border rage

No, not *that* border. I was just trying to come up with a clever title that reflected how similar the environments in Borderlands:

http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-borderlands-pc/17-1552/

look to id's upcoming game Rage:

http://www.giantbomb.com/five-minutes-of-rages-dead-city/17-4026/

Now sure, there are some important stylistic differences. Rage doesn't have Borderland's cartoon-y cell shading, and Borderlands doesn't have Rage's nasty organic quality to the monsters. When I saw the Jeep-ish car thing in the Rage trailer, though, I called shenanigans. The environments, the settings look pretty similar to me.

At first I couldn't tell how Rage was supposed to be an id game. By that I mean that I wasn't absolutely blown away by the graphics at the very beginning of that trailer. It wasn't until the video showed wide shots of the gigantic city where that part of the game takes place that I realized that, yes, this was an id game, graphics and all.

Graphical quality in the previous decade was defined by lighting models (shadow volumes, "HDR," and whatnot). I think the coming decade will be defined by scale, scope and animation. Included in animation is physics (perhaps the most important animation of all). Now, the animation in Rage hasn't put me in awe yet, but it didn't offend either.

The scale of that city, though, did blow me away. It all *looked* explorable, although I'm sure it won't be. With graphics all you *really* need to do is create that illusion and then make me never need to fully explore the environment. Better if I'm so pre-occupied having fun that I never even want to explore it all.

Anyway, it looks very interesting. I'm much more interested in Rage as a tech demo than I am as a game. I don't really play that kind of game any more, but I do still enjoy me some pretty (or gross) graphics.