Anger Management
Tim Willits, creative director of id, discusses Rage, motion control and why everyone needs a Carmack
I think it's tricky to work them in. [pause] A funny story. One of our programming guys is tasked with implementing the vehicles. I had my Microsoft steering wheel, and I was like, hey, you know it'd be really cool if we could get the steering wheel to work. So I brought it in, he programmed it all up and I was driving around, and it was great.
But then I realised that when you stop, and you get out of the car, you have to put the steering wheel down and pick up the controller, and I said, s**t! That's not going to work!
So I think that it has to be part of the core design. You try and force it in, you're going to cause problems, it'll feel clunky and weird.
It'd be better, yes.
Well, they say so, they may know more than we do. But again, the best games to take advantage of those controllers will come out after those controllers have matured a bit. I think time will tell.
Actually, no. There's so much that we have to do still on Rage that I never feel frustrated about not being able to do something else. It all depends on what the goals for your game are. For Rage our goal was to make it as fun as possible, to give the player a variety in the gameplay with the vehicles and the first person shooting and stuff, everything that we wanted to do, we've been able to do.
But you need to set up those goals, focus on those goals, focus on the core of what the game is. The consoles are great systems, they're powerful systems still. Heck there are games out there that still sell 20 million copies - that says a lot for the systems. For me personally, I've not been frustrated with any limitations that the consoles have enforced. From the very beginning it's been about, not how far can we push these machines, but how fun can we make this.