preordered mine

the game looks sweet. is have MP mode right? but without a DS.

If you want to get a smooth performance of Rage on the Xbox 360, you should install it to the hard drive. However, the install will be a whopping 22GB, according to id Software, taking up a major chunk of space on the hard drive, especially if you have one of the older hard drives (and forget the 20GB HD, too.)

"On the 360 we don’t have a partial install option; it’s all or nothing, which is kind of unfortunate," id Software co-founder John Carmack stated, "It means you have to install 21/22GB of stuff which takes a long time but if you’ve got it and you play it on the 360 that’s the way to go."

The PlayStation 3 version has a whole other set of issues. According to Carmack, "Once you get everything from memory that works pretty good, but if you’re coming straight from the hard drive then the first time you walk into everything from the DVD or from the Blu-ray – even worse in terms of total latency time – you listen to that Blu-ray churning around as its pulling everything in." Ouch.

PC owners will only have to deal with the insane system requirements that the game will demand, and will probably have a gigantic install space, though 500GB hard drives are on low-end systems to begin with.

Rage will be released on October 4 for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

    id Tech 1: Doom(1993), Doom 2 (1994)
    id Tech 2: Quake (1996), Quake 2 (1997)
    id Tech 3: Quake 3 Arena (1999)
    id Tech 4: Doom 3 (2004)
    id Tech 5: Rage (2011)

Notice a trend? With the exception of the earliest id shooters, which evolved very quickly, id has been in the business of developing one game per technology platform for the last eleven years. Sure, they licensed that technology to other developers to create other id titles like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory to Quake 4 but when strictly talking about the work being done internally at id, technology and game development have gone hand in hand. But id's Todd Hollenshead knows that has to change.

"We need to get to shorter cycles," Hollenshead told VG247. "And I think part of that is that we can't be doing a revolutionary technology with every game we develop." To that end, the studio's upcoming Doom 4 will use – you guessed it – id tech 5! "We have to go to a bit more of an iterative technology approach," he admitted, adding, "I think it's a completely doable thing, but I don't think it just happens without putting some effort into it."

Luckily, with Bethesda's deep pockets backing the studio now, id is able to work on two games in parallel, without risking everything. "The capital required to put both those games in production – the means and size to do them at a triple-A level – would have been a literal "bet the company" sort of thing," Hollenshead explained. So, after Rage ships does that mean id can finally get to work on that Commander Keen reboot we've been waiting for all these years?

By now, gamers are getting accustomed to online passes for games, which give players access to early access to DLC, additional content, or even multiplayer modes. Publishers see it as a way to encourage players to pick up new copies of their games, as opposed to purchasing them on the secondary market. The upcoming shooter Rage has a similar strategy, but it's been woven into the single-player campaign.

As players explore the game's massive wastelands in id's upcoming shooter, they may come across some mysterious hatches that dot the landscape. How can you open them? Well, that's where the code that's bundled in with new copies of the game comes into play.

"If you bought the game new, [those hatches] would be open for you," says id's creative director, Tim Willits in an interview with Eurogamer. "You still have to download it, but you don't have to pay for it. Those hatches are all over. Most people never find them. But as soon as you do, you're like, oh. And then you start to look for it. That's our first-time buyer incentive.

"But as you can tell, most people never even see it. I can tell you, some people will buy Rage, download that, and still never set foot in those things. They just won't. I think that's fair. It's cool. It's outside the main path. We're not detracting from anything. But I know some consumers, when you can't avoid it, then you get a little touchy subject."

What do you think? Does this kind of strategy make you more inclined to pick up the game new, or does it turn you off entirely?

Bethesda has confirmed that the PC version of id Software's upcoming shooter, Rage, will use Steamworks as its platform. The announcement was made via Twitter earlier today.

"Since folks are asking," the Tweet said, "We can confirm that Rage will use Steamworks on PC."

Launched in early January 2008, Steamworks is a development and publishing platform for PC games that gives devs access to all components of the Steam client, including digital rights management, authenication tools for peer-to-peer and server multiplayer games, voice communication, achievements, and more. Being Steamworks specific also means the PC version of Rage can be purchased from any distributor and added to a Steam account.

