Digital Foundry: Rage isn't just a shooter, you've got vehicles, you've got driving. This is a new discipline for you. What was your approach?

Tim Willits: Lots of prototyping and iteration, especially on the vehicles component. Let me tell you, that was way more difficult than we thought it was and I have way more respect now for the guys that make those racing games. But again, we tried to play everything, but really it's all about working on a system... we would just go and mess with all the variables, changing the physics until it felt right.

We'd drive around little square boxes to start with until those evolved into real cars. It's was really tricky, but it feels good now. It's well integrated into the game, we don't force you to do it more than you need to. Yeah, not to toot my own horn but I think I did really well integrating that concept into the game.

Digital Foundry: What about the physics simulation? How realistic is it?

Tim Willits: It's all about what feels good. We actually started down the reality path and that didn't feel good. Whenever we hit the crossroads between reality and fun, we'd always take the fun route. For instance, when you go off a jump, you can air-control your car which of course is not realistic but it's way more fun. When you drive around you want to feel like Bo Duke driving around in the General Lee, you don't want to feel like a London taxi driver.

It works well for the game which is a bit over the top, like our characters, like our gunplay, it's well integrated. There's a journalist who wrote an article about five things he liked about Rage and number one was the "jackass vehicle physics". I was like... "Perfect!" One journalist said to me that he played Rage and he spent more time racing there than he did in the driving game he had to review. He wouldn't tell me the game!

One of the cool things about Rage: in a normal driving game, you choose your favourite car and you go race. You do the same thing in Rage, you win, you upgrade your car and on the wasteland you're a badass and now you can go on a mission, you can blow these bad guys up. You have that connection. You have that reward and you use it in a fun, meaningful way throughout the campaign. That connection and those rewards for that side of the game really pay off well.

Digital Foundry: Going back to the virtual texturing for a moment, you've got to support hard drives, you've got to support optical drives, you've got to support systems that don't have any hard drives at all...

Tim Willits: Which is tricky, I can tell you. I recommend that everyone buys a hard drive. Buy them used on eBay!

The introduction of vehicles and a vast open world in the form of the Wasteland definitely sets Rage apart from the more scripted, linear first person shooters that have defined the market over the last few years.