RAGE Is Rockstar's Secret Weapon For Grand Theft Auto 6 -

Rage is a pretty common word in video games. The root cause of broken controllers and toxic comment sections the world over, of all the modern world’s major art forms, gaming is perhaps the one most familiar with rage. RAGE could also be the key to gaming’s future – you’ll notice the subtle case change there. Rockstar makes its games on the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, or as you’ve probably put together, RAGE. The last game to use RAGE was Red Dead Redemption 2, which in many ways remains the technical apex of what games are capable of. The next game will be Grand Theft Auto 6, and with at least a six-year window to improve RAGE, it could be like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

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RAGE has been around in various forms since 2006 and, in true pub quiz fashion, the first game to use it was bizarrely unpredictable: Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis. It has been significantly reworked three times since then for GTA 4, the PS4/Xbox One remasters of GTA 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2. Given Rockstar’s perfectionism and the huge gap between releases, expect it to have been reworked again for GTA 6.

GTA Online using the Vinewood sign to tease GTA 6.

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It’s not unusual for major developers to have their own proprietary engines, and it’s not always good news. EA’s Frostbite engine is excellent for the numerous sports titles and shooters it dominates the market with, but EA studios like BioWare have complained in the past about its unsuitability for RPGs. Fans can often get too invested in engines without much knowledge of them, and use them to praise and criticise games in equal measure without fully understanding their purpose or function. No, Unreal Engine doesn’t make everything ‘look like Fortnite’.

But RAGE is an engine worth getting excited about. If you set anything on fire in Red Dead Redemption 2 and watched the flames spread with satisfying realism, that’s RAGE. If you tied a person up and dropped them in shallow water and watched them struggle for breath, that’s RAGE. If you killed a deer then returned later to find its bones rotting in place, picked apart by birds summoned by carrion, that’s RAGE. It looks pretty and that’s RAGE too, but it’s the depth of the world that just keeps going that best represents what RAGE is all about.

Graphics and engine power aren’t everything in games, and Rockstar’s six-year, highly expensive development cycles aren’t sustainable for everyone. It takes a village of indie, double-A, and triple-A games to keep the industry alive, but it’s hard not to marvel at the groundbreaking potential Rockstar’s style offers.

Since Red Dead Redemption 2 came out, there have been a few challenges to its throne. The Last of Us Part 2 has some impressive graphical flourishes, mostly found in the smallest details, like Ellie moving her shirt to check for wounds. Tears of the Kingdom’s confidence to play with physics, and the fact it modelled one of its abilities (Ascend) after dev tools the public usually never gets to see is a sign of complete understanding of what the game is capable of. Elden Ring, while not as technically proficient as the other three, offered a bold new step for open world design, the shadow of which GTA 6 will have to emerge from under if it wishes to be as cutting edge as its predecessors. But I still can’t overlook the way the world breathes in Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s still number one.

RAGE is also the reason why Red Dead Redemption 2 was able to scramble so effectively out of the uncanny valley, leaping from ‘great video game graphics’ in GTA 5 to ‘goddamn this looks like real life’ in Red Dead Redemption 2, with no stopover in between. Red Dead Redemption 2’s version of RAGE introduced PBR, which doesn’t make a funny word but does have a significant impact. PBR stands for physically-based rendering, which essentially means using realistic lens flare, lighting, and shadows through a series of real-life camera shots and photogrammetry.

It remains to be seen if RAGE can transform a city into a breathing world the way it could for the wilderness of Red Dead Redemption 2, and the busier setting plus flashier and faster gameplay GTA brings will be an even bigger test for it. But RAGE did not strain under the duress of RDR2, so maybe a bigger test is exactly what it needs.

Grand Theft Auto 6 arrives under huge pressure. It needs to be the greatest game of all time, or there will be mass gamer rage. But thanks to RAGE, on a technical level at least, it might well pull that off.