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1. The Assault Rifle starts and stays the best all round weapon so upgrade it as quickly as you can

While Rage 2 throws all sorts of wonderful tools in your face that encourage all sorts of experimental fun, you basically starts the game with all the tools you need. Namely the Ranger Assault rifle. It’s got good damage, high accuracy with minimal recoil or spread and there’s plenty of ammo around. Even without touching any upgrades it’s extremely powerful whether you’re toe to toe with enemies at close range, chipping them away from distance, or taking on one of the game’s lumbering giant bosses. For that reason while there’s are some insanely fun weapons to use, they only really add colour for the most part. Upgrading the Assault Rifle will do things like increase reload times, fire rate and magazine capacity, add armour breaking rounds and even feed ammo back into the clip on kills. All of which enhances a weapon that can already take you through the whole game. 

2. Enemy difficulty is more or less meaningless

Often when you enter a bandit camp or any other location on the map you’ll see an ‘Enemy Difficulty’ flash up, rating the danger level out of 10. Ignore it. While the game presents the idea of area having a level that indicates a threat via the skull icon on the meter you’ll never really encounter anything you can’t deal with – from hulking giant mutants to camps swarming with goons, you can pretty much deal with anything easily using just the dodging Dash ability and assault rifle, both of which you unlock by default. Anything else you get on top of that only further renders the idea of a difficulty level a moot point.  

3. Don’t forget to craft it if you need it

There’s crafting materials all over Rage 2’s map, but there’s also a ton of ammo, grenades, Wingsticks and other usable items so it’s easy to forget you can actually make stuff. You’ll rarely actually need to though as a rule, but if on occasion you do find yourself short of something, you can go into your inventory and craft it. Specifically that’s Wingsticks, Grenades, Health Infusions, Overdrive Infusions, Ability Infusions and Turret Drones. All can be made with a combination of the mechanical, electrical, chemical and explosive components you pick up as you play. You can also level things up with schematics bought from vendors, although, much like the weapons choice, you start as powerful as you ever really need to be and will just be adding colour, rather than meaning to these options. 

4. Get the Icarus Gyrocopter fast

The Icarus Arc Gyrocopter is basically a cross between a giant drone and a motorbike that makes getting around Rage 2’s map incredibly easy. You can control the altitude and it lets you just make a direct beeline to anywhere you need to go by flying over anything and everything. It’s automatically unlocked when you reach level 7 with Dr Kvasir, who’s Search and Recover map markers mainly deal with Nanotrites – the science flavoured doohickies that give you all your powers. That means ticking off anything blue on the map will level up your affinity with him. This includes opening Arcs, locating Fentrite meteorites and finding Ranger Echos. However, opening Arc Chests also count, so check the Items of Interest for all the other activities like Bandit Dens as they can contain Arc chests almost at random. As soon as you get Kvasir up to level 7 the Gyrocopter will unlock in your inventory and you can call it in from the Vehicle menu. 

5. The best Rage 2 perks will make life easier

While picking some perks will depend on your taste and playstyle, the best Rage 2 perks are clear cut advantages that everyone will benefit from. These are earned from the Projects menu that relate to the three main characters you work with in the game – John Marshall, Loosum Hager and Dr Kvasir. You unlock perk tiers by completing missions and map markers relating to each character’s specialty, which are, respectively, Kill & Destroy (pink), Capture & Control (yellow) and Search & Recover (blue). These are the perks that you need to make a priority from each: 

• John Marshall – Bullet Bag and Throwables Bag perks that increase what you can carry, as well as the Tactical Movement Boost that increases your movement speed while aiming down the sights. 
• Loosum Hager – Wingstick Lock On and Wingstick Redirect to better control your death frisbee, multiple Perks to use less items when crafting, and a Lucky Feltzer perk to gain more Feltrite from crates 
• Dr Kvasir – Multiple Tracking Perks to make things like Storage Crates and Feltrite easier to find. There’s also a Feltrite Drill perk that will extract more from the nodes you find around the world. 

