Avalanche’s Involvement in Rage 2 Development Is ‘Vital’

Rage 2’s pre-E3 2018 announcement surprised everyone. With the return of DOOM having gone over so well, no one could anticipate id Software cranking out another Rage. However, the acclaimed studio rose to the challenge, and this time the team has help. Avalanche Studios, the developer behind Just Cause and Mad Max, is lending its open world expertise to Rage 2’s development. According to id Software’s Studio Director, Tim Willits, this new entry in the nascent franchise probably wouldn’t exist without Avalanche’s involvement.

When asked by GameSpot if Avalanche was “vital” to Rage 2’s being greenlit, Willits answered with an affirmative.

Yes. Yes. Yes, we definitely wanted to do it, but we knew we needed that open-world technology, and a company with experience. So yes, I would say they were critical. One of the most exciting things about this game is how distracting the world is. Like the guys will call me, and they’ll say, ‘Hey we put this mission in, can you go check it out?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah. Hold on. I’ll call you back in like an hour.’ And then they’ll call me a couple hours later, ‘What are you doing?’ I was like, ‘Oh sorry, I got the monster truck, and I was trying to jump this ravine,’ and so there’s just a lot of emergent fun gameplay that you can just go and do stuff. Like you run across a band of mutants walking through the desert, and you can run them over, and then do cool stuff like that.

Later in the interview, Willits continued to sing Avalanche’s praises, specifically with regards to Rage 2’s open world. When speaking on the biggest lesson learned from developing the original Rage, Willits said the following:

Don’t try to make an open-world game with the technology that’s not open world. [laughs] That one. But, people love to experience emergent gameplay, and that’s signature Avalanche style. Rage really was too directed, it was too, ‘go here, now do this.’ There’s much more freedom of choice, freedom of your ability to play the way you want, and it’s actually more approachable.

From the little that’s been shown, so far, the sequel certainly seems more dynamic. How that translates to the rest of the game remains to be seen, though.

Rage 2 releases on an unspecified date in 2019.

[Source: GameSpot]