With the backstory out of the way, the Rage live demo actually began as it started midway through the movie. The demo (played on a PC with an Xbox 360 controller) immediately showed the graphical detail of Rage using the new id Tech 5 engine. The game looks incredible with highly detailed character models, realistic lighting, and terrific art and character design. It's certainly several steps up from id's Doom III engine technology (now known as id Tech 4).

The demo showed the blasted wasteland quite well and our player character was guided to a shack just behind him. Inside was Crazy Joe, who chatted with the character and giving more info on the game's back story. Animations on the character were almost spooky in their realism; we had to remind ourselves this wasn't CGI but a live game demo.

After the conversation, the demo shifted to one of Rage's big features: vehicle gameplay and combat. id developed games have rarely used drivable vehicles so this is something new for the company. We were told that the player character will have to actually find the parts to build their first vehicle (a dune buggy) but for the QuakeCon demo the vehicle was already completed. The character got inside and started driving in the wasteland. It wasn't long before we got into combat with other marauding vehicles but some firepower from twin mounted machine guns made fairly quick work of the AI enemies.

We then moved into the next portion of the demo as we entered Wellspring, one of the communities that is set in the Rage world. Here we could relax a bit and perhaps repair our vehicle, speak to other NPCs to accept or deny new missions, sell or buy items and more. One of the missions we accepted was to take care of some marauders that basically are making life bad for one of the residents.