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id Software's Rage: Nothing ill can dwell in such a temple

I've become a heretic. id Software is deep into development on a game that I care nothing about. As I watched Tim Willits nervously repeat the same phrases we've heard about Rage since 2008, I wondered where it all went wrong. I regarded the now familiar wasteland environment with boredom. I almost dismissed the new screenshots, full of male nipples and patriotically-colored tattoos, until I spotted a rogue blurry texture and pondered the purpose of this new technology. If we're still looking at pixel soup, what's the point of virtual texturing? It's a beautiful game, but in 2010, I want more.

Rage shows male nipples, patriotic tattoosFor the hubbub id's making about Rage's 60hz refresh rate, I was surprised by how often the game hitched and stuttered as Tim Willits moved the camera or drove around in the wasteland. For a game that's relying entirely on its presentation, it's disappointing that environmental vegetation blatantly pops in and out as you get closer or farther away-just like any other game. I perked up when Tim Willits selected Rage's rocket launcher but immediately lost interest when I saw its obnoxious HUD effect, which makes the entire screen red. Despite id's confidence in its ability to handle first person shooter gameplay, it found a way to make using rocket launchers unpleasant. The long, jarring load times of past id games are present in Rage; Tim Willits had a cavalcade of marketing jabber ready to fill the awkward silence whenever he loaded a different demo map.

Tim Willits seems pretty excited about Rage. He told E3 attendees that Rage will feature different bandit clans, and each clan will have a unique fighting style. The bandits in the E3 demo were more acrobatic than effective; they do little to intimidate players who aren't irrationally afraid of baldness, tattoos, or freestyling. As I watched the cross-eyed bandits cartwheel, shadow box, and flail their arms at the player, I immediately felt as if the laughably stereotypical "Generation-X" criminals from Paul Blart: Mall Cop were attacking me. It is perhaps unfair to associate an offensively bland Hollywood movie with a game by the company that made DOOM, so I'll offer another comparison. These somersaulting bandits channel the circus gang from Batman Returns, which perfectly illustrates the principle that fighting carnies is inextricably embarrassing.

Rage simply feels like it's aping other successful games. id Software is feverishly incorporating every feature from hit games that its developers play during their off-hours. We notice the premise that seems unabashedly cribbed from Fallout, the leaky pipes and water shaders that somehow don't look as good as Bioshock's, electrocuting bandits in the water like Bioshock, the World of Warcraft inspired engineering plans and quests, the Halo-derivative recharging health, the HUD that bloodies when a player takes damage exactly like Gears of War, the Grand Theft Auto style open world with vehicles. Rage is doing little to distinguish itself.

What happened to id Software? We can trace the beginnings of its downward spiral as far back as Quake 2. id became a revolving-door company after the original Quake, and today it's just another big studio owned by a larger company. It's a fun mental exercise to reflect on the notable id employees that have come and gone since Quake's completion in 1996:

Many gamers feel that id fired Romero "for not doing his job and only caring about the fame." That's id's official explanation of why they fired Romero, but it's also a lie. id's official explanation of Adrian Carmack's departure differed from the truth as well. I believe it's imperative for gamers to stop blindly trusting PR babble. The truth about Romero is that he busted his chops the entire time he worked at id. Quake was the last id title he worked on. If we look at the map credits for that game, we find that he made more maps than any other designer at id-including Tim Willits.

  1. start - Welcome to Quake - John Romero
  2. e1m1 - The Slipgate Complex - John Romero
  3. e2m1 - The Installation - John Romero
  4. e2m2 - The Ogre Citadel - John Romero
  5. e2m3 - The Crypt of Decay - John Romero
  6. e2m4 - The Ebon Fortress - John Romero
  7. e2m5 - The Wizard's Manse - John Romero
  8. e2m6 - The Dismal Oubliette - John Romero
  9. e3m1 - Termination Central - John Romero
  10. end - Shub-Niggurath's Pit - John Romero
  11. dm3 - The Abandoned Base - John Romero

The maps Tim Willits made:

  1. e1m2 - Castle of the Damned - Tim Willits
  2. e1m3 - The Necropolis - Tim Willits
  3. e1m4 - The Grisly Grotto - Tim Willits
  4. e1m5 - Gloom Keep - Tim Willits
  5. e2m7 - The Underearth - Tim Willits
  6. e3m5 - Wind Tunnels - Tim Willits
  7. e4m1 - The Sewage System - Tim Willits
  8. dm1 - The Place of Two Deaths - Tim Willits
  9. dm5 - The Cistern - Tim Willits
  10. dm6 - The Dark Zone - Tim Willits

Not only did Romero make more Quake maps than any other level designer at id, but he also created DM3, its most memorable. To this day, many gamers refer to DM3 as the quintessential deathmatch map. The gaming press labeled Romero as a lazy screw up because of disastrous business decisions he made at Ion Storm. It's fair to criticize Romero for bungling Ion Storm, but Romero always did his job at id Software. Amusingly, despite Ion Storm's commercial failure, it still managed to release more quality games than id has released since Romero's departure: Anachronox, Deus Ex, and Thief: Deadly Shadows.

Quake 2 was the first game id worked on after it pushed out John Romero. The development of Quake 2 went very smoothly compared to the first Quake, and the game was completed in a little over a year. Even though John Carmack was happy with development cycle, Quake 2 was missing the grittiness and atmosphere of the original Quake. Quake 3 was disastrous. The game's development was utterly wayward; employees had such little direction and inspiration that some of them simply left. There was no vision for Quake 3 beyond making a multiplayer-only title for tournament play. The result was a game where the Doom guy, a fat clown with an exposed paunch, and a gargantuan eyeball with robotic legs murdered each other in maps made out of intestines.