As the platform has evolved, it has been made more robust with the addition of elements such as Steam Cloud support, which allows game saves to be stored in the cloud and accessed on any computer with proper account credentials.

In August 2010, a placeholder page for Rage appeared on the Steam store, leading some to believe that the game would use Valve's Steamworks platform. Bethesda quickly shot the rumor down, saying the game's appearance was in indicative of any decision regarding platform. Rumblings began going in the other direction when the official Rage website was updated to include the Games for Windows logo, pointing at the possibility of Games for Windows Live, a competitor to Steamworks, would be the platform of choice for id Software.

Comments on the announcement within the Shacknews community have been positive, but the decision to launch Rage as a Steamworks game brings to mind what could have happened if history was slightly different.

In July 2008, id Software announced it had entered into a publishing agreement with EA to release Rage via its EA Partners program. During the summer of 2009, id Software was purchased by ZeniMax Media, the holding company that controls Bethesda Softworks, taking Rage with it. With recent changes to how games are patched and how new content is made available on Steam, EA has since opted to focus on offering its upcoming titles on its own digital platform, Origin.

Had ZeniMax not purchased id Software, things may have been different today.

"I don't even have to pretend to be an executive anymore," said Doom creator and current Rage lead John Carmack to Gamasutra. "I don't have to go to board meetings. I don't have to do anything! I can just sit in my office and work."

It has been just over two years since Bethesda bought out id Software, providing Carmack something of a reprieve from the doldrums of wearing a suit to work everyday.  The man behind some of the biggest games ever now says he is once again ‘free’ to simply get back to work.

"I take resources and a goal, and I try and put them to the best use to get us there. That's what I do. I don't want to be doing anything else."

"One of the humbling things that you find is that, no matter how good of a programmer you are, you write code, and you make stupid mistakes," he notes. "And I am getting to be a huge proponent of really, really rigorous code analysis, because I have been going through pioneering these things, just squeegeeing through our code base, and every single programmer -- from our best to our worst -- they all make stupid mistakes, and they are unavoidable. So, we need to have more automated checks on these things."

Those checks come in the form of tools - tools that the team at id are certainly using to ensure that coding is done as efficiently as possible.  Carmack speaks of the professional edition for Microsoft’s Visual Studio, a package that is incredibly expensive to use for PC developers. Interestingly enough, that professional studio is completely free to use for Xbox 360 developers.

"So, Microsoft has got some pretty good static analysis tools, and normally they make you buy, like an $8,000 professional edition of Visual Studio, but they give it for free to all Xbox developers -- which I think says an interesting thing about this stuff. Where Microsoft figures that, well, nobody blames them for crappy software on Windows, but they do blame Microsoft a bit for crappy software on 360, so it's in their best interest to put more static analysis tools available there.”

Carmack is adamant that devs should embrace such a tool.

"I swear, any 360 developer that's not using that is making a mistake. It will find problems in your code base. But after we got through all of that, we made it so it's warnings as errors, nobody can check in anything that doesn't pass that. We've been going on adding additional tools like PVS Studio and PC-Lint."

Free license for the PVS-Studio static analyzer: http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0092/

Upcoming sci-fi shooter Rage from id Software is a visual stunner, but all that pretty comes at a price - namely in the form of precious hard drive space.

The PlayStation 3 version has a mandatory install of 8GB before you can play, where as Xbox 360 can optionally install it for a whopping 22GB of HDD space.

The newer console models have plenty of HDD space to go around but for those still milling about on the 40GB or 60GB SKUs it can prove more difficult to play new games on PS3. Still this is nothing new to us PC gamers who have to install everything.

Rage releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC October 4th in the US, 7th in Europe. Xbox 360 can optionally install game data for better performance or simply run it from the disc.

Wholy,  the content is so freaking large or simply the graphic is juz too many files
Hopes the files has more content
any1 getting this?

  i dun have single 1TB HDD...so crazy the texture.....
HOw much? RM125? 3-4 DISC?