“It’s not cast in stone yet, but at this point no, we don’t think we will have dedicated servers,” he said, according to Variety. But he’s glad “we won’t have to be a pioneer on that. We’ll see how it works out for everyone else.”

News that Infinity Ward was dropping dedicated server support in favour of everyone playing online through its new matchmaking service IWNet touched, off, predictably, a petition-fuelled backlash from a PC community that had long used dedicated servers to play Call of Duty games. Carmack, Variety said, indicated the felt the servers are a relic of PC gaming’s early days.

Dedicated Servers and Rage – News You Probably Don’t Want to Hear [Variety]

According to Sweden’s Metro, the unnamed 18-year-old assailant “became angry when his internet connection wouldn’t work.” He then consulted a troubleshooting manual which apparently told him “grab a knife and go outside, that’ll solve everything.” There he attacked a 15-year-old girl “who was on her way home from a party and laughing with a friend.” Take that, you inconsiderate laugher!

Her injuries were not life threatening. Knife guy just got sentenced to psychiatric care. The prosecutor wanted hem tried for attempted murder but the court stepped in and said, no, it’s quite likely this guy is nuts.

Oh, this happened Aug. 9. And people say I’m slow with the news.

Crazy Starcraft Player Stabs 15yr Old Girl [Hot Blooded Gaming]

I learned about this key Rage feature a couple of weeks ago in Texas, as I was wrapping up a chat with three of the principals behind the new game from the makers of Doom and Quake. I’d learned why the developers had combined driving with shooting and was teased about a twist to the game not evident in the Rage demos being held for the press. But that was not enough and I asked for more.

“You might want to say that there are a lot of 12s in it,” Matt Hooper, the game’s design lead told me.

Tim Willets, Rage’s creative director laughed.

I’m sure I looked puzzled, so they relieved me of my confusion.

Hooper said he’d once been in a meeting with game industry executives. He was discussing a game and they wanted to know what the 12 moments in the game were. They didn’t mean “12″ as a number of moments, but “12″ as the level of quality of the game’s moments. Any moments that could be merely rated a quality of 10/10 weren’t enough. Even Spinal Tap level-11 moments would not suffice. No, the game would have to have moments that could be rated a 12.

So, yeah, Rage will have 12s.

Rage also does has driving, shooting and sparing use of monster closets, plus a similarity to Fallout 3, the last big game made by the company that just bought id.

The most striking novelty of Rage is the meshing of trademark id first-person shooting with driving gameplay, all set in a wasteland future of Earth. But while the combination is the critical element of the Rage’s gameplay design, Willets said its presence was part of an evolving creative process, not a master plan.

Willets recalled that the Rage development team, which is only about 40 people strong, small by the standards of today’s major game development efforts, began by considering the graphical possibilities of the company’s new id Tech 5. They recognised they could create beautiful and extensive landscape. And they had a problem.

“We’re like, ‘We don’t want to spend all this time making this really cool environment and having people auto-travel or just magically jump to the next level that they would play in,’” Willets said. They wanted gamers to see the sights — and like it. “We wanted the journey to be as much fun as the [action] when you get there. That led to: ‘OK, well we need cars. We’re going to want to have badass cars with guns.’ That led to this kind of muscle car feel with the kind of buggy formats as well. And then, once we had that, that was a natural jump to the racing. And if you win races, you have to reward the player. If you reward them they can buy cool stuff for these cars.” (Read about how all that is coming together in my Rage demo impressions from QuakeCon.)

Some part of that racing-shooting development evolution must have generated a 12. But there comes a risk, when making a game, that your 12s might be the same as someone else’s 12s. Say… the 12s of Bethesda, makers of their own (car-less) post-apocalyptic game that stars a character who also begins his or her adventure leaving a survival vault to discover a wasteland over-run by ragged people and mutants.

Don’t worry, the id guys said. Rage’s post-apocalypse won’t feel that much like Fallout 3. “I can guarantee you that our little interpretation of it — and the fundamentals and the core mechanics — are going to be different enough and feel a little different,” Hooper said. “It’s this action movie that you’re living through… we’re not trying to be an RPG. I think that’s why it’s going to end up being different.”

Fallout 3’s executive producer, Todd Howard, who I interviewed the same day as the Rage guys, let them off the hook. “They’ve had their own development path for a long time,” he said. “I think they’re obviously influenced by a lot of the same things that Fallout is influenced by. A lot of those are just post-apocalyptic things.” Bethesda and id are now owned by the same parent company, ZeniMax Media.

