Tim Willits interview: Rage 2 gets crazier with an injection of Just Cause and Mad Max

Question: There’s a ton of open games out there, especially within the last year. How do you differentiate yourself? How did you set out to do that?

Willits: The biggest thing about creating a post-apocalyptic world — I like to say this is post-post-apocalyptic — I hope you experienced this when you played. The personality is different. We’ve tried to add more color and vegetation. People aren’t starving. There’s water. What does the world look like after the dust settles?

Rage took place 100 years after the asteroid hit, and this takes place 30 years after that. The world is greener. If you go from Wellspring to Gunbarrel to Lagoona, you can see how people look different, what they wear. We really tried to give it more personality. We tried to make the game look fun. It’s the action side, the lighter side of surviving in this world. I hope that personality has come through as why this is a different kind of post-apocalyptic game.

If you sit and play for a few hours, put the controller down, laugh a little, smile — if you had a good time and blew some guys up — that’s what we want.

Question: Do you have anything you can say about the Nintendo Switch? Or VR?

Willits: We have looked at the technology, but we’re still evaluating our plans on the Switch platform. Same with VR. We’re just trying to get the game done now. May is coming quick. We need to polish it up.

Question: Any tips for killing the really big enemies?

Willits: Dash and Overdrive. Overdrive with the machine gun is more effective against bosses than Overdrive with the shotgun. You have to set up that rhythm. Dash, shoot, dash, Overdrive. More dashing, less slamming.

Question: I tried to attack the Ark Tower thing.

Willits: Those are tough!

Question: I wasn’t doing any damage to it at all.

Willits: When they open up, there’s the core. You take on the core and there are three levels that show up. But those are tough. And there’s still some balancing to be done. Our thinking is, we want players to explore. If they get into situations where they feel like it’s too tough, they can come back. You go get beefed up, come back, and kick ass.

Question: I saw some custom weapon mods and things like that. Is there a system for that in place that we weren’t able to get to in the demo?

Willits: Yes. You’ll be able to upgrade your weapons. I have a quick little list here of the sheer volume. There are over 70 projects. There’s eight weapons with mods. There’s the Nanotrite upgrades, the support upgrades, the vehicle upgrades. There are more of those tabs than we wanted to have in the demo today.

Question: How many of the different vehicles can you use?

Willits: It may have been a little hard to understand in this build, because the garage tab was disabled. Anything that you steal and drive back to Wellspring or Gunbarrel or the other cities — if you have the garage project enabled, you’ll be able to spawn any vehicle you steal anywhere in the wasteland. If you steal the monster truck and drive it back to your garage, you’ll be able to bring up your garage, select the monster truck, and drive it.

Question: What happens if they get destroyed?

Willits: There’s a salvage value for bringing them back, and then they come new, which is nice.

Question: What about microtransactions?

Willits: There are no loot boxes! [laughs] We’re working on those plans. But we want to keep — we’re trying to arrange our post-launch plans in such a way where we can be flexible enough to steer into what people like. A lot of times developers lock in their post-launch plans so far before the game ships, and then when the game ships they find out, “Oh, everyone likes red and we’ve made all this blue.” We’re trying to be flexible enough. There’s so much to do that we want to make sure we give people more of what they want.

Question: I know you said that this a stand-alone story and you don’t need to know what happened in the first game, or it’s more or less explained. Do you have any kind of intro video or other primer on that, though?

Willits: We do have an intro video, which roughly tells you what happened. Like I said, Vineland, the area where you grew up that gets attacked, that’s really your tutorial. We’ll introduce you to a number of characters. They’ll explain things. Walker does a lot of chatting while you learn the mechanics of the game. You’ll get a better understanding. Here you were just thrown in, so that was a little more challenging. But sometimes we overexplain things. You’ll have no problem.

GamesBeat: I had a harder time with some things. Turning the buggy was tough.

Tim Willits: Was it the braking or the turn radius?

GamesBeat: The turn radius, I think.

Willits: Do you feel it was too small or too big?

GamesBeat: I was sort of deceived by some of the turns. I could really hug the corners and turn like that. But with a different kind of momentum behind me, I’d go really wide and crash into the wall.

Willits: The braking distance in this build is actually much longer. I actually had them pull it back a little bit, because when you get up to top speed, it takes so long to brake. You smash into things, especially in the race. I had them increase the braking efficiency.

GamesBeat: But you do want us to brake, right? You have to brake a lot.

Willits: Yeah, you want to brake. Also, if you hit the handbrake, you can swing your back end out, and then when you hit boost, you go straight. That’s the opposite of reality. In reality, if you hit boost, your back end would just swing out even more. But when people see that kind of thing in action movies they think that’s how cars work. It’s more like Mario Kart. [laughs] In the updated build, we have better braking, which may help you.