I learned about this key Rage feature a couple of weeks ago in Texas, as I was wrapping up a chat with three of the principals behind the new game from the makers of Doom and Quake. I'd learned why the developers had combined driving with shooting and was teased about a twist to the game not evident in the Rage demos being held for the press. But that was not enough and I asked for more.

"You might want to say that there are a lot of 12s in it," Matt Hooper, the game's design lead told me.

Tim Willits, Rage's creative director laughed.

I'm sure I looked puzzled, so they relieved me of my confusion.

Hooper said he'd once been in a meeting with game industry executives. He was discussing a game and they wanted to know what the 12 moments in the game were. They didn't mean "12" as a number of moments, but "12" as the level of quality of the game's moments. Any moments that could be merely rated a quality of 10/10 weren't enough. Even Spinal Tap level-11 moments would not suffice. No, the game would have to have moments that could be rated a 12.

So, yeah, Rage will have 12s.

(UPDATE: To those in the comments section for whom I did not write this story clearly enough, Hooper was joking. He does not take the "12" talk seriously.)

Rage also does has driving, shooting and sparing use of monster closets, plus a similarity to Fallout 3, the last big game made by the company that just bought id.

The most striking novelty of Rage is the meshing of trademark id first-person shooting with driving gameplay, all set in a wasteland future of Earth. But while the combination is the critical element of the Rage's gameplay design, Willits said its presence was part of an evolving creative process, not a master plan.

Willits recalled that the Rage development team, which is only about 40 people strong, small by the standards of today's major game development efforts, began by considering the graphical possibilities of the company's new id Tech 5. They recognized they could create beautiful and extensive landscape. And they had a problem.

"We're like, 'We don't want to spend all this time making this really cool environment and having people auto-travel or just magically jump to the next level that they would play in,'" Willits said. They wanted gamers to see the sights — and like it. "We wanted the journey to be as much fun as the [action] when you get there. That led to: 'OK, well we need cars. We're going to want to have badass cars with guns.' That led to this kind of muscle car feel with the kind of buggy formats as well. And then, once we had that, that was a natural jump to the racing. And if you win races, you have to reward the player. If you reward them they can buy cool stuff for these cars." (Read about how all that is coming together in my Rage demo impressions from QuakeCon.)

Some part of that racing-shooting development evolution must have generated a 12. But there comes a risk, when making a game, that your 12s might be the same as someone else's 12s. Say… the 12s of Bethesda, makers of their own (car-less) post-apocalyptic game that stars a character who also begins his or her adventure leaving a survival vault to discover a wasteland over-run by ragged people and mutants.

Don't worry, the id guys said. Rage's post-apocalypse won't feel that much like Fallout 3. "I can guarantee you that our little interpretation of it — and the fundamentals and the core mechanics — are going to be different enough and feel a little different," Hooper said. "It's this action movie that you're living through… we're not trying to be an RPG. I think that's why it's going to end up being different."

Fallout 3's executive producer, Todd Howard, who I interviewed the same day as the Rage guys, let them off the hook. "They've had their own development path for a long time," he said. "I think they're obviously influenced by a lot of the same things that Fallout is influenced by. A lot of those are just post-apocalyptic things." Bethesda and id are now owned by the same parent company, ZeniMax Media.

Rage will be different from Fallout 3 and also different from Doom 3, id's last major game. There was one monster-closet joke that I saw in the demo of Rage that the id guys played for me. A dummy monster pops out of a closet for a mock scare. It's a harmless callback to the criticized attack surprises featured in Doom 3. Though, Willits said, those monster closets in the game were a throwback of their own to the first Doom. Lesson learned? I pointed out to Willits that Doom 3 was not as warmly received as the first Doom. "Doom 3 did outsell all the other Dooms," he said. "But Rage is so much different. It's brighter. It's more expansive. And there are no flashlights in Rage." You know what that means: A whole new set of 12s.

As expansive as the visual scope and the virtual terrain for Rage may be, the creators of id's new adventure talk about creating a streamlined game. "We don't want to make this overwhelming game that you get frustrated with," Hooper said. He wants that action movie pacing. Plus, he dropped this comment, whatever it suggests about how the game will evolve: "We want to the player to make meaningful choices."

Most of the 12s in Rage remain a mystery. What I saw of the game and described a couple of weeks ago remains the extent of what id is publicly discussing about the project — well, short of this tease from art director Stephan Martiniere. "What I can say is a storm is coming," he said. "From a bright blue sky where everything seems to be happy, suddenly clouds are starting to form. There's going to be something ominous in the land that's just going to start introducing itself."

Could that be a 13?

"There is a lot of good to be said about Epic and Valve and the tacks that they've taken," Carmack told me during an interview in Dallas last week during QuakeCon. "They've both grown to be much bigger companies than id Software was.

"And, you know, somebody could look at this and say I held id back, because I did not want to grow the company into a really big company at those times. And maybe we would have been better off to do that, but we came off pretty good, so I'm not going to kick myself over any of that."

Today, id largely makes its graphics tech for its own games. It's previous graphics engine, id Tech 4, powered few of the industry's games. The next one, id Tech 5, is first and foremost being developed for id's own next big game, Rage. It's companies such as Epic that make the graphics engines that power so many games on the market.

