Anger Management

Tim Willits, creative director of id, discusses Rage, motion control and why everyone needs a Carmack

Feature by Dan Pearson Contributor

Published on Oct. 18, 2010

GamesIndustry.bizWould you ever consider taking Rage, or indeed any id IP into the MMO arena?

Tim Willits

That's a whole different mindset, different developer skills. Even getting the vehicles working was hard enough. [laughs] I have way more respect for those MotorStorm guys let me tell you.

We would really have to have a paradigm shift - it's a whole different way of thinking about things. That's a service-based game. It would be very unlikely. For us, anyway.

GamesIndustry.bizYou've talked about how you think keyboard and mouse is still the best way to control an FPS, but you've also said that you play most games these days with a joypad. What's stopping those things co-existing?

Tim Willits

It's still a logistical thing. People don't have a desk in their lounge. We've all used web TV, it was horrible, right? You don't want to play like this. [balances imaginary mouse on knee]

For most people, the mass consumer, having that controller in your hand, sitting back watching the TV, it's intuitive, it's easy. Heck we moved our buttons to match Call of Duty, because hey, you get 25 million people learn where the jump button is, you don't move the jump button! I don't know why games do that!

So people are familiar with it. It's comfortable, there's no trickery. It's going to be a while, or it may never happen, especially with Kinect and Move, there may never be a keyboard and mouse extension for the mass market using a TV. That's why games like WoW do so well on the PC, imagine trying to do a raid with that little keyboard that plugs into the controller.

GamesIndustry.bizOne of the big things you've pushed about id Tech 5 is the way it's nailed cross-platform parity. Why have people struggled with it so much so far?

Tim Willits

It's simple. All those other games have old technology that was written for one CPU, one thread. They've taken this old tech, a lot of it is old id Tech, and they shove it into the console.

John Carmack and Jean Paul van Waveren and the board group were like, okay, let's stand back, start from scratch and look at the landscape. Taking a game that's single-threaded, and making it multi-threaded - much more difficult than people think.

But, if you start from the beginning, and you architect everything to take advantage of all the cores and CPUs, and they're all pretty much the same, really, apart from a few techniques, but if you plan from the start, it's so much easier. The problem with that is that it takes so freaking long to get the game done. That was one of the reasons why we partnered with Bethesda and the Zenimax family.

We're able to grow id studio, who everyone knows are working on Doom, using id Tech 5, using our content to test stuff. So instead of development time being technology development, then game development, we're able to go like this. [makes leapfrogging motion]

So you'll see games from id software come out much faster than historically.

So, yeah, start from scratch. It's much easier, it just takes longer. And you have to have John Carmack.