Design Director, Matt Hooper, recently revealed a lot of the development information about id Software’s upcoming foray into the shooting genre with Rage. The title just so happens to be the first shooting franchise developed by the company since their incredibly successful PC title Quake in 1996. So, just how long has it taken Hooper and the team at id to come up with this masterpiece? Well, it’s been in development for roughly the last six years.

Apparently, the world of Rage has changed drastically over the span of the last three years. Originally the environments were meant to be broken into many more areas that were smaller in size, but ultimately the team decided to go with two large areas that would dwarf most environments as a whole.

“Part of it was technology; part of it was what we wanted to do on the design side,” Hooper explains. “We used to have six little chunks of wasteland with discrete opportunities. Then we went with two giant but more integrated chunks. We’ve been back and forth, and we moved environments around.”

“We found that with some of the more opportunistic things for the player, like little modular sewers, he can go in and achieve something even without a specifically-crafted job that he has to do. A sniper mission is something that we’re putting into the game just because the world looks so beautiful up high, and there’s a sniper rifle. It just fit, so we’ve added those things in.”

Considering the development length and the team behind the game’s past success, it should be safe to assume that Rage should deliver on all fronts to any gamer that picks the title up. I know for sure it’s one game I’m looking forward to.