Earlier this decade, id Tech 3, the graphics technology used in Quake III Arena, was widely licensed in the industry, used in games like EA's James Bond Everything or Nothing and the first Call of Duty. At the time, Carmack told me, id didn't have the support team to handle a wide number of licensees. "Our technology license stuff was, 'Ok you pay this and you can have eight hours of technical support," Carmack recalled. "You can come down and talk to me for eight hours. Mostly it's, you're on your own, because we didn't have support staff."

To do that better and for more game companies, id would have to grow. Carmack didn't want that. "We knew that we didn't want to have the big support staff like they have for things. And I didn't want to give away the kind of freedom. When you have 50 licensees on stuff like that, you are handcuffed."

Carmack couldn't tolerate having to accommodate the need to minimize his own programming efforts in order to not shift code too much and unsettle the other companies relying on the same tech. "The work I'm doing now on id Tech 5 is changing some fundamental class hierarchy stuff across all of our resources, and it's the right thing to do. It's better, because of that. It's incredibly painful just doing it in our codebase. There's no way I would contemplate doing that if I had 50 other development teams that would have to go through and make similar changes on there."

Money left on the table? Perhaps, Carmack said. "It's a good business on there. We did great on the Quake III generation, tons and tons of licenses on that. But it does tie up your arms a little bit technically and it does mean you're out of the game business and you're in the technology supplier business. There are aspects to that that are admirable. There's definitely a part of me that, as an engineer, says it would be great to try and document this really well, try and clean it up and make it as good as you possibly can, because there's always this balance between making something really good code and rapidly exploring as many things as you can on there."

Let the Epics and Valves sweat that stuff, he is happy to conclude. Let them worry about making sure Unreal Engine 3, Source or whatever else works for all the companies that pay to use it.

"I don't gainsay anybody their success," he said. "I'm happy to see everybody doing good work on there. I think it's great to see Epic and Valve doing their thing. I like the industry. I like seeing the industry being vibrant and competitive. "

Yesterday, I posted about the greatest feeling in video games as determined by Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood. I explained how he hopes his studio's next game, the team-based first-person shooter Brink will deliver more of it.

But when I interviewed Wedgwood at QuakeCon 2009 last week, he also told me about something that bugs him.

We were sitting at the far end of a hotel meeting room in Dallas that contained a long table surrounded by chairs. Wedgwood got out of his chair and approached the furniture to explain what I'd call the Table Problem.

"If I walk up to a table and the level-designer made it an inch higher than I'm able to jump, that's it, I can't get over the table," he said. He and I sized up the table he was standing near. It wasn't that tall.

"So even though I'm 200 pounds — maybe 210 and somewhat chubby — I can vault that table if I ran at it right now and get across that table," he said. I agreed with him, but hoped he wouldn't try it. There wasn't much room for a running start, and who knows how much weight a hotel table can support.

"Walking into this room, I know to avoid the tables and chairs," he said, reasonably. "I don't get stuck on geometry. But in a shooter, I can't see my feet. Even if I rendered the whole model, I can't see my feet in this view I'm using." As a result, people get stuck bumping into things in shooters that they'd never walk into in real life.

Solution, please.

Well, Wedgwood first shared what the old solution has been: "What level designers do to get around this is having boardrooms that don't have furniture in them. In multiplayer games you have to have super-smooth clipped routes."

And if there's something to climb, maybe a wall or a table that's in the room to vault, a game programmer inserts what Wedgwood called an "entity," a programming instruction that produces a signal to players that that given wall or table can be clambered over. "If he forgets to put an entity there — or if the designer didn't want you to [climb] — you suddenly have an invisible barrier. And, bam, your immersion's gone. You're out of the game because you find that so frustrating. Why can't I climb up that wall, because the icon shows up, but not that one? Worse still: When you hit the button, you enter a canned animation until you get to the top. And that's it, done."

Wedgwood was exercised about this and described to me what Brink would do different. "We wanted a system that was real-time, dynamic, blended animations, full trace of the geometry around you, not faked, not clutched. In other words, if I decided that I'm going to mantle up that wall, if it's a height I could climb or reasonably jump to, I can, irrespective of what a level designer wants. If it's there, I need to be able to climb it. And, as I'm climbing it, as my first hand comes free, I want to be able to start shooting. As my second hand comes free, I want to be able to start re-loading. If I want to stop and take my finger off the button, I want to drop back down to the floor. If, as I'm dropping I hit jump, I want to kick away from the wall. It must be a completely dynamic, fluid system. It's not on auto-pilot, but it is smart, which is handy because it stands for Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain [laughs]."

Credit Bethesda marketing for the acronym, he noted.

And he continued with what sounded like a furthering of the freedom of movement given to first-person gamers in last year's Mirror's Edge:

"The idea behind this is that, when I want to get where I'm going to, I'm holding down my sprint button, because I'm going there as quick as I can. At that point, I've given the game permission to interpret, intuitively what I want to do, which is to vault, step up, jump or do whatever. But I want some control over that. So, if I look up, I want you to go up the route that mantles me over something. And, if I look down, I want you to slide me underneath it. So, if I hit a security center, I can make that choice in real time. I'm steering, I'm turning. And, if I let go, I stop what I'm doing at any given point.