Orbb from Quake 3Quake 3's sales were underwhelming, so id, in its great wisdom, decided to make an expansion pack for it. Quake 3: Team Arena is notable for being one of the few games that no one has ever played. Tim Willits later spoke of Quake 3's failure at E3 2005. He felt that the game wasn't as commercially successful as it should have been because it appealed to only a small subset of gamers: "My biggest failure was Quake 3. The game offered perfect multiplayer for hardcore players. In fact, they're still playing it. But the more casual gamers, and other people who actually have money, found playing next to impossible."

Despite Adrian Carmack's misgivings, id worked on Doom 3 until 2004. Adrian Carmack, id's best artist, was eventually fired in 2005. Using the same wisdom that produced Quake 3: Team Arena, id decided that it was a good idea to ship a sequel to DOOM with no cooperative play, no super shotgun, no spider mastermind, only a single hell level, and a slow-moving DOOM marine.

In a 2004 interview with IGN, id Software again demonstrated its Solomon-esque wisdom by stating that PC gamers like being "alone in [their] room [with] all the lights turned out" whereas console gamers "like to play together."

Todd H. of id SoftwareIn what I'll generously call 1up's "interview" with id Software, Tim Willits mentioned that Rage has been in development for three years. Given that DOOM 3 shipped in August 2004, you might wonder what happened during the time gap. After finishing DOOM 3, the always-wise id Software thought it was a good idea to make another oppressively dark and plodding horror game: Darkness. They worked on this game, which amusingly had almost exactly the same title as Starbreeze's 2007 game, for 18 months before realizing that it was a bad idea.

Even though the quality of id's games has plummeted, id still has a reputation with gamers and the gaming press as the leader of graphics technology. Careful consideration of id's recent games reveals that this reputation is undeserved. id hasn't actually been first to market with a breakthrough technology since the original Quake. In 8 of the 13 years since the release of Unreal, Epic's had a more powerful engine and better tools than id:

id Software keeps its reputation intact by dramatically announcing games early in development. They're really quite masterful at announcing a game that's four years away from shipping and eventually releasing it after gamers have already seen the technology in a dozen other games.

The original Quake was a technical marvel that greatly surpassed any competitor's technology at the time. While Duke3D was still writhing in the primordial ooze of pseudo 3D environments and peer-to-peer networking, Quake started the on-line gaming revolution that's now mainstream. It's regretful that the innovations of Quake-extensive modding capabilities, free dedicated servers-are largely lost on gamers today.

If we look closely at the ship dates of id titles, we find that they have consistently trailed other developers since the first Quake. Quake 2 was a much less ambitious game than the original. It was essentially a commercial version of the experiments that had been done after Quake's release; it was a unification of GLQuake and Quakeworld. Quake 3 featured curved surfaces that no one-not even John Carmack-seemed to care about. By the late 90s, most developers started licensing Epic's engines because Epic offered superior tools and support.

At the Macworld Conference & Expo in 2001, id Software amazed us by demonstrating Doom 3's bump mapping and real time shadows. While gamers and the gaming press heaped praise on id Software for being the first to implement these technologies together, Starbreeze Studios quietly released a Riddick game for the Xbox in June 2004, two months before the release of Doom 3. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay had the same features as Doom 3, and Starbreeze beat them to the shelf. To add insult to injury, Riddick, a Vin Disel movie license game, was actually more fun to play than DOOM 3. This observation is so shocking to me-even today-that I have difficulty processing its implications.

Vin Disel's Rage-esque nipplesBump mapping became standard in AAA titles, but Doom 3's method for rendering shadows in real time has been abandoned for baked lighting that is less computationally expensive. Even Rage doesn't have a unified lighting system. In 1996, id dictated the direction of 3D game engines and heavily influenced the evolution of early GPUs. In the past few years, no one's licensed id's engines:

Quake 3 engine games
Unreal Engine 2 games
Doom 3 engine games
Unreal Engine 3 games

While id was treading water and farming out development of games to reprehensibly boring companies such as Raven, Valve inspired a generation of games with intelligently scripted events, and they created lip syncing technology that is state of the art six years after the release of Half-Life 2. Valve's instilled video game characters with so much life that we feel we know them. Sadly, Rage's characters still look like they have marbles in their mouths when they speak.

Whereas Epic introduced impressive rag doll physics effects into Unreal Engine 2, and Valve fully integrated physics into gameplay with Half-Life 2, Carmack was actually against incorporating physics into DOOM 3. DOOM 3 only got a physics system because a junior programmer went off and implemented it on his own time: "I'm not a proponent of rag-doll physics, but Jan Paul van Waveren went ahead and did it, and it's good, and it's a crowd pleaser. Clearly it's a gimmick, but it's popular--and that's an example of me making a bad call." Here's more game design wisdom from John Carmack:

In World of Warcraft and Dungeon Siege, Blizzard and Gas Powered Games did important work in streaming game content and eliminating load times. Blizzard followed through on one of John Carmack's ideas: to create a Snow Crash-style virtual world in which millions of people interact. Technically, Crytek's Crysis eclipsed almost every competing title by supporting the latest computer hardware.

What has id Software contributed in the 21st century? id Tech 5 promises crossplatform support and superior tools, but the technology isn't going to be finished until 2011. It's likely that Splash Damage's Brink-not Rage-will be the first title in stores that fully exploits virtual texturing. id has almost completely missed this generation of console systems. When Rage's development began in August 2004, John Carmack wrote, "We have a really solid team that did a lot of maturing through Doom's development, so I have high hopes that it won't be another four year odyssey." In all fairness, Carmack wrote those words before Kenneth Scott, id's lead artist, left the company.