I love that id had the balls to just show uninterrupted gameplay footage in trailers leading up to the release. That is so rare these days :(

If you make your purchase decision based on those gameplay trailers then you knew exactly what you were getting. I enjoyed rage (minus the driving sections) but I was just expecting a good fps rather than some fallout3/fps rpg that some people thought it was going to be? The level design was extremely linear and lacked exploration, but the combat was satisfying and meaty.

I've played it to completion twice, which is more than I can say about 90% of games I play. 

Hah yeah, actually I played through it again myself when they implemented Ultra Nightmare difficulty, and a second playthrough is rare for me. It wasn't that it was a game that blew my mind, but a lot of it was really... comfortable. 

Those previous 2 posts, and Scarecrows.

Rage was a good shooter - you got solid, meaty FPS action in some spectacular environments. The characters were mildly entertaining too, and the optional racing / mini-games were fine. The main problems were having the necessary racing shoe-horned in, and a really weak ending. Fix those and it would have been a great game. Throw in some non-linearity and yeah an extra 10 hours of Dead City, it would have been excellent.

At the end of the day, after playing it, I just wanted more RAGE. Which is a good sign. But I didn't get any....ah well. 

I just can't wrap my head around the ending... at all. What was the logic behind that? Was it an attempt at a 'cliff hanger', thereby galvanizing consumer demand for expansion packs?
Did they finish the game a week before it was released?
What was that? 

There's no way they planned for that ending.

They basically cut it so they could ship in time.

If I had a dollar every time I played a game with a rushed, unfinished ending...

Bit sad to see it from a studio like id though. 

...it's time for a HUGE DLC wrapping up the thing for good.
Ain't it? 

Was one of my fav parts of it, felt really well executed. 

i just wanted to shoot things. played again last night; forced myself to do the mandatory race, then was rewarded with a simple fetch quest that was only driving. stopped playing again.

the racing might be well implemented, but i just don't want to drive a car. i want to shoot things dead. :( 

someone should make a massive mod that fixes all the things people didn't like, ie removing the racing parts completely 

Am I the only one that didn't mind Rage's driving stuff? Honestly, the problem with Rage was its overall lack of ambition in design, and I would direct most of that criticism towards the incredibly samey, simplistic, dungeon crawls where there is nothing to the gameplay beyond travelling down a series of tunnels and shooting a load of blokes with guns. If your only metric for quality is "does it feel meaty and satisfying when I shoot Mohawk Vinnie Jones in the balls?", then Rage scores high, but I dunno, compare its design to Half-Life 2 (nearly a decade older than Rage), and it pales pitifully. 

If the outdoors environment had more gameplay/exploration/scavanging. The 'missions' were good - good shooter action, nice LD (I thought anyway - linear disguised as non-linear). The racing parts were OK, but it would have been better if there was more chaos and exploration in the outdoors areas. More random stashes of loot, NPCs just wondering around doing their own thing would have been nice to talk to.... 

One thing I didn't like was the overworld/dungeon distinction. With this tech I expected everything to be a seamless world. Apart from that, I think a medpack system would have been really nice here, turns a bit pop and stop a lot of times, avoiding crossfire etc.
If the world was seamless things could have been made a bit more of a simulation, so the macro and micro game would be more interconnected etc. 

"Am I the only one that didn't mind Rage's driving stuff?"

I didn't mind it, it was just ... filler. I had to drive places, shoot things, and drive back. The driving parts were peppered with enemy cars that were easily ignored and nothing special happened - ever. It was annoying and clearly only there to eat up gameplay time. 

FFS, they didn't even implement Fast Travel for locations you've already been to. 

The driving to places doesn't bother me much, but it really sucked there wasn't any point exploring since everything is locked anyway, and areas that look like they might have been interesting to explore are clipped to hell.
The races are what I disliked. Being forced to do them and having them be non-trivial (so that I had to expend effort in something I had no interest in) annoyed me the most.
The game seems to promise things but doesn't deliver:
look and feel of an open world game -> no point exploring anything 

All in a matter of minutes(< 60) :(

It was 20 years ago style find keys/items, unlock door ad nauseam. In this decade a game being made should present more than 1996 Quake wrapped in MEGAtexturing!

At least, in.my.mot.so.humble.opinion. 

Hating on Id is the cool new thing right? 

 

but the points people are making completely valid.

This huge world should have been more interesting to explore, but it's barren of any real content (other than looking very pretty).
The levels were really nice too but the gameplay suffered a little because the majority of enemies were very samey.
The lost city should have been so much more.
The big boss fight about half-way through the game was neat but a little simple.
No big boss at the end was a huge huge huge disappointment.
The racing parts, while I enjoyed them, shouldn't have been mandatory. 

I think you have to give a game a bit more than less than an hour to judge it. not that i've played rage, yet. 

It was 20 years ago style find keys/items, unlock door ad nauseam. In this decade a game being made should present more than 1996 Quake wrapped in MEGAtexturing!

This is a complete fabrication. 

Games should definitely present in-depth stories and emotional characters, lengthy cutscenes, quicktime events, immersive real world scenarios, plenty of puzzles / combat complexities / RPG elements ....cos all those things are essential for a good shooter. 

Why do you guys even install games anymore? You want Quake, so just play Quake. :) 

I enjoyed playing Rage.

I like lots of modern FPS games, but generally what makes them good are the core mechanics and aesthetics, rather than superficial window-dressing. 

... is that feeling of frustration that comes from seeing something that has the fundamentals down right but falls short of greatness for seemingly silly, trivial reasons. Which is much worse than the frustration that comes from something just being common-or-garden variety crap.