Rage 2 Lets Viewers Lend Streamers A Hand

Rage 2 will allow you to get a little help from your friends--or at least, your viewers. When the game launches next week, a Twitch extension will allow viewers to help out when the wasteland puts you into a tight spot, or just add some more flavor to the game world.

If you die in the game, viewers can help by playing the defibrillation mini-game to bring you back to life and impact your health total. If enough people participate, they could even bring you back to life with full health. The other application of the extension will pull viewer names for the other participants in an in-game race.

"We have integrated the Twitch extension into our game to try to encourage streaming," id studio director Tim Willits told GameSpot. "Open world games are not really streamed as much as you would think. But we feel that with both the nature of the gameplay of Rage 2, and some of the fun stuff that we added in, we're hoping to draw some more streamers."

Willits commented that we may see more extensions added after launch, as well as rewards for those who view the game and participate in the streams with the extensions.

"Yes sir," he said, in response to the addition of more extension functionality. "We'll also have some drops. We're working on the drops for people who participate, and that will be like weapons skins, wing stick skins, stuff like that. Like I talked about before we just wanted to see what people are gravitating towards, and if we find that streamers are enjoying streaming the game, we'll definitely try to add some of those in with some of our live updates. If it takes off we're going to chase as much as we can. If we can get viewers to participate more, and I do believe this is actually the future of gaming to have viewers participate more in the experience."

Willits also said that the studio's approach to extensions was partially influenced by his experience with Quake Champions. He expects that having some elements of randomness introduced by the game and extension should draw in more viewers than a usual open-world action game.

"You have the whole intro is a great time for streamers to talk about their strategy, and to talk about how they work with their teams, and they jump in," he said. "So games need a little bit of downtime, for lack of a better word, that allows people to talk, and to kind of slow the pace down a little bit, so they can explain to the viewers what they're doing. And this action that's different from watching the same thing over and over again.

"Like normal classic linear first-person games, you know once you watch someone play it once, you're done. So hopefully with the randomness of Rage 2 and some kind of fun extensions--they're not super overly complex extensions--but they should be fun enough to draw some people in."

Rage 2 launches on May 14 for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Check out our pre-order guide for more details.