GamesBeat: I may have relied too much on the ground-pounding thing, especially in the mutant area. It seems like it works really well against the mutants.
Willits: Yes, it’s more effective against the mutants, because they’re lighter. It doesn’t do a ton of actual damage. It has a lot of knockback, but it doesn’t do a lot of damage. On the mutants, because their health is so low, it does knockback and damage, so it’s more effective against them. Also, the shatter — if you don’t practice a lot, you don’t know the distance. Sometimes you may shatter and not actually do that much damage to somebody.
GamesBeat: It really does make sense to master the different abilities and know when to use them before you go out and start….
Willits: Especially against the turrets. The turrets are tough.
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GamesBeat: When you came by, I wasn’t sure why the path on the map wasn’t spelled out for me.
Willits: Yes. That’s broken. Sometimes they don’t appear. That’s just a bug. And then when I redid the path, untracked and retracked, then it drew. That wasn’t your fault.
GamesBeat: So that’s what you want to happen. If you want to do the next mission, you should be able to find it quite easily?
Willits: Oh, yes. Always a track. There will always be a track.
Above: Somebody is burning and screaming in Rage 2.
GamesBeat: I think that’s a good thing. In Red Dead 2, I always knew where to go next. Here’s the yellow path.
Willits: Nobody wants to be lost. That’s never fun.
GamesBeat: And then it seems like you’re almost encouraging us to stop halfway there and shoot a bunch of things.
Willits: Yeah, there’s a high distraction factor. The more you stop, and the more things you do, the more project points you’ll earn, and the more stuff you can unlock. The game is more fun that way. If you rush through the game — if you go do all the missions and you skip everything else — you won’t have as much stuff to fight. And like you said, once you figured out the ground slam and things like that, you had more fun. That’s when the game gets fun. We made it more dense so you get pulled off, and to reward you naturally, so when you do the main missions, you have more fun.
GamesBeat: How plentiful are things like the rockets going to be? When I was chasing one of the first cars, I wasn’t shooting very accurately with the rockets and I used them all up. I didn’t realize they were going to be so expensive and rare.
Willits: You’ll get better. [laughs] Also, did you talk to the little guy driving around in the van? He sells rockets and ammo for your vehicle. We’re doing our pricing and economy balancing now.
GamesBeat: In some ways unlimited rockets would feel like an id thing.
Willits: [laughs] What you can do, if you unlock the garage expansion project, you can steal cars. You spawn a bunch of bandit cars, those will have a bunch of ammo and you don’t have to worry about it. That’s a kind of workaround, almost a cheat, which is funny.
GamesBeat: I felt like there was a Call of Duty feel to some of the moves. The ground pound, the shield.
Willits: There are general advancements in games, things that just appear and happen through the natural evolution of gameplay. Plus, we’re all game fans. We all play everything.
GamesBeat: With the wingsticks, I remembered that you shouldn’t throw them at anything where there’s a metal barrier.
Willits: Right, it’ll break.
GamesBeat: Or you shouldn’t throw it at a guy with heavy armor.
Willits: Yes, yes. You can do damage, but you’ll need to upgrade it. You should have a clear line of sight. Unless you spend a project point and get the ability to lock it on.
GamesBeat: They’re really good, but you shouldn’t waste them.
Willits: Right. You need to be smart with those.
Above: You can kill mutants in a game show in Rage 2.
GamesBeat: I was remembering how that was my favorite thing in the first game.
Willits: The wingsticks were awesome, yeah. It was the signature piece.
GamesBeat: As far as beefing up your vehicle, have we seen much of that?
Willits: We had the garage tab turned off, yeah. But it’s just a Phoenix. There’s four weapons: the mortars, the rockets, the gatling guns, the machine guns. You have a more powerful engine. You can do that energy attack. Those all upgrade.
GamesBeat: Is it more like Mad Max, armoring your car up and things like that?
Willits: Not really. It’s already pretty beefy. There’s a few upgrades, but it’s not about tricking it out with hundreds of upgrades. It’s not like that.
GamesBeat: It seems like, in some ways, you’re economizing. You’re not going completely crazy in some of these areas.
Willits: Yeah, because it’s overwhelming. Theoretically we could have hundreds or thousands of upgrades. But that’s just not the premise of the game.
GamesBeat: What did feel like it was important for you to get right?
Willits: To make the combat fun, the gunplay. We really wanted it to feel like an id game. Being able to use your combos, get that dance of death going, get the right weapon for the right situation. We wanted that. That’s the core of the experience. Everything else supports that. There’s other fun stuff to do. Racing is fun. Mutant Bash is fun. Stealing all the vehicles and taking them back to your garage is fun. But I want people to really enjoy the combat. That’s the id Software thing to say.
GamesBeat: If you go in just shooting one weapon against a bunch of these things, you’re not going to survive.
Willits: Yeah, you’re not going to do very well.
GamesBeat: But if you use all these different things….
Willits: When we were first testing the game, and we weren’t introducing people to learning how to use the abilities yet — we were just giving them the abilities and letting them play — they didn’t know they should use them. They’d just use the guns and they’d say, “It’s too hard.” But when we had the little virtual training areas where they’d learn how to use everything, when they went back to play the same areas they’d have more fun. It wasn’t so hard, because they’d learned to use everything in the arsenal.
GamesBeat: Have you thought about something like a quick menu that reminds you of everything?
Willits: It’s a hard one. They’re on the screen. The Overdrive that lights up, people still miss that. It just takes practice.