"So, all it does is solve the problem of you not seeing your feet in an intuitive way that would work if you walked into this room, which is why you didn't bump into any of the chairs or tables, because you can see them because they're in your view. And this is great because our level designers can now flood our maps with tons of crap that makes it feel much more realistic. And the little routes and things are not based on complex player-clipping. And that just makes a huge difference."

I saw some of this, particularly the player-character wall-scrambling, with my own eyes when Wedgwood played the game live on stage at QuakeCon the next day. I can't vouch for the nuances he described about free hands being used to do things the moment they are free.

But I can vouch for the real Paul Wedgwood not bumping into any of the furniture in the Dallas hotel room. He avoided all of it.

Brink is set for release in the spring of 2010.

[PIC]

The August release of the fifth downloadable mission-pack for Fallout 3 wrapped up a hefty mid-year helping of new content for one of the most acclaimed games of last year.

The game's executive producer, Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks, told me last week in Dallas at QuakeCon that he's happy with the roll-out. "We knew we wanted to do three initially and we'll see where that goes," he said. " I kind of had in my mind that the upper limit was five. Part of that was what I think people are willing to continue to pay for a game. And a lot of that is our own internal bandwidth."

With the launch of Mothership Zeta, Bethesda's met Howard's goal. Five game-expanding pieces of content, each granting players about four hour' worth of game time for $10, are now out on the Xbox 360 and PC. The packs are planned for a PlayStation 3 release this next month, with, according to Howard, about one new one per week, starting with the game's end-changing and level-cap-raising Broken Steel.

The DLC packs began development as work on Fallout 3 wrapped last year, about two months' prior to the game's late October shipping date. Howard recalled that he had two groups out of his 90-person development team working in parallel on the first two expansions, Operation Anchorage and The Pitt. "About half the team goes on to the next big game," he said, making no attempt to hint at what their next project will be. "The other half, which is mostly a lot of artists and designers go on to DLC stuff."

The creation of the DLC is the fun part, Howard said as the designers are freed from having to wrestle with technology and have fun. That liberation produced the early suggestions to throw aliens in, but Howard delayed that desire until Mothership Zeta. "That one kept coming up: 'We should do alien abduction, we should do alien abduction.' I thought it was hilarious, and I said, 'We should wait. That isn't like the classic Fallout. You kind of want to keep the footprint of aliens in Fallout small.'

"But once we got to the fifth one, it's like: It's really funny. It's a cool concept. We should do it.' And the reason I like it is I do like the DLC to feel like something new. And that one, just on the surface, is instantly: this is different. It's not more of the same, I'm out in the wasteland."

Howard called out Point Lookout, the fourth DLC, as one of his favorites, referring to it as "one of the biggest and best DLCs." That one, which brings the player to a spooky new island to have an adventure that plays as a microcosm of the original game was developed by Joel Burgess, lead level designer of Fallout 3 and Nate Purkeypile, one of the game's artists. "We knew we were going to do a fourth DLC, I said to them: 'I think you guys should do this,'" Come up with some ideas and pitch us. And that's what they did. That was on the case that, on a bigger game, they wouldn't have gotten that opportunity."

The single design directive for Point Lookout, Howard said, came from something he thought the first DLC releases lacked. "It it felt like the other DLCs didn't do what the game does best, which is give me a wide-open area to explore. So let's do a DLC that gives you that in a new way."

The DLC's now done, all available for PC and 360 users and soon playable on the PS3. Bethesda's moving on. Five got the job done.

The next announced Fallout project is Fallout: New Vegas, currently in development at Obsidian Entertainment.

The darkness dances in an erratic sizzle of colors from thousands of computer monitors, the pulsing pixels illuminating an electronic shanty town of home-built computers, neon, pillows and people.

This room of humming computers, quietly clicking keyboards, and energized gamers is the throbbing heart of QuakeCon, id Software's annual fan gathering held last week in Grapevine, Texas.

While the free convention, held in a Dallas, Texas-area hotel each year, sheds light on new projects in the works by the famed developers behind Quake, Doom and Return to Wolfenstein, what makes this gathering unique is it's sense of camaraderie. Gamers from across the country, and sometimes around the world, bring their own computers to the event to hook them up in a massive network and game together.

It is, id Software says, three days of Peace, Love and Rockets.

This year the event drew more than 7,000 people to the Dallas-area and included a more than two-hour talk by id developer John Carmack. But QuakeCon hasn't always been so auspicious. The convention grew out of a gathering of gamers in the summer of 1996 that was more pilgrimage than celebration, said id Software president Todd Hollenshead.

"A bunch of guys made a pilgrimage to Dallas to see if they could get (John Carmack) to talk at their LAN party," he said.

The group all gathered at a hotel in Garland, Texas a few miles from id Software. They set up an impromptu tournament and then emailed Carmack asking if he could swing by.

On the last day, Carmack showed up and talked to the group in the hotel's parking lot for about half an hour.

The late night parking lot chat and the days leading up to it have, over the years, blossomed into a gaming party of sorts, with tournaments, music, gaming and Carmack's annual chat.

Although the event has always been held close to id Software's Texas offices, that doesn't stop a group of id developers from moving into the hotel for the show's four days so they can check in as often as they'd like on the 24-hour a day gaming.

"People who come to QuakeCon are genuinely enthused about PCs," Hollenshead said. "They lug their PCs to the hotel just to play for 72 hours."

