An 18 month old game from Id got the boot because they felt it was too dark and inhibited too many of Doom’s short comings.
From the ashes of canned survival horror game ‘Darkness’ though arose the upcoming action focused ‘Rage’. Gamers want to say ”‘I’m victorious,’ not ‘I’m not dead.’”
The game would have players crash land on an island and then bombard them with the tried and true method of making you jump, presumably by hiding beasties behind a shrubbery or two.
”We would have been keeping Doom 3’s faults,” said id’s John Carmack, speaking with Shacknews. He agreed that complaints of the ”contrived nature of monsters hiding in closets” and overly dark environments of Doom 3 were ”completely valid.”
Sales were also a factor as they believed survival horror titles just don’t do so well compared with the other genres. The game was in full swing production so making the call to give it the can was a cautious time for the studio.
”There was some fear that we would alienate the artists,” said id’s Matt Hooper. ”We started just feeling it out. There wasn’t that much of a push-back, because the coolest thing about Rage on the design side.. is that we can pull in and add these little elements.”
”There were a lot of cool aspects of Darkness,” he continued, ”especially on the psychology horror side, and some things we could have pushed for, but Rage allows us to.. to me I was just elated, because I got to do a lot more things than I would ever do in the survival horror genre.”
”You know, you want to say ‘I’m victorious,’ not ‘I’m not dead.’ It’s just a fundamentally more rewarding genre to be in,” added Carmack.
Source: Shacknews
