja an assassination mission? They go off, do it and come back - you don’t know how they’ve done it, but it’s done. Those are the types of developers you want to have around, and there are a number of things in RAGE that are borne from that.
You know sometimes when you shoot someone and they writhe around on the ground and then end up shooting you from the floor? I didn’t even know that was going to be in the game. I was playing one day, shot this guy and he fell over - I thought it was a bug. He shot me as I walked over to him. I was like, ‘that’s awesome!’ That’s one of the great things about RAGE, and one of the great things about working with a lot of creative people. It allows us to do that kind of stuff and make the game a lot better for it.
Tim Willits: That’s right. Historically, the plots in our stories have been very light. We really tried to do more with RAGE - we tried to build a universe up. You feel like stuff happened before you got there, and of course we want the story to continue after you’re done. The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger, but I think it really works well. Hopefully we’ll get to make a RAGE 2 if the first one sells really well. At the moment though, we’ve got some cool DLC that we’re working on - so we want to support this franchise and we want our fans to know that we stand behind it. We want this game to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein.
SPOnG: A cliffhanger? Isn’t there a bit of a risk of pissing people off if you decide not to do a sequel for whatever reason?
Tim Willits: Uh, no - well, it’s not that much of a cliffhanger. In our previous games you killed a boss and yay, the whole world’s saved. What RAGE does is set up the world for more to come. From our perspective, we say we might not make a sequel, but you don’t take a full swing at bat if you can’t hit a home run. I’m confident that this is a franchise that’s here to stay for us.
Tim Willits: Yes. There’s always pressure - especially when you’re id. There’s lots of expectations and preconceived notions about us. I believe when RAGE ships though, that it will change the perception of the company. I think that our hardcore fans will get it and love it, and we will actually get some new fans. We’re really excited about getting some fans on the PS3. I mean, if you’ve had a PS2 and a PS1, and always stayed on the home console side of things, you may have never played an id Software game before.
So right there that’s 75 million people out there that we want to try and recruit. That’s what the cross-platform strategy will do for us. We’re trying a lot of new things and it seems to be working really well - people who have played it really seem to love it.