QuakeCon provides the tables, the chairs, the power and the cabling to hook all of those thousands of computers together, the gamers provide everything else.

"I think this is the largest free event of its kind in North America and the largest bring-your-own-computer in the world," he said.

The lights in the massive gaming room go off Thursday and don't come back on again until Sunday, and some people try to take advantage of every minute of that potential game time.

"There are people who will literally go down there and play until they are done," he said. "We've had instances of people who pass out at their computers.

"People will bring pillows, lay them over the keyboard and go to sleep. We don't encourage that, because it's probably not the best thing."

The computers, many modified into outlandish shapes like small coffins or Transformer Optimus Prime, light up the otherwise darked space.

"It's a cool thing to see - the monitors and the neon," Hollenshead said

While QuakeCon is returning to its roots in some ways, it's also moving forward in others. Earlier this year id Software was purchased by the company that owns developer Bethesda Games.

Last week Bethesda Games attended their first ever QuakeCon, remaining quietly in the background of the show typically dedicated to id. But that is something that could change in the future.

"The potential is that we could have a bigger and more exciting QuakeCon" with Bethesda's help," Hollenshead said.

It makes sense for QuakeCon to try and expand from an id-centric experience to one more broadly dedicated to PC gaming in all of its forms.

The current stable of cutting-edge consoles have eroded the home computer's already failing gamer-base and groups like the PC Gaming Alliance are bringing groups together to try and draw that audience back.

Hollenshead believes that as this generation of consoles age, PC games are regaining their advantage.

"As consoles go into their fifth Christmas the technology advantage of the PC is going to become an important factor," He said. "It's likely over the next couple years that PC gaming will have a a bigger competitive advantage."

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Wedgwood's means to this end is Brink, the squad-based shooter he showed to attendees during a stage demo at QuakeCon in Dallas on Friday (Brink preview here). A day earlier, I spoke to him about the game and its planned deployment as a tool that can blur the lines between single-player and multiplayer gaming.

As Wedgwood walked me through his answer and discussed a conversation he has had with Brink's creative director, Richard Ham, he brought me to this monument of a statement:

"I've convinced him that the buzz you get from coordinated team play is beyond and above just about every other experience that you can have as a video gamer," Wedgwood told me.

"But the jump from single-player shooter player to my end of the spectrum — which is the high-end tournament clan combat — is one where you have to have such a thick skin and such dedication to your aim that most people are put off. What we'd love to do is just help people find that route to the incredible buzz that we get from coordination by giving them a system that allows them to coordinate with strangers to get things done."

Wedgwood described the way his game will do that and how it compares to the efforts of other designers in great detail. I'll share his concept below.

But, first, I must note that listening to the audio recording of my chat with Wedgwood today, Sunday brings to mind an unlikely parallel development to his stated goal: the creation of Rock Band.

The New York Times Magazine's glowing cover story on Beatles Rock Band — one of the most prominent stories I've ever seen about a video game — quotes Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos discussing the missed opportunity so many people have of playing instruments: "They spend the rest of their lives loving music, and listening to music, and playing a lot of air guitar, but not having any outlet for that innate urge they feel." Rigopulos has said as much to me and other reporters that Harmonix has been driven by the desire to use video games to give to those who don't have the skill to play music the thrill of playing music. Rock Band, evolving the idea further, simulates the nirvana of playing music in a group.

What we've got in Harmonix and, it seems, in Wedgwood's studio, Splash Damage, is men and women in game development who are engineering the medium to transport a person — a player — into a situation in which they'll find themselves suddenly skilled to do something they never thought themselves capable.

To get us there, to the sublime peak of coordinated group play, Wedgwood and Brink's Richard Ham had to confront a formidable obstacle, the ugliness of playing online games with other people, when you're not good at such games. This is possibly the analog to getting on stage at a concert, guitar in hand, without knowing how to play at the speed of the rest of the band.

Practicing alone doesn't help much.

"If you play through a traditional single-player shooter — the kind of mine-cart-style ones — the enemy's always in front of you, and you're witnessing canned cinematics," Wedgwood said. "It just doesn't prepare you for being out-flanked when you go online. If the first thing that happens is that, not only are you out-flanked, but it happens five times in a row, he teabags you at the end of each one and shouts "Homo!" over the VOIP [voice-communication], you just quit and can't be bothered. It's just no fun. And Richard Ham, our creative director, is just obsessed with solving that problem."

The Brink guys yearn for their players to be skilled online team gamers but have to worry about things like racial epithets scaring their players from the stage. That's a challenge.

To appreciate their planned path past that obstacle, it helps to absorb a description of how varied and complex the activities in the game might be. Wedgwood explained to me how this squad shooter, which can be played alone or with friends, put the player in the role of a fighter of change-able classification and skill-set. Bear in mind that the Brink player always has squad-mates in the game, whether another person is playing with them or not:

"At any given point you could be playing one of four different combat roles. We have this squad commander, essentially an AI mission director. Based on the combat role that you've chosen and your location on the battlefield and the status of these big objectives that you're trying to pull off, it generates a bunch of missions on a rapid-access objective wheel. And you have segments which represent how difficult they are. Each one that you do can take you on a completely different route and the end result will be very different gameplay. Sneaking behind enemy lines and interrogating an enemy with a taser is nothing like hacking into a back-door and opening up a route for your team, which is nothing like trying to get to a security gate, when all focus is on that gate and it's an absolute choke point — and you're the one who does the touchdown with the heavy explosive charge. So as you play through the game we have this branching mission structure which leads to a highly re-playable experience because it rarely feels like you're doing the same thing that you did before — unless you choose to because you had fun doing it last time."

