Between Fallout 76, the Division 2 and Dying Light 2, it’s a good year for post-apocalyptic games. In this coming world of washed out browns, one brave developer stands on the side of bright colors.
The Id Software studio director Tim Willits said at E3: “We knew that Rage was every shade of brown. We knew that Mad Max was every shade of brown, we had gone deep into brown.” And he’s not wrong. There’s this nagging trend, ever since Fallout 1, that wastelands = brown, I don’t know why.
Avalanche and Id worked hard to differentiate Rage 2 from other games in the genre and there’s even even an in-universe explanation for the vibrancy and variety in landscape. The game follows up years after the events of Rage where the arcs, vaults of highly advanced technology, were opened allowing a kind of terraformation of Earth. It’s not so much a radiated wasteland as a dangerous, mutated new world.
“We wanted to evolve our characters with more color and diversity. Then we wanted to make the guns more colorful, and then the intensity of the game—we wanted to blow it out, to be more crazy than Rage,” Willits stated. Which as far as I’m concerned is awesome.
“We wanted a strong, identifiable look, not only from the initial design of the game but all the way to making sure that the world knows we’re here. And while it may visually jarring, it’s also apparently paying off: “People love the pink.” Oh no good sir, jarring is good, I couldn’t imagine a post-apocalyptic wasteland to not be jarring. And I certainly do love hot pink.