I actually feel bad about ID's Rage now, sure the first game felt hollow but it honestly had few really fantastic ideas and some beautiful post apocalyptic factions and world design, I would say I would even want to see some of those someday making it in a decent Fallout game.
The problem here I believe is not only a sequel no one asked but the fact they make post apocalypse cheesy, it's the same thing that happened to zombie genre, they made zombies so damn stupid and comedy driven it lost its horror appeal (Shawn of The Dead is still amazing). Story short down anything to appeal to teenage masses with bright colors and blood and it flushes itself in to the toiler few years later and falls into a coma until next wave of popularity.
Now clearly these devs have one thing in common, they all made post apocalyptic game of the same category (wasteland/mad max... I don't know) two of which didn't made that much of an impact or money, but had each one of them something really amazing going for it, like in the case of Mad Max the wasteland itself in that game is absolutely phenomenal and beautiful and that's how the wasteland should look in all Fallout games imo.
Clearly this is more of ID game than anything, Bethesda is publishing and avalanche helps with the look of the wasteland I guess. Now when talking about ID we can most certainly expect a good first person shooter, which is not bad at all. Now Bethesda's role is much more strange to me, I mean what are they going to do and bring to the table when it comes to post apocalypse? Probably they just sponsor the whole thing and dictate a direction here and there! I feel like this is nothing more than an experiment for Bethesda on how to make money out of Fallout without any effort, if it is a success Fallout will follow the same formula, if it doesn't... well they going to get back to their day job making TES games or stripping RPG elements out of Fallout.