That's the gameplay structure. Here's the scheme for getting the player to that sublime peak of coordinated group machinations:

"What we want to do is create something where, if you bought it, didn't have an Internet connection, never went near cooperative gameplay it was still a really fun, compelling squad-based game. But if you happened to go online, your friend can join you.

"Let's say you have a friend who has already finished both campaigns and he's at work. He's recommended the game to you. You've been playing for a couple of hours. He gets home. You can invite him and he can just jump straight into your game with his badass character all decked out in cool gear and everything and play alongside you.

"When you've got some experience playing, the game's going to say to you: Why don't you go online and try playing with some strangers? Just cooperatively and we're not even going to turn on VOIP [voice-communication] — there's no point, you don't need to talk to anybody, the game coordinates for you, you're not going to get put off by what they're doing."

By default, Wedgwood told me, that VOIP is turned off for anyone who isn't on the player's friends list. That AI mission director will ensure they have the opportunity to have a productive and un-harassed co-op play experience. Players will be able to play with humans without having the uncomfortable consequences of sharing an open mic with strangers in an online shooter. Ideally, the game will enhance the player's skills to a level that makes them competitive and interested in team tactics.

All that would bring players of Brink to the level of coordination of a well-tuned band.

That's quite a climb. And it's a heady endeavor.

Brink's out next spring on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. We'll know then just how high it can take us.

(QuakeCon '09 may have wrapped this weekend, but Kotaku still has more to share from it, even for gamers who don't consider themselves the target audience for QuakeCon material. Expect more from Carmack, Howard and more in the next couple of days.)

Carmack made those comments on Thursday, during the id co-founder's QuakeCon 2009 keynote speech in Dallas (aka the event that spawned the Longest Liveblog In Kotaku History).

Early in his address, he admitted that Quake Live, the multiplayer in-browser web re-make of Quake III Arena that went into open beta early this year, was not up to id's standard yet. Leaderboards and more community functionality around the game need to be improved, he said. Later, he fielded a question from the audience about the future of the game.

Carmack said he did not think the game could survive on Internet advertising alone, the only revenue-generator currently in place. Instead, he believes it will be necessary for the financial well-being of the project to offer a premium version of the game, which might allow players to host games on their own servers. Web ads won't suffice.

The Quake Live project is grander than Carmack said he had envisioned, which may be as much a factor in spurring this need for player payment as a weak online ad market. But the game, at its base, will remain free, he noted.

Carmack said the "beta" tag will be removed from the game soon, as problems with leaderboards and other tech are resolved. Mac and Linux versions are planned to go live this coming week.

Early in his talk Carmack said that the next year would prove whether Quake Live is a success. Later, when answering that audience question, he said the game wouldn't be able to be deemed a failure for two years. He hopes such a pronouncement won't be necessary, of course.

He said the game has been popular, with half of those who register for it returning to play it at least once a month.

This experiment will continue, with some tinkering that users may need to pay for.

Brink is the Bethesda-published game from the makers of Enemy Territory Quake Wars, Splash Damage. The studio's chief, Paul Wedgwood, took the same stage from where John Carmack addressed the QuakeCon 2009 faithful earlier this week to drive the first public demo of the game.

Set in the future on Earth, Brink depicts two factions — resistance and security — at war over the floating and failed eco-paradise city of Ark . Maps from that city are the battlefields of the game, with major objectives associated with each map that comprises the game's two single-player campaigns. Any of the game can be played alone or with other players dropping in to take control of squadmates.

Wedgwood entered yesterday's demo in a map set at the so-called Container City, the one seen in the second screenshot here. An in-engine cut-scene quickly established the arrival of his character and two AI-controlled members of his squad. I entered the hall where Wedgwood was doing the demo too late to catch the main mission objective. But it was obvious that the squad was going to infiltrate a hostile zone, with orders to proceed inside. The Container City was full of corrugated tin walls and toppled shipping containers, a mess of a sector inspired by the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Wedgwood was playing as security, decking his character in a blue uniform and face-paint, and shades, accoutrements that may be among the cosmetic unlockables that will show other players who is good at this game.

As an operative-class fighter, Wedgwood plunged into a firefight, using his sub machine gun to shoot at resistance fighters in the region. He didn't have to be an operative. And he didn't have to keep playing one. The essence of Brink is playing as a multi-class squad, taking on class-specific missions and changing class in the heat of battle if need be. An individual player's missions — tasks, really, that the player does within the context of the larger battle they've entered — are generated on the fly.

In the situation being demoed, Wedgwood pulled up a radial menu that showed several available missions for his character class, specific to the current fight. Missions grant experience points which can be used to get better items. One mission, for 300 experience points, involved interrogating an enemy. Selecting it produced an arrow at the top of the screen that guided Wedgwood to a downed enemy. Finding the enemy, Wedgwood's character produced an iPhone-a-like in his left hand and transformed it into something that looked more like an electric-shock device. He extracted his info; his character's right hand popped a thumbs up, and Wedgwood pulled up a menu to browse more missions.

