There was something oddly familiar about the Rage presentation at this year’s E3. No, I didn’t see it last year in Germany – well, I had seen Wellspring, but not everything else. No, I hadn’t seen it anywhere else on the web. “Where the hell had I seen it?” I asked myself... Then it dawned on me. I hadn’t seen it at all, but I had instead edited Rich’s preview from pre-E3 and he paints such a vivid picture that it was like seeing it myself. Okay, I lie, it took a phone call to Mr Walker before I realised this. Why am I telling you all this? Simple, because rather than regurgitate the same info that Rich penned to paper last month and waste your time, I’m going to focus on some of the more interesting things that Matt Hooper, Design Director, talked about – oh, and a short 4 minute clip of their “E3 exclusive” which featured an all new environment: Dead City.

As Rage presentations seem to go, Hooper started off in the wastelands and guided us through to the first in-game hub: Wellspring. “We wanted a very strong personality, we wanted to build a town that you hadn’t seen before,” says Hooper. “The coolest thing about it is that this town has this Western feel, it’s very dusty, it’s built over the well, it has its purpose in the story,” he continues.

What can we expect from other hubs though? “The next town is Subway Town,” notes Hooper, “built underneath... it’s almost got this New York subway feel... The boss of the town is almost like a Mafia boss. People are a little paler. They look different, they treat you different, they act different and it’s at a different point in the story.”

Gadgets are obviously a huge part of Rage as well – up until now we’ve seen cool things like the RC bomb-cars and the spider-turrets – but after playing a holographic mini game on the streets of Wellspring, Hooper touches on what we can expect from the rest of the game. “One of the neat things that you can see is a little hint at maybe a different type of technology that exists in the world,” says the Design Director. “We’re not going to get into that too much today, but there’s a faction called The Authority. In the second part of the game it really opens up and goes in this sci-fi sort of direction later on.”

And now for something much cooler...

“As you can see already, there is something a little different with these guys,” said Hooper about a group of British bandits called the Ghosts. “It’s not just the way they look, but the way he’s traversing on that pipe up there. What we’ve done throughout this environment, we have this dynamic traversal system. The AI basically knows where to jump into a wall-run, a wall-kick or flip.”

“We wanted to keep that just for the Ghosts. Keeping it fresh, fun and unique for the player,” says Hooper.

The main highlight of the presentation – not only because we hadn’t seen it before but because how different it was – was most definitely the newly unveiled Dead City. “We’re showing it for a couple of different reasons: it’s so different than the last environment,” harps on Hooper. “There’s a lot of attention to detail and you kind of learn what Dead City is all about; the place, the story and who lives there.”

“It happens to be occupied, mostly by mutants,” he adds

“They call it Dead City because nobody ever comes back alive,” he continues. “We’ve heard rumours of mutants, about giant things and The Authority doing experiments. Let’s see what we can find,” he says, knowing full well what we’re going to bump into.

Basically, Dead City is a devastated city with swamps, fallen skyscrapers, litter floating around its eerie calm and it’s not long before mutants pour out the nooks and crannies. Simply put, it’s a ghost town and a far cry away from the civilisation you see in Wellspring. It’s a forgotten city if ever there was one. Unfortunately for our main man, it’s not easy pickings, and after seeing off a dozen or so standard mutants, a huge hulk of a mutant comes out from the wreckages. If id’s character hadn’t been so loaded to the balls with rocket launchers and what not, I’d assume it would have been a little trickier to take this big 10 foot mutant down. If that wasn’t enough though, after you’ve seen him off you’d be mistaken to think that he was the final boss of the area, and climbing over the wreckage moments later is another mutant that is twice the size of the previous one – I’m guessing around 15-20ft high.