First, there was Darkness.

“It followed the id formula,” muses creative director Tim Willits of the codenamed first-person shooter initially planned to be id Software’s first new IP since Quake, “but we had to do something different.” Rage unapologetically taps into id’s core competency as an action game, but by blending car combat and racing with colorful characters in a stylized environment powered by the very latest rendering technology from legendary programmer John Carmack, it will bring to Xbox 360 fresh ideas amid its action-packed gameplay.

“We could do space corridors ’til the cows come home…and make money from it,” adds Willits of the company’s historic Doom- and Quake-powered legacy. Willits doesn’t accept that the company had to do something different just to prove that they could, but Rage allows design and creativity muscles previously left dormant in sterile off-world corridor-focused shooters to be flexed in ways you won’t have seen before, especially from an id game. “With idtech5 [the HA HA!: id’s Steve Nix revealed that the Rage name was trademarked but wasn’t protected. So id filed to claim the trademark, the owners didn’t contest it, and now it’s id’s! new engine powering Rage], John has created a tech that allows uniquely textured stuff and lets us gear the design how we want,” says Willits.

“John can give you all the tech blah-di-blah,” adds the game’s lead designer, Matt Hooper (to which Willits quickly interjects to his colleague, “Please don’t describe it as blah-di-blah,” a nod to the respect expected — probably demanded — of the high-end tech-creation process from the company’s figurehead co-founder). “But the great thing about the tech is that it doesn’t matter,” continues Hooper. Unfettered by the constraints of a technology restricting their visual goals, Rage will probably be the best-looking game you’ll see on 360. Possibly ever. So not having to worry about whether the tech can handle the vision, the designers are free to go to town on gameplay mechanics, story, and characters that will power a truly memorable experience.

Doom of Planet Earth

You may have heard this before, but an asteroid is going to hit Earth and destroy civilization as we know it. The opening trailer focuses on the final edition of the Dallas Southwest News as it screams the headline “Last Ark Buried.” If you’re not deep underground, protected in cryostasis in a specially built Ark, you won’t stand a chance. In an effort to protect humanity, governments engaged the Eden project to build hundreds of small Arks holding a dozen or so people each. Engineers, doctors, and others with special skills are chosen to take the deep, frozen sleep, with each Ark set to re-emerge at a different time over the coming years, as no one knows how long the devastation will last.

You’re the unnamed occupant of an Ark, injected with nanodrites that help keep you alive and automatically heal you in combat. (They also act as a defibrillator, jolting you back to life if you do happen to die.) But it’s unclear at the outset what special skills or circumstances gave you such privilege. Willits dodged that question, as your role in the Eden project is part of a core plot that is being kept under wraps for now, although he hinted that each Ark inhabitant was a key piece of a bigger puzzle.

Awakened by Quake

An earthquake shifts your Ark from its burial ground, but you’re the sole survivor from your group. Memory fogged by the jolt from cryosleep, you’re still unclear on what’s going on, but what becomes quickly apparent is that more people survived the impact than was expected. Some 80 or 90 years in the future, new frontier-like towns have grown out of the devastation, and most people have forgotten about the Ark dwellers, though they’ll recognize your uniform. How this early game goes, we’ll have to wait a long time to see. John Carmack revealed that to ensure the start is as memorable as possible, it will be the last level crafted, allowing the team to be as familiar as possible with the tools at their disposal.

Emerging into this new world (somewhere among the Sonoran Desert and the hills of Arizona and Utah, where the art team spent several days shooting location footage for reference), you’re befriended by Dan Hagan, who gets you grounded in the environment and on the path to getting mobile. Ramshackle towns provide enclaves among the wasteland that’s now home to bandit clans and mutants ravaged by the effects of the impact…or maybe The Authority, an organization about which we know little, but, as Willits teases, “it will be your ultimate destiny to face them…after many plot twists.”

Keen Detail

Hagan helps you scavenge for the parts that will let you build your first buggy. Keys in hand, you can now investigate the wasteland and get into (and out of) trouble. Racing at high speed over landscapes crafted with exquisite visual detail, you might miss or take for granted some of the stylish look. You won’t miss it, however, when you enter Wellspring, a town you’ll encounter a couple of hours into the campaign. The texture detail on the shanty buildings is astonishingly detailed and incredibly real.

Here you’ll meet folks who will put you on the path to various missions, pushing you to explore outside the city limits and uncover more about the culture that has emerged from the rubble. “We want you to go to the office and talk to friends about characters who are memorable and unique,” says Hooper. To that end, each of the main characters we saw — the town sheriff, the mayor, and the producer of the Bash TV game show — are hand-animated to convey exactly the bold, almost cartoon-like expressiveness needed to make these encounters among the game’s most unforgettable moments.

Lone-Wolfing It

The Sheriff sends you to destroy a bandit base (the Shrouded Clan), and venturing out into the wasteland throws you into vehicle combat. Though Willits tells us the team toyed with having you aim the mounted machineguns jerry-rigged to your ride, it proved unwieldy in testing, so the guns will auto-target enemy vehicles. (Clicking in the right stick will switch your target.) The action is fast-paced and varied, with each bump and hill in the environment throwing the vehicles around in a wild dance of racing metal, flying lead, swirling smoke, and cascading dirt. You might have stumbled across this base before given the open-world opportunity to explore, but you’ll have found your progress blocked by a cramped passageway you couldn’t even crawl through. However, now you’ve got a remote-controlled car in your inventory. And it’s got a bomb on its roof! Drive the R/C car through the crawlspace and detonate its charge to destroy an objective and open up the base for further exploration. But beware: the bandits have their own R/C cars and send them racing in your direction, requiring quick aiming and trigger work to destroy them before they detonate in your face.

“Though we’re not in space, you expect an id game to have a great shotgun and assault rifle,” says Matt Hooper. Check and check. But he also describes the blank slate of this new environment that allows for original designs like the Wingstick, a boomerang-like thrown weapon that can kill in one hit and allows a stealthy approach to some infiltration missions. You’ll also scavenge items that you can sell (like a water purifier) and plans that let you build your own upgrades and objects, à la Fallout 3. Build and then place Aliens-like auto-defense turrets. Produce spider-like robots that seek out (and shoot) enemies hiding behind cover. Upgrade weapons with new ammo types. Earn, build, and park new vehicles in your garage. “It’s an open world, but focused,” notes Hooper of the broader design style. You’ll have freedom to travel but will be kept on-track with a limited pool of missions at any one time. “Missions will never be stacked too deep,” he adds, so you’ll be kept up-tospeed through a story that appears to have two distinct halves. The town of Wellspring is the hub of this first part, but you’ll have interacted with a huge slew of characters and situations as you race toward a confrontation with the mysterious Authority. A dead city and industrial area are two further locations that will eventually open up for exploration within Rage’s gameworld.

Where that leads — and how the nanodrites, Ark inhabitants, mutants, The Authority, and you all blend into a bigger picture — is still to be revealed. The backstory of Arks appearing at different times opens the opportunity for new inhabitants to emerge from cryosleep into this new world order. Then, will there be Rage?