Throughout the demo, the game sported the visual signatures of a first-person shooter, like the on-screen barrel of the player's gun. Less common was its adoption of a visual element seen in last year's first-person free-running game Mirror's Edge. Wedgwood's character could amble up a crate, vault over a wall, his hero more athletic and acrobatic than most first-person shooter protagonists.

Remaining an operative, Wedgwood selected a 10 xp/second mission to escort a bot. This led him to a large, golf-cart-size rolling robot. The longer he stayed with it, the more points he gained. Then he took a mission to change into an engineer, for 250 points. To do that mission, a guide arrow led him back to a controlled command post. He arrived, changed to an engineer and immediately selected a mission to repair a crane (500xp). Engineers have repair and construction abilities, and can lay mines. At this point, two other developers joined and took control of Wedgwood's two squad-mates.

Wedgwood explained that the game would keep generating contextual missions that suited the classes of the three controlled characters. They assisted each other until reaching a narrative choke point that cued an in-engine cut-scene and a cliffhanger — the three troopers discovering something surprising that we couldn't see.

Brink already looks very good. It boasts the level of graphical detail up there with a Call of Duty and approaching even a Killzone 2, but with a more diverse color palette than Sony's drab first-person shooter. The area Wedgwood was fighting in was densely packed, a tighter theater of war than seen in some of the flashy games just mentioned. It's a compliment to the art direction and graphical prowess that it was surprising to hear that game runs on modified id tech, Wedgwood said, evolved from what his studio developed with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Wedgwood's demo concluded to rousing applause. It was fitting given the heritage of the project and the new corporate reality of the company behind QuakeCon 2009. Brink's development studio, Splash Damage, has long worked closely with id. And, months ago, Brink was announced to be published by Bethesda, the company that subsequently bought id weeks before the big show.

This may have been the ideal game for QuakeCon '09. The crowd loved it.

Brink is set for release in the spring of 2010 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Scoring a headshot in a shooter is, after all the most celebrated action in many first-person shooters.

So what is a headshot on wheels in Rage?

I had Matt Hooper, design lead at id as well as creative director Tim Willis and art director Stephan Martiniere stumped for but a moment

"We have discovered that people love running into stuff," Willits said.

"There's something very rewarding about doing those head-on maneuvers and the guy goes flying," Hooper added.

Speed helps. "There's something satisfying about just pushing up on the accelerator," Martiniere said.

The vehicles take damage in Rage from these head-on collisions, but Willits said that ramming like that is both the most effective and most fun way to take out enemy vehicles.

You won't take that much damage, Hooper said, if you play enough to earn "the coolest of the front grills."

"Its one of the things we learned from testing," Hooper said. "It's fun to ram things."

That's the headshot. On wheels.

Developers usually ask for thirty minutes but here in the second biggest state of the Union, in the 400,000 square foot QuakeCon 2009 hotel, the Gaylord Texan, the development studio behind one of the biggest games of all time wanted to show me their new project.

But for all the talk of scale — for all the mathematics that have dominated the talk about id's next game, Rage, and its amazing technological capabilities — the game demo I got from id was surprisingly focused on nuance, art and color.

Rage is shooting and driving, gun rage and road rage. It's been designed to be swift to its action, to not waste gamers' time, to never let players be lost, and to be gorgeous.

Id's Matt Hooper and Tim Willits took turns controlling a demo that they presented for me in several parts, in a small meeting room at the Gaylord a day before this big shooter-centric convention began. They used an Xbox 360 controller to steer a PC build.

First they ventured into the game's wasteland. Ambling through the dusty, Arizona-style desert, Willits took control of the game's hero — a man never named, in the id tradition of letting the player feel that they are the hero. The game's graphical beauty is arresting, as can be seen in the QuakeCon '09 Rage trailer. The developers talked constantly throughout my demo about creating a game that looks great. Hooper described aspects of the landscape being created to please the eye, of the physical pacing of the character through the world designed to expose the players to grand and lovely sites. "The goal for Wellspring was to make it as gorgeous as possible," art director Stephan Martiniere told me. Good aesthetics are a priority.

Even the people are an achievement. In an interview later, id co-founder John Carmack raved to me that Rage is the first id game to contain "real people," humans rendered with the fidelity to give them life and personality.

A first look at Rage immediately brings to mind the other action-shooter set in a wasteland, Borderlands, though Rage is more of an action-centric game while Borderlands has the player gaining experience points as it calculates damage for every shot. Rage is smoother, more detailed and more organic-looking than the attractive, slightly cartoon-styled Gearbox game.

Rage's wasteland is not post-nuclear. An asteroid hit the Earth, its arrival sending selected citizens of the world into underground bunkers for a humanity-preservation effort called Project Eden. Our hero's bunker is hit with an earthquake; he get out years later than planned, in a jumpsuit and into a world turned Mad Max. There's Fallout to all that; a coincidence, Rage's creators say.

In the wasteland, Willits found a man in a shack named Crazy Joe whose face wrinkled and arms waved with a more authentic elasticity than people in most other games. If current tech often makes characters look to be made of plastic, Rage mixes in some rubber, more closely approximating the movement of bone, muscle and flesh.

