This is an *Avalanche* title (just cause 1-4, Mad Max, Zero Generation, that open world hunting game), not an iD game (tho Beth's iD team have worked on the 'shoot' elements). The Avalanche engine (for they are an engine company foremost, like Dice) is getting pretty ancient, as coporate lack of success means Avalanche have had to target a broad base for their titles.
Rage 2 began life as Mad Max 2, but then WB canceled that game, and Bethesda stepped in. Given Zenimax's love of legal action- most recently against a dev who dared to reuse some of their code from Fallout Shelter, I'd like to know how much Mad Max (the first) code is in Rage 2 - a lot of people here backed the Zenimax win over the Westworld, not understanding how important it is that devs can use their own code methods in multiple projects.
Rage 2 is to Mad Max as Westworld was to Fallout Shelter. Both games with massively derived code bases from the earlier title.
Anyway, Avalanche is not providing 'bleeding edge' examples of their engine, so honestly the required specs for good enough performance should be quite modest today. The real question is how good the game is going to be, given that Avalanche really hasn't done anything amazing since Just Cause 2 (and even Just Cause 2 was clearly inferior in many ways to Mercenaries 2 as a game- tho obviously JC2 had a far better engine at the time). Mad Max was OK, tho the melee combat was barely acceptable.
I really wish WB hadn't cancelled Mad Max 2. I think Avalanche had gained a lot of experience from the first one- and the lore of that IP is vastly better than Beth's Rage. Mad Max only gave us the one region. Even the (new) move had more than that. And we can see from what is now Rage 2 how Avalanche had moved forward to a far bigger world with far more regions for Mad Max 2.
Rage 2 reminds me of People can Fly's stinker, Bulletstorm. Another 'jokey' 'sadistic' shooter where 'mindless murder' was the name of the game rather than the standard 'good guys' vs 'bad guys' morality tale that makes this genre (film and game and novel) work.
And remember this, iD so lost its way with the original Rage, the company went down and had to sell itself to Bethesda (who eventually helped finish Rage, tho it was one of Beth's less successful games). Rage, across time, had the most outrageous dev budget- yet delivered a mediocre engine, a pointless texture management system, and a most unremarkable gameplay. But it *did* run 'well' on the Xbox360 which was Carmack's (insane) stated design goal.
Carmack had solved a *very* difficult texture algorithm problem that gave killer visual results on iPhones and very limited VRAM consoles of the day- at the cost of totally breaking the texture and model and level design artist part of the game development pipeline. And the pure irony of Rage megatexture was this. Most textures were just repeated anyway, cos the artists had neither the time nor the inclination to take advantage of the 'every pixel is unique' system.
But Megatexture is gone today- from a CS POV, when modern dev methods are considered, combined with increased texture resolution and increased VRAM resources, it is mathematically wrong-headed. Rage 2 uses modern JIT texture streaming.
Here's the funny thing. The original Rage went up against the original Borderlands family and lost badly, and the same seems set to repeat this year. But then Borderlands has a 'heart', which gimmick shooters like Rage and Bulletstorm lack.
Mind you, I used to think the one thing Beth published titles did have was 'polish'. But I've been trying 'The Evil Within 2', which is one of the most unpolished coding atrocities I've experienced in years. If Rage 2 turns around Beth's technical and quality control and game design decline (given that Beth has had a ton of input in *independent* dev Avalanche's project) it will be a genuine miracle.
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