T w e n t y S i d e d

The next person we meet on our Wasteland tour is one Loosum Hagar, Mayor of Wellspring. She’s one of the few returning characters from the original Rage in 2011. You might know her as the teenager with the wingsticks from the original:

It’s been 30 years, and she’s now mayor of the town her father founded. She’s added a bit of gunslinging to her arsenal and the wasteland has made her cynical and hard-edged. She wants to help us with Project Dagger, but this is a video game so of course there’s a catch.

Klegg Clayton is some sort of wasteland douche lord. He’s rich, creepy, self-aggrandizing, vain, insecure, and ambitious. He’s trying to oust Loosum so he can run the city himself. Also, he’s somehow managed to get his hands on the super-secret Authority super-tank required for Project Dagger. So you need to deal with him.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rage 2 Part 6: Win Some, Loosum”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Before we go any further with this series I want to back up and talk about themes. The term “theme” has a couple of different meanings when applied to stories. It can mean an idea that the text brings up again and again, or it can mean something that the author is deliberately trying to say through the workPreferably without saying it explicitly..

We don’t need to draw a hard line between these two. For our purposes a theme can be thought of as a thesis or a message. Perhaps a zombie story tries to show us that “consumers are the real zombies” or perhaps “the survivors are the real monsters”. That’s close enough for our purposes.

Themes Are Critic Bait

George Orwell’s themes were – by design – forceful and obvious, while other stories have proven harder to pin down over the years. James Cameron’s Avatar had a theme that was blunt to the point of being vaguely insulting.

A lit major might jump in here and chastise me for playing fast and loose with the definition of theme and how it applies to fiction. That’s fine, because it doesn’t really matter in this game. Rage 2 is an action adventure power fantasy shooter, and in this realm the rules of fiction are incredibly lax. Like, just having a theme in your game puts you ahead of most shooters, even if that theme is muddled and poorly executed. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rage 2 Part 5: Theme Park”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.