6. Get the Smart Rocket Launcher sooner rather than later

The arcs scattered around Rage 2 are full of useful weapons and abilities that make combat easier and more fun. None of them are more useful than the Smart Rocket launcher which fires swarms of homing missiles. Because it tracks targets and largely operates as a fire and forget weapon it makes larger enemies encounters, like bosses and the giant turret sentry Authority towers, much easier. Upgrading it lets you increase the amounts of targets you can acquire, as well as things like reload speed and magazine capacity. You’ll get it by opening the Strongbox Ark which you’ll find here on the map: 

7. Look out for Mutant Bash balloons and speaker towers to earn free Mutant Bash cash 

You’ll encounter Mutant Bash TV as part of the story and, after that, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to spend any extra time killing for cash. However, you can still earn MBTV tokens to spend with the MBTV vendors in one of two ways. Firstly you’ll occasionally find yellow balloons around the map that will explode when you shoot them and drop a MBTV crate full of the same goodies you’d earn by competing. There are also MBTV speakers making hard to miss announcements that also have chests you can grab. 

8. Upgrade the Phoenix to take down convoys more easily 

The Phoenix is your default car and a good general option even if you unlock other vehicles. If you’re going to go after the conveys that roam the world you’ll want to unlock its Cruise Missile and Blast abilities. These will make stripping away the armor, weak points and shielding on enemy vehicles much easier and blow things up quicker, avoiding any lengthy chases to the far end of the map. 

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That’s why, for this sequel, the two studios have collaborated in an effort to play to each other’s strengths. It feels like a true jam session, with Avalanche’s expertise in designing unhinged open worlds colliding with Id’s uncanny ability to design some of the best feeling weapons in the games industry. But how is something so outrageous being tied together? By one of the most ridiculous storylines to arrive this year, of course! 

In an effort to find out just how out of control Rage 2 is going to be when it launches on May 14, we sat down with Avalanche’s narrative director, Odd Ahlgren, and the studio’s senior narrative designer, Loke Wallmo, to get some insight into the mastery behind the chaos.

Rewriting the history of Rage

Rage 2 is a sequel, but it feels quite fresh in terms of how it follows on from the first game. How do you approach that from the ground level, narratively speaking?

Odd Ahlgren: The first thing we thought about when we were gonna pitch our ideas for Rage 2 was ‘where do we want to put ourselves in the history of Rage?’ Because we really liked the first game, we wanted to keep it in the same universe. But we wanted to add our own spin to it, and that’s why we [set] it 30 years in the future from when Rage ended. A lot of things have happened since then; the wasteland moves in faster cycles than our world, so there are remnants of what we saw in Rage 1 but it has changed dramatically and looks very, very different. In doing it this way, we could maintain the basic feeling and ambience of the first game, but add our own crazy twists to it.

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Loke Wallmo: The giant ECOPods that terraformed parts of the world to greenery [after Rage] allow us to have more variation, and allows us, yeah like [Odd] is saying – a fresh start is what we really want for the franchise, and that’s really what Bethesda and Id wants as well. So we felt it fit really well with what everybody wanted, so it was an easy start from our perspective.

OA: Then we have to figure out how everything has changed over those decades. How the factions have changed, how the enemies have changed, how your allies have changed.

How involved has Avalanche’s narrative team been in the production of Rage 2 to make this happen?

OA: From the very beginning – from the early concept phase. We felt that it’s two things that sit right next to each other – there’s the gameplay and there’s the story. It this case, [narrative] feeds so much into the art and sound. So art – especially art – and narrative have been working really, really close on Rage 2 from the get-go. It’s really good. It means that everybody’s on board, that way we don’t end up in a situation where we have a lot of beautiful things but nobody knows what they are there for or why they’re so great looking.

Building a better wasteland

Are there a lot of little stories to uncover all throughout the world?

