Open Letter to ID’s John Carmack RE: Rage

Dear Mr. Carmack,

I have been a fan of ID since elementary school, and have played every game from Commander Keen to Quake III. I have owned copies of Doom for Dos, Windows 95, iPhone, Motorola Doom RPG, XBOX 360 and I even once hacked an iPod to run a Linux version. I found what you were able to accomplish as young as 21, and most of the things I have heard you say about game design and innovation to be a consistent source of inspiration.

I say this all mainly because I would love it if you could take the time to read this and not dismiss it as the normal trolling fanfare any game can expect to receive.

Before I get to the real point, I have some basic questions:

1. Why can I not shoot through 1/2 inch thick wood planks with fully automatic weapons?
2. There are all of these cool weapons the guys I am killing are wielding, why can I not pick them up after they are dead?
3. Look at all these amazing places... wait I can't explore them further because of this six inch high retaining wall blocking my way...
4. Why is it that this enemy doesn't flinch while I shoot him three times in the chest, yet stumbles all over himself when I barely clip his arm?
5. Why isn't this game any fun?

I very much understand this isn't an action rpg, or a realistic war shooter. I get the genre you are trying to portray the game from. That being said, for a shooter to be cutting edge in this day and age there are a few things it has to have:

1. Some level of destructible environments.
2. Some level of realistic terrain behavior.
3. Some level of responsive modeling: i.e. shooting an arm off, blowing a leg off etc. etc.

There are many points in the positive column and the negative column, and I could spend hours dissecting the game. I believe the core of the issue with it is outlined above. It lacks an immersive quality, and a consistent payoff.

Before the iPod was first demo'd Steve Jobs noticed when the headphones were plugged in there was no clicking sound. He made the team go back and change the jack so it had a clicking sound. He knew that sound and feeling was satisfying, and helped with the immersive quality of listening to music on the go. The same holds true for Rage. When I shoot an enemy square between the eyes I expect his head to explode. If I see an enemy on the other side of a wooden board I expect to be able to shoot him through said board.

Every time a player runs up against something they intuitively feel they should be able to do, and can't, it reminds them that they are just playing a game. You don't want that. You want the player to forget they are playing a game.

The environment is beautifully sculpted, but that was a poor allocation of resources. You could have pulled half of the detail away and no one would have noticed. That time would have been better spent on the responsiveness of the models and the terrain.

I don't want ID to fall into oblivion, not only because of my nostalgic loyalty to it, but because I see it has great potential. Today Valve does everything that ID should be doing. Half-Life 2 is the game that Rage was trying to be, and at the end of the day succeeded six years earlier with a fraction of the budget. Look at Minecraft and Portal and all these other titles, the aesthetic value of the environment is the least important factor in whether or not a game is immersive. Less is more, and the player will only notice so much.

If you want to be a pioneer once again, now is your chance. Do what no one else would dare do. Fix Rage, fix all these problems with it, make it a better game and release these fixes as a patch. It will endear the ID brand to a whole new generation of gamers, and set the tone for a quality of craftsmanship and professionalism that will define the industry for the next 20 years.

UPDATE:  I changed my mind.  It's pretty cool.

Signed,

Your Lifelong Fan