Rage will be different from Fallout 3 and also different from Doom 3, id’s last major game. There was one monster-closet joke that I saw in the demo of Rage that the id guys played for me. A dummy monster pops out of a closet for a mock scare. It’s a harmless callback to the criticized attack surprises featured in Doom 3. Though, Willets said, those monster closets in the game were a throwback of their own to the first Doom. Lesson learned? I pointed out to Willets that Doom 3 was not as warmly received as the first Doom. “Doom 3 did outsell all the other Dooms,” he said. “But Rage is so much different. It’s brighter. It’s more expansive. And there are no flashlights in Rage.” You know what that means: A whole new set of 12s.

As expansive as the visual scope and the virtual terrain for Rage may be, the creators of id’s new adventure talk about creating a streamlined game. “We don’t want to make this overwhelming game that you get frustrated with,” Hooper said. He wants that action movie pacing. Plus, he dropped this comment, whatever it suggests about how the game will evolve: “We want to the player to make meaningful choices.”

Most of the 12s in Rage remain a mystery. What I saw of the game and described a couple of weeks ago remains the extent of what id is publicly discussing about the project — well, short of this tease from art director Stephan Martiniere. “What I can say is a storm is coming,” he said. “From a bright blue sky where everything seems to be happy, suddenly clouds are starting to form. There’s going to be something ominous in the land that’s just going to start introducing itself.”

Could that be a 13?

To those who may not know what they are, “monster closets” were areas of a map where an enemy would be “hidden”, and only revealed when the player “triggered” them by opening a door, or walking to a certain point on the map. It was cheap, and quickly became a royal pain in the arse.

So for upcoming shooter Rage monster closets are no more. id’s Matt Hooper:

[In Rage] when you’re going to the RC-Bomb base [from the demo] to deal with the Shrouded clan they’re doing whatever they’re supposed to be doing. If they’re supposed to be defending against you coming there, they’ll be doing that. If they’re just tinkering or having a conversation they’ll do that. You will never see [a monster closet.]

Good news.

Scoring a headshot in a shooter is, after all the most celebrated action in many first-person shooters.

So what is a headshot on wheels in Rage?

I had Matt Hooper, design lead at id as well as creative director Tim Willis and art director Stephan Martiniere stumped for but a moment

“We have discovered that people love running into stuff,” Willits said.

“There’s something very rewarding about doing those head-on manoeuvres and the guy goes flying,” Hooper added.

Speed helps. “There’s something satisfying about just pushing up on the accelerator,” Martiniere said.

The vehicles take damage in Rage from these head-on collisions, but Willits said that ramming like that is both the most effective and most fun way to take out enemy vehicles.

You won’t take that much damage, Hooper said, if you play enough to earn “the coolest of the front grills”.

“Its one of the things we learned from testing,” Hooper said. “It’s fun to ram things.”

That’s the headshot. On wheels.

Developers usually ask for thirty minutes but here in the second biggest state of the Union, in the 400,000 square foot QuakeCon 2009 hotel, the Gaylord Texan, the development studio behind one of the biggest games of all time wanted to show me their new project.

But for all the talk of scale—for all the mathematics that have dominated the talk about id’s next game, Rage, and its amazing technological capabilities—the game demo I got from id was surprisingly focused on nuance, art and colour.

Rage is shooting and driving, gun rage and road rage. It’s been designed to be swift to its action, to not waste gamers’ time, to never let players be lost, and to be gorgeous.

Id’s Matt Hooper and Tim Willits took turns controlling a demo that they presented for me in several parts, in a small meeting room at the Gaylord a day before this big shooter-centric convention began. They used an Xbox 360 controller to steer a PC build.

First they ventured into the game’s wasteland. Ambling through the dusty, Arizona-style desert, Willits took control of the game’s hero—a man never named, in the id tradition of letting the player feel that they are the hero. The game’s graphical beauty is arresting, as can be seen in the QuakeCon ‘09 Rage trailer. The developers talked constantly throughout my demo about creating a game that looks great. Hooper described aspects of the landscape being created to please the eye, of the physical pacing of the character through the world designed to expose the players to grand and lovely sites. “The goal for Wellspring was to make it as gorgeous as possible,” art director Stephan Martiniere told me. Good aesthetics are a priority.

Even the people are an achievement. In an interview later, id co-founder John Carmack raved to me that Rage is the first id game to contain “real people”, humans rendered with the fidelity to give them life and personality.

A first look at Rage immediately brings to mind the other action-shooter set in a wasteland, Borderlands, though Rage is more of an action-centric game while Borderlands has the player gaining experience points as it calculates damage for every shot. Rage is smoother, more detailed and more organic-looking than the attractive, slightly cartoon-styled Gearbox game.