We were in the wasteland to see some killing. Outside of Crazy Joe's shack, Willits used a quick-select option to wield the Wingstick, a boomerang of distant death-dealing potential. One far away mutant lost his life this way. The vistas of Rage are impressive, worthy of a postcard from America's Southwest. But they are all the more impressive when one's weapon flies visibly far into that distance and then comes back. The sense of witnessing what could be a mere backdrop painting is replaced by the belief in a continuous, reachable, touchable landscape ahead.

We went to town, a place called Wellspring that combines the look of the Old West with a cramped Chinese village. Hooper raved about significant characters being rendered to look and dress and sound like unique people. He spoke also of exploration and crafting, picking up items and making new ones using a few key components. There's Fallout to all that too, I noticed (he didn't mention), but crafting in this game can be done anywhere, not just at a workbench. That's fitting, as Hooper kept describing the game as one that's designed to waste a minimal amount of time. He wants players to be able to see and do things with immediacy. The id guys steered the demo to Wellspring's mayor, who gave the player plans to build RC-controlled bomb-carts and sends the player to a bandit-controlled base be liberated.

Usually, the player will have to drive everywhere, though that's not a contradiction to id's goal of minimal time-wasting. Hooper said the distance between Wellspring and the based in this mission "isn't just happenstance." It's not a randomly or even mathematically programmed arrangement of sectors. It's designed to pace the player through the action, like a good action movie. And the drive there can be expected to be exciting. For the demo, the id guys loaded right to the base, but driving elements they showed at other moments made clear how such a journey would proceed. The player gains a garage of vehicles, a four-wheel ATV, later an armored sedan or, as shown playable in the demo, a dune buggy. These vehicles can be improved and armed, the better to fend off enemy vehicles in the wasteland. When Willits was driving through the desert at one point, he was being tailed by two enemies. A green circle emerged around his dune buggy to serve as a radar warning for approaching cars. Yellow triangles in the circle pointed to the vehicles hot in pursuit.

Driving's in third-person in this game. Shooting is in first-person. You'll see your hero in his car, but not on his feet. Those perspectives — and those perspectives only, since Willits is leaning against having a hood-camera option for races — are set for Rage. That's because those perspectives are what the developers feel is optimal for the driving and shooting gameplay they have. Again, it's all efficiency and best user experience. Hooper said he's determined to make sure that the driving controls feel natural to shooter players, even, so that FPS gamers won't feel like they're being asked to learn a whole new scheme.

Back to the mission the mayor gave us, we got to this base outside Wellspring, ready to craft remote-control buggies. As open as the game had seemed until this point — and even this base can be visited at any time instead of just when the plot calls for it — the interior offered a return to more traditional id level design. It had corridors and enemies running through them. Hooper, now in control showed off the ability to lay down turrets, to send a spider-robot on a killing spree ahead and, less purposefully, for the Wingstick to get caught in another room because it flew so far away. It won't magically snap back. You have to get it. Enemies wielded their own radio-controlled bombs, one bad guy standing behind green glass with the big controller for his little toy-car-bomb in his two hands. Hooper used his own remote bomb to detonate a portion of the base's interior, allowing him to progress to reaches off-limits to any player wandering into the zone prematurely. He used a cross bow for an optional stealth kill. He used shotguns and pistols for more obvious assaults. He shot the armor off one enemy brute, piece by piece. Had the base been cleared out and the player left, mutants might take over later. There's a flow of life in this world and a reason to return, Hooper said.

Willits took back over to show the game's racing. He found a race promoter in Wellspring standing on a box with a megaphone. Behind him, a burly guy in a shirt painted with a checkered flag occupied a booth. He was ready to dole out races. Rage's races are vehicle specific and, Hooper said, could draw from any of the vehicle elements in the game, allowing for RC Bomb races, jump competitions and who knows what else. Willits played a more conventional three-lap desert dune buggy race made more dangerous with armed competition. It was called the South Highway Combat Rally. During his laps, Willits could collect ammo and speed pick-ups. Enemy shots and car bumps rolled his buggy rolled a few times, but he still won in a minute, 40 seconds. He earned race certificates for winning and a bonus for eliminating one competitor. He could spend those tickets on vehicle repairs and upgrades.

The final section of Rage I was shown was one of those classic locked-room video game carnivals of death. The bulbous TV producer behind something called Mutant Bash TV had our hero locked in a series of rooms, attacked by lanky mutants, while circus music played. The first room had the enemies throwing fireballs. Clearing that allowed the player to walk to the next room, this one jungle-themed with a gorilla statue spinning its blades around the room while mutants flung themselves into the scene via overhanging bars. Then there was a big slot machine to shoot. Then a Kraken level with spikes popping out of the floor as mutants emerge. And, finally, a Big Daddy-scaled boss with a thick tentacle for a right arm. He fired that arm at the player like he was snapping a towel at them. The whole thing took three minutes, forty-five seconds to complete. The reward was $877 dollars, for 46 kills. And the player can keep coming back, their best scores shared through online leaderboards. (id isn't talking about any multiplayer beyond that; when I asked Willits if players should expect id-standard multiplayer he said that the multiplayer is still being worked through and kept secret, that players can think now of Rage as having a rich single-player experience.)