LW: Yeah, we’ve sort of spread it out all over the place so it’s kind of like more of a sandbox. You’re going to a certain place and you find something there and it has a context and story.

OA: Most people you meet, most stuff that you see, even enemies that you never really talk to, they have a backstory and they have a reason to be there, and they have a reason to behave in the outrageous way that they do. Most of these things are explained if you look close enough.

Avalanche Studios: Trekking the open world

Mad Max (2015)

Telling an original story about the titular road warrior, Mad Max marries vehicle-based action and third-person combat surprisingly well – though the world is as bleak and brown as you might expect. 

TheHunter: Call of the wild (2017)

The open world of TheHunter speaks for itself, giving you a sandbox in which to, well, hunt. Your own stalking and hunting connects you to the world.

Just Cause 4 (2018)

Set on the fictional island of Solís, where action hero Rico has to battle a rival army through its crazy biomes. Environment variety is important to Avalanche, and that shows here.

How do you go about making the areas distinct from one another?

OA: Those things usually have an explanation in the context of the game world.

LW: Something we’ve tried to do is to figure out who lives in each place, why are they there, and why do they hate everybody else?

OA: Yeah, you come into a town or a city and do they have police? You know, those are the questions [we ask ourselves]. So we have one town where they don’t have police, because they’re a lawless town and people don’t kill each other because everybody’s armed – that’s the only reason that people don’t kill each other in it. Another town they of course have guards everywhere, because it’s that type of town. We try to approach things from the bottom up. Of course, it’s not a simulation – we’re not making a city simulator – but it’s that at least we’ve given it that thought, that vibe that ‘here is this, and this, and this, and it works according to these rules.’

LW: Something that I think Rage put a lot of focus on, that we’ve tried to maintain in Rage 2, is the crazy characters that show up and have their own motivations for doing things and asking things of you. That’s something that we want to spread out through the world a little bit as well. There’s a strong part of that in the main story of the game, in the fight against The Authority. But that also echoes out throughout the rest of the world as well.

With areas like bandit camps – like Stilt Town, that we’ve seen in recent demos – you’ve mentioned there are little stories revolving around why they’re there. At what part of the process do you come up with locations like this?

LW: There’s pretty dynamic back-and-forth between the world and location builders and us. They come up with a great idea or vice versa, and I think in a lot of cases we sort of get inspired by each other. Like, say they want to build an enemy base on top of a bridge and we’re like, ‘okay, can this be some old Trading Post that’s been taken over by bandits?’ and then we sort of go from there. It’s a lot of back and forth.

OA: Usually, it’s also if the world designers feel that they should have [more] information hubs spread out into the world. Those could only be notes, or we can create a cool story around each and every one of them to make it better in the world. We usually try to do it that way.

LW: I have to say, Bethesda and Id has been pushing for the story… They knew that they wanted a strong story component in the game, and pushed for that from the very beginning.

As fans of their games, what’s it like working with Bethesda and Id?

LW: It’s really strange for me. My way into the games industry has been like building Doom levels back in the ’90s, so it’s like that’s where the interest comes from. Even though I’m building levels today, it’s still weird to work with Id who has been like such a big part of my gaming life. That’s humbling in a way. And cool! Cause they’re really nice guys!

OA: It is humbling. I gotta say that it can still get you sometimes like “Wow, we’re working for those guys.” But it’s also hard to love those games, and then create a post-apocalyptic video game for the same publisher that’s not that game, and trying to avoid getting inspired by that game. But I think that we’ve succeeded. We’ve created a different niche.

LW: Open world is certainly new when it comes to the Id portfolio, so we’re learning from each other a lot I think, because we both have our special interests or special backgrounds that we come from.

Do you love games with a story? Then take a look at our list of the 30 best videogame stories ever told!

The post “We wanted to add our own spin to it” – How Avalanche is building a better open world wasteland in Rage 2 appeared first on Game News.