Rage’s wasteland is not post-nuclear. An asteroid hit the Earth, its arrival sending selected citizens of the world into underground bunkers for a humanity-preservation effort called Project Eden. Our hero’s bunker is hit with an earthquake; he gets out years later than planned, in a jumpsuit and into a world turned Mad Max. There’s Fallout to all that; a coincidence, Rage’s creators say.

In the wasteland, Willits found a man in a shack named Crazy Joe whose face wrinkled and arms waved with a more authentic elasticity than people in most other games. If current tech often makes characters look to be made of plastic, Rage mixes in some rubber, more closely approximating the movement of bone, muscle and flesh.

We were in the wasteland to see some killing. Outside of Crazy Joe’s shack, Willits used a quick-select option to wield the Wingstick, a boomerang of distant death-dealing potential. One far away mutant lost his life this way. The vistas of Rage are impressive, worthy of a postcard from America’s Southwest. But they are all the more impressive when one’s weapon flies visibly far into that distance and then comes back. The sense of witnessing what could be a mere backdrop painting is replaced by the belief in a continuous, reachable, touchable landscape ahead.

We went to town, a place called Wellspring that combines the look of the Old West with a cramped Chinese village. Hooper raved about significant characters being rendered to look and dress and sound like unique people. He spoke also of exploration and crafting, picking up items and making new ones using a few key components. There’s Fallout to all that too, I noticed (he didn’t mention), but crafting in this game can be done anywhere, not just at a workbench. That’s fitting, as Hooper kept describing the game as one that’s designed to waste a minimal amount of time. He wants players to be able to see and do things with immediacy. The id guys steered the demo to Wellspring’s mayor, who gave the player plans to build RC-controlled bomb-carts and sends the player to a bandit-controlled base to be liberated.

Usually, the player will have to drive everywhere, though that’s not a contradiction to id’s goal of minimal time-wasting. Hooper said the distance between Wellspring and the based in this mission “isn’t just happenstance”. It’s not a randomly or even mathematically programmed arrangement of sectors. It’s designed to pace the player through the action, like a good action movie. And the drive there can be expected to be exciting. For the demo, the id guys loaded right to the base, but driving elements they showed at other moments made clear how such a journey would proceed. The player gains a garage of vehicles, a four-wheel ATV, later an armoured sedan or, as shown playable in the demo, a dune buggy. These vehicles can be improved and armed, the better to fend off enemy vehicles in the wasteland. When Willits was driving through the desert at one point, he was being tailed by two enemies. A green circle emerged around his dune buggy to serve as a radar warning for approaching cars. Yellow triangles in the circle pointed to the vehicles hot in pursuit.

Driving’s in third-person in this game. Shooting is in first-person. You’ll see your hero in his car, but not on his feet. Those perspectives — and those perspectives only, since Willits is leaning against having a hood-camera option for races—are set for Rage. That’s because those perspectives are what the developers feel is optimal for the driving and shooting gameplay they have. Again, it’s all efficiency and best user experience. Hooper said he’s determined to make sure that the driving controls feel natural to shooter players so that FPS gamers won’t feel like they’re being asked to learn a whole new scheme.

Back to the mission the mayor gave us, we got to this base outside Wellspring, ready to craft remote-control buggies. As open as the game had seemed until this point—and even this base can be visited at any time instead of just when the plot calls for it—the interior offered a return to more traditional id level design. It had corridors and enemies running through them. Hooper, now in control showed off the ability to lay down turrets, to send a spider-robot on a killing spree ahead and, less purposefully, for the Wingstick to get caught in another room because it flew so far away. It won’t magically snap back. You have to get it. Enemies wielded their own radio-controlled bombs, one bad guy standing behind green glass with the big controller for his little toy-car-bomb in his two hands. Hooper used his own remote bomb to detonate a portion of the base’s interior, allowing him to progress to reaches off-limits to any player wandering into the zone prematurely. He used a cross bow for an optional stealth kill. He used shotguns and pistols for more obvious assaults. He shot the armour off one enemy brute, piece by piece. Had the base been cleared out and the player left, mutants might take over later. There’s a flow of life in this world and a reason to return, Hooper said.

Willits took back over to show the game’s racing. He found a race promoter in Wellspring standing on a box with a megaphone. Behind him, a burly guy in a shirt painted with a checkered flag occupied a booth. He was ready to dole out races. Rage’s races are vehicle-specific and, Hooper said, could draw from any of the vehicle elements in the game, allowing for RC Bomb races, jump competitions and who knows what else. Willits played a more conventional three-lap desert dune buggy race made more dangerous with armed competition. It was called the South Highway Combat Rally. During his laps, Willits could collect ammo and speed pick-ups. Enemy shots and car bumps rolled his buggy a few times, but he still won in one minute and 40 seconds. He earned race certificates for winning and a bonus for eliminating one competitor. He could spend those tickets on vehicle repairs and upgrades.