There was a monster closet joke in there somewhere. Monster closets were that old id staple, where enemies hid behind walls, bashed out and mauled the player. They made it into Doom III, by which time some of that game's players criticized them as being archaic. Id gets it. While walking through the Bash TV level, we got a face full of a monster closet. Right in front of our hero a closet sprang open and a dummy monster popped out. Harmless and humorous. No enemy encounters in this game seemed that cheap.

That was an hour of Rage. Did it need the hour? The sprawl suited it. The game appears to break few conventions and may suffer this season from being compared to games out last year and, in Borderlands' case, this October. But as it heads to its when-it's-done release date far off in who knows what year, it will have a chance to clear the pack. I've seen no game that, in this realistic style, looks so good and has a landscape so rich with visual splendor.

This launch trailer was shown off yesterday during QuakeCon's epic keynote, covered by our very own Stephen Totilo live. The trailer may have been slightly eclipsed by the first in-depth look at Rage, but only one of those games can be in your hands in less than five days.

Wolfenstein Launch Video Trailer [Game Videos]

The first is the classics line which includes Wolfenstein 3D, which will be getting the ability to download user created levels in a future update. Next for that line will be Doom 3D, which John Carmack said will support local wifi multiplayer. Carmack said during today's Quakecon press conference, that future classics coming to the iPhone will include Quake II, Quake Arena and even, potentially, Doom 3.

The second line of titles are role-playing games like Wolfenstein RPG, which just hit the iPhone.

The third line of games headed for the iPhone are titles designed from the ground up for the Apple device. That includes, Carmack, a Rage-themed game, perhaps a racer. Carmack said that he believes that Rage game engine Id Tech 5 can run on the iPhone 3Gs

"Potentially that's eight iPhone titles," Carmack said. "I would expect an iPhone title from id every other month and that's going to be neat."

Two of id's recent iPhone releases can now be had for cheap, with Wolfenstein 3D marked down to 99 cents and Doom Resurrection marked down to $2.99 USD. The latter might be a wise purchase now, as the forthcoming Doom Resurrection 1.1 update will add a new challenge game mode and one new level.

If that's more inline with you consider appropriate pricing for an iPhone game, then you'd better make those purchases snappy. Those mark downs will only last as long as QuakeCon does. It's all over Sunday.

id's other new iPhone release, Wolfenstein RPG, can be had at the regular price of $4.99, if your pockets go a little deeper.

Keep an eye on the QuakeCon liveblog for more exciting news than this.

Good thing Rage has all of those gun-toting cars thrown into the mix.

And for good measure, here's a shot of Doom II for Xbox Live Arcade as well, on display at this year's QuakeCon.

Expect an official announcement soon with the QuakeCon 2009 press conference about to get underway. Don't forget, we'll be liveblogging the event on the site.

"It was a hold over from the Brew and Java development of the game," Hollenshead said. "Wolfenstein has been fighting censorship since 1992 when Nintendo made us change the blood to green and the dogs to rats.

"Some day people may realize this is a game and it's supposed to be fun and we're making fun of these things, not endorsing them."

id decided to take out references to Nazis because of concerns raised by cell phone carriers for the earlier version of the game. When it came time to move the title over to the iPhone it got a new look, but Hitler remained mustache free.

"We wanted to be consistent with the versions," said Hollenshead, who also happens to sport a soulpatch.

The issues id faced with mobile phone development will soon be coming to an end, Hollenshead added.

"Doom 2 RPG may be our last Brew and Java game we develop in-house," he said. "We're are shifting our mobile development toward the iPhone."

That means iPhone and iPod Touch gamers can expect the developer to start looking more at some of the new tech coming out for the platform including multiplayer gaming and "other ways" to build the community around a game.

Hollenshead said he would be making some iPhone announcements later today during the QuakeCon 2009 press conference. Make sure to check back on Kotaku for our live coverage of the event.

[UPDATE: I should have just called this Quake Arena Arcade. Sorry about the "Quake Live" confusion.]

This top picture shows a bit of both with an official of some sort playing Doom II on an Xbox 360 while wearing a shirt that says Quake Arena Arcade.

The keynote is just a few hours away, we'll be blogging it live, but until then Totilo has walked through QuakeCon and witnessed constructions he never imagined. Behold the things gamers will build.

Doom II with an Xbox 360 controller.
It's the fake Alamo at the Gaylord Texan, home of QuakeCon 2009.
Lounging in the exhibition hall.
Your deputy editor wearing Gameskulls' $90 helmet-headphones. Better noise-canceling, they tell me!
Computers glow at QuakeCon. Or have liquid sloshing through them. Or are built to look like Galaga spaceships, as you'll see....
The Ventrilo racing pick-up.
The QuakeCon rules.
More QuakeCon rules.
Here's the Super Mario PC Nintendo never made. Also spotted someone rolling in a tower painted with Link,
The Lego Quake PC. Unofficial.
Lord of the Rings, maybe?
This one befuddled me, some sort of Nvidia special PC that had a Star Trek sign next to it.
Your Galaga PC of the day.
The Galaga guts.
And, of course, the Craftsman tool-chest PC.
The suitcase PC? Or was this a bomb I was supposed to defuse? Too late?
These people are having fun in the BYOC (bring your own computer) main hall.
And some Intel cards to wrap us up.