Toward the end of the week, there was a smaller panel, dedicated 100% to Id Software and Avalanche Studios’ ultra-violent, day-glo, apocalyptic party-simulator sequel, and although a much lower-key event, it brought with it more than a few interesting news nuggets. The panel wasn’t broadcast, but I was there, ready to record the whole thing and smuggle out its facts. So I now bring you those facts. And I start with the knowledge that…

You can drive airboats 

“We have this philosophy in our company that if you can see it, you can go there, and if you go there and poke it, it will react.” That’s the Avalanche studios mantra, as explained by Rage 2 game director Magnus Nedfors, and while it starts in the realm of geography, it stretches to vehicles as well. “If it has wheels, you can drive it”.

But it now turns out that this doesn’t even end with wheels. Showing off a new, boggy environment via concept art (“This is a toxic slime swamp. And I love those”), Nedfors was asked if an airboat in the foreground was drivable, and not just a bit of evocative scenery.

“Yes, of course”, came his emphatic answer. “You can drive the hell out of that airboat”

JK Styles and Mutant Bash TV are back (but massively evolved) 

The original game’s Mutant Bash TV challenge arenas were one of its trademarks, alongside ebullient commentator JK styles. And while circumstances have changed (“Sometimes, when 30 years have passed, and there’s a huge war, people disappear. And that’s what happened to JK Styles”), both will return to Rage 2, at least in spirit.

Mutant Bash TV is back in an upgraded, evolved form, and although lost and very probably long-dead, Styles’ presence will still be felt throughout. He’s now, in cartoon form, the show’s mascot, and exists throughout every facet of Mutant Bash’s imagery. He’s “the Ronald McDonald of killing mutants”, appearing everywhere from stage furniture to the bulbous mask-heads worn by the show’s go-go dancers.  

Original hero Nicholas Raine is now a mutant death-god 

Yeah, it turns out that Raine’s efforts to violently reduce the mutant threat backfired. After killing “billions of mutants” in the Mutant Bash TV arena, it turns out that he became rather too effective a figure of fear. Now, 30 years later, although he’s missing amid a great many stories and legends, Raine has become mythologised as the mutants’ death-god.

The upshot? There are now statues to his terrible power out in the wasteland. Mutants haven’t relented in their attacks on humans, but rather upped them, dragging their victims to these death-pit locations in order to sacrifice them, hoping that this will appease their god and persuade him to pass them over. So yeah, long-story short, attempt to handle diplomacy via mass-murder, and you’ll likely get the opposite of what you wanted. Who knew!?

There are Nazi sci-fi Samurai and sexy pirate hedonists 

We also got a closer look at a couple more of Rage 2’s enemy factions during the panel. Most of the game’s demos and promotion so far have focused on the anarchic Goon Squad, but they’re only one of several very different groups with radically varied ideologies and fighting styles.

Take the Immortal Shrouded, for instance. A regimented, “military/fascist” organisation with a major focus on discipline (be that toward themselves or innocent bystanders), they’re described as having echoes of the Bushido code, albeit in a deeply twisted capacity. And that parallel follows through into their weapons and fighting style. Masters of electrified swords and cloaking devices, they sound part-samurai, park-ninja, all uptight, apocalyptic jerk. They couldn’t be more different from the Goons.

And then there’s the River Hogs. A group of swampland survivors, they’re a hedonistic bunch (“They’re feel-good crew. They like to feel good”, explains Nedfors), living a life of piracy, trade, invention, and highway crime. Also, outfits with open asses, in some cases. They live near returning character Dr. Kvasir, but apparently he doesn’t see them as too much of a threat. “They’re the kind of group that will leave you alone as long as you leave them alone, or unless you have something they want. But they want a lot of stuff.”

There’s a monster truck called the Cok Rocket, and it’s so powerful that Avalanche had to change the camera system 

“When the guys first put it in”, explains Id Software studio head Tim Willits, “they were like ‘Hey Willits, you got to check out the… the… [laughs]. So I hit boost, and the fire was filling the whole screen. It was all fire. And I was like, [gleeful yell] FIIIIIIIIRRRE! And then we had to do some camera adjustments on the, er… Cok Rocket.”

