Rage will have an online pass system that will give players that buy the game new extra levels in the form of secretive sewer zones. Tim Willits told Eurogamer that there will be hatches throughout the world that many players will never notice that will remain sealed to second-hand purchasers. Those who get the game new will be able to download the extra levels for free and explore the zones beneath the wasteland.
"You still have to download it, but you don't have to pay for it," Willits said to Eurogamer. "Those hatches are all over. Most people never find them. But as soon as you do, you're like, oh. And then you start to look for it. That's our first-time buyer incentive."
"Most people never even see it. I can tell you, some people will buy Rage, download that, and still never set foot in those things. They just won't. I think that's fair. It's cool. It's outside the main path. We're not detracting from anything."
Thanks to an impressive barrage of trailers recently, we've seen a lot of Rage, but it's still hard to tell how open its world will be. The idea there's an entire strata of the underworld that's locked off as a bonus for new buyers suggests there'll be much more to discover when Rage comes out, on October 4 in the US and October 7 in Europe.
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