The final section of Rage I was shown was one of those classic locked-room video game carnivals of death. The bulbous TV producer behind something called Mutant Bash TV had our hero locked in a series of rooms, attacked by lanky mutants, while circus music played. The first room had the enemies throwing fireballs. Clearing that allowed the player to walk to the next room, this one jungle-themed with a gorilla statue spinning its blades around the room while mutants flung themselves into the scene via overhanging bars. Then there was a big slot machine to shoot. Then a Kraken level with spikes popping out of the floor as mutants emerge. And, finally, a Big Daddy-scaled boss with a thick tentacle for a right arm. He fired that arm at the player like he was snapping a towel at them. The whole thing took three minutes, forty-five seconds to complete. The reward was $US877 dollars, for 46 kills. And the player can keep coming back, their best scores shared through online leaderboards. (id isn’t talking about any multiplayer beyond that; when I asked Willits if players should expect id-standard multiplayer he said that the multiplayer is still being worked through and kept secret, that players can think now of Rage as having a rich single-player experience.)

There was a monster closet joke in there somewhere. Monster closets were that old id staple, where enemies hid behind walls, bashed out and mauled the player. They made it into Doom III, by which time some of that game’s players criticised them as being archaic, and id gets it. While walking through the Bash TV level, we got a face full of a monster closet. Right in front of our hero a closet sprang open and a dummy monster popped out. Harmless and humorous. No enemy encounters in this game seemed that cheap.

That was an hour of Rage. Did it need the hour? The sprawl suited it. The game appears to break few conventions and may suffer this season from being compared to games out last year and, in Borderlands’ case, this October. But as it heads to its when-it’s-done release date far off in who knows what year, it will have a chance to clear the pack. I’ve seen no game that, in this realistic style, looks so good and has a landscape so rich with visual splendour.

id Software’s upcoming Rage will be set in a post-apocalyptic world that some fans of Fallout 3 might find surprisingly familiar.

Good thing Rage has all of those gun-toting cars thrown into the mix.

The official Quakecon schedule is now available for public perusal and my personal calendar has been updated.

The event happens at the Gaylord Texan just next to the Dallas Fort Worth airport in Texas, from Thursday, August 13 – Saturday, August 15. Most people will attend to have LAN parties and shoot each other, virtually, to bits.

While part of the gaming world gets hyped for Madden during those days and some Kotaku colleagues will begin to calculate how many pairs of socks they’ll need to pack for their trip to Germany next week, I’ll be in Dallas. With thousands of gamers. And a batch of top developers who limit their names to three syllables.

Highlights for this Quakecon include id co-founder John Carmack’s keynote to the Doom/Quake/Rage faithful on Thursday.

3:30pm – Main Stage
id Software Press Conference
id Software welcomes thousands of attendees to QuakeCon 2009 and offers exclusive insight into the studio’s latest development projects and exciting announcements.

4:00pm – Main Stage
John Carmack Keynote
John Carmack, technical director of id Software, offers his annual keynote address and audience Q&A, with topics ranging from the state of graphics hardware and the development of idTech5, to his ventures into rocket science.

Expect id’s EA-published open-world shooter Rage to be a big part of the show. I expect to be checking it out.

And then on Friday, Splash Damage’s Paul Wedgwood shows up to do a public demo of the Bethesda-published Brink, followed by Bethesda lead designer Todd Howard speaking for an hour about who-knows-what.

There’s plenty more in the official schedule and some stuff marked on my calendar that I can’t publicise yet (work-related, I promise).

Local Dallas developers, I/Kotaku will have a couple of hours of free time on Wednesday.

Sadly, I’ll be en route to the airport on Friday late afternoon, when this happens:

4:00pm – 5:00pm – Exhibit Hall Event Stage
BAWLS Chugging Competition
If you think you have what it takes, be sure to join in on a QuakeCon tradition where daring attendees attempt to chug a can of Bawls as fast as possible. It’s all about bragging rights and winning one of those coveted Ultimate Power Up tickets.

And as part of their talk on “virtual texturing”, the company presented some new Rage screenshots, which were dutifully picked up by Shacknews. And my oh my are they pretty. I won’t try and sum up what virtual texturing actually means (it’s something to do with very, very large textures), since it all seems a bit technical, but if that sounds like good reading to you a pdf of id’s talk is at the link below.

Virtual Texturing [id, via Shacknews]