According to Nedfors, driving the Cok Rocket is so much fun that it’s “a game on its own”. This thing’s going to be iconic.

There’s a photo mode 

Asked via Twitter whether Rage 2 would accommodate this generation’s most fashionable (and creatively worthy) game feature, Nedfors confirmed:

“Yes. We will have photo mode. We will have all the fancy stuff where you put labels on, and you can write your messages, and do everything like that. You can create your own images, and share them with other people.”

More than any other upcoming game, Rage 2 feels like it demands a photo mode. Those ludicrously beautiful, neon-drenched vistas are real ‘Stop, zoom, and look’ material, and between Avalanche’s talent for explosions and the chaotic slapstick of Rage 2’s combat, this thing is guaranteed to throw up some beauties.

Wellspring is back, but it’s changed 

The original game’s first big town still exists, and you will visit it in Rage 2.

“But it’s changed”, explains Willits. “What’s really neat is that for those of you familiar with the original game, it’s definitely new, but there’s some signature architectural pieces – and even signature landscape pieces – where you’re ‘Oh, check that out!’ So it’s a lot of fun even for me to go through these new environments all ‘Oh, I remember that!’

“If you’ve never played the original, you’ll still find it beautiful, and wonderful, and amazing, but if you did, there’s some hints and throwback and imagery that will remind you of the original as well. So yes! Wellspring is back.”

There’s a “Willits Switch” cave that changes the time of day, and everyone but Tim thinks it’s stupid 

Yep. There is no good reason for this, except that Id Software studio director thought it was a cool idea, and no-one stopped him. On reflection though, it is – through its pure, gleeful absurdity – a really cool idea.

“Because the world is dynamic the time of day changes, and the weather changes”, Willits offers, while justifying his inspiration. “So one of our producers works at [Id owner] Bethesda, and I work closely with him and we work with the Avalanche guys. So I called him up and I was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea. I want to have a little secret cave somewhere in the game that you go in, and there’s just a switch. And you throw the switch and it changes the time of day’. And the guy’s like, ‘That’s the stupidest thing ever.’”

But Avalanche made it anyway. Tim has but one request of you, in exchange for this gift. “So if you find the switch in the game somewhere, that’s the Willits Switch. And [when you do find it,] say ‘This is awesome’, because so far, I’ve only heard, ‘This is really dumb.’”

Tim Willits promises that this Rage has a good ending (and has made sure to get hard evidence this time) 

The original Rage’s ending was… well it wasn’t even really an ending. The game just stopped. Protagonist Nicholas Raine fought his way to the headquarters of the oppressive Authority government, raised the buried Ark cryo-chambers containing his would-be compatriots in insurrection, and then the credits rolled. That was it. The game just stopped.

Understandably, people were furious. And they stayed furious for a very long time. Willits, having taken a lot of flack for that conclusion, is adamant that a) things are going to be better this time, and b) he’s got himself covered. Recounting his last trip to Avalanche’s studio in Sweden, when the team was working on Rage 2’s ending, he tells us,

“Okay, so when we were working on Rage 1, we were in a room, and everyone was like ‘This is fine, this is good’, and then [after the backlash] they were all ‘Eurgh, that was Willits’ ending’. So I gathered everybody up and I took a selfie, and now it’s like ‘All these people have agreed this is going to be an awesome ending’. And I emailed it to everyone. So I have proof!”

So there you go. Rage 2’s ending will be good, and if it isn’t, you can’t give Tim Willits all the blame this time. Just, you know, a chunk of it.

There’s plenty of post-launch content coming 

“The game won’t end”, pledges Nedfors, picking up from the last point. “I agree we have an end to the main story of the game, but the game doesn’t have an ending. We want to keep providing content, adding new content into the game-world over time. So the game won’t have an ending, but the story will.” 

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