Innovation is definitely not what I'd expect from an id shooter - I rather expect solidly executed conservative shooter gameplay with the latest eyecandy features.

If that's what Rage does, then I might eventually get it. Sometime.

No linux client though, right. Oh well, that just means it has to get in line with the other Windows shooters I intend to buy. Sometime. 

My biggest balk with RAGE is the linearity -- in both the missions and most of the maps, which are clipped beyond belief -- but one would expect this from any other console game. But I am having a blast playing it. I am hoping like hell you can still have the roam of the land after the campaign finishes, since there are several sidequests and areas I'd love to revisit. Speaking of which, found the Quake room (with help from that annoying video), and am going for the DOOM one next. 

Runs fluently on my old rig. AMD Athlon II X2 250, nvidia 8800GTX on Wine. Texture pop-ups are just a bit too much though and so far the game did not impress me too much.

Played the first mission.

Bullshit:
-The unskippable intro sequences
-The menu. Mouse speeds are all wrong and the menu is slow to use (console crap, just like UT3 had).
-The UI. I could not figure out how to use grenades.

Bad:
-Protagonist feels like a little sissy. Get hurt stepping down a 1m step. Screams like a girl when I crash the buggy yet there is no (other) punishment of doing that.
-I also cannot stand that US soldier look. Immediately anti-reaction.
-Health seems irrelevant and auto-generating? There is not even a display.
-The wingstick minigame was a trivial joke. Console design for controller aiming.
-Environments are indeed super static. There is nothing you can move or destroy.
-Clipping is done badly and obviously. There are steps you cannot jump over when there are other places with the same height where you can. And the first driving sequence was ended with a fucking joke, look at that HUGE EDGE! http://i.imgur.com/t2BNd.jpg You have to dismount. They could have made a bit more believable at least...
-Binding the Z and Y keys is broken on a QWERTZ layout.
-The music is really really bad. While some small cues were nice, the background music is like a cheap amateur horror movie soundtrack. Really bad. I will turn it off even if I miss "immersion and subtle cues" by that. Stupid cheap orchestra. No connection to a wasteland at all.
-The first mission had a huge areal but it was a corridor mission on fast rails. No interconnectivity. Might be just the first mission. :-) But it felt like a huge waste. I think the engine would rock for explorative games (apart from the staticness).
-When I returned from the mission that Hagar guy said something like "you already noticed, we got hit by mutants". Well, no, I did not notice anything.
-Weapon feedback is shallow so far. Doom3 was much better. The blood looks weird, like plastic goo. No gore at all (I feel weird saying this, but I actually miss it while I normally hate it).

Good:
-You do not HAVE to aim over sight, just firing with the UI crosshair is accurate and easy.
-Loading is quite fast. Loading the wasteland takes ~10 seconds for me. Loading that first mission is 6s.
-Characters seem great so far. Good looks, good voices.

Awesome:
-Once the textures are fully loaded (fractions of a second for me, I did not yet try any tricks) the looks are just amazing. But as I said, all you can do is look at it. Clipping/steep surfaces are everywhere. 

 

To hardskip those stupid unskippable intro videos:
+set com_skipIntroVideo 1

Force v-sync:
+r_swapInterval 1

To disable the texture popups this worked for me (on my "high-end" 8800GT, heh. From http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1236250-rage-support/page__p__18743528#entry18743528 :
+vt_maxPPF 8
+vt_pageImageSizeUnique 8192 +vt_pageImageSizeUniqueDiffuseOnly 8192 +vt_pageImageSizeUniqueDiffuseOnly2 8192

runs well and I have no noticable texture popups anymore. I do get some super quick hiccup every now and then though. Will have to see how it turns out.

Haven't yet managed to get a FPS display.
+set com_showFPS 1
did not do anything. 

I did that popin fix but I still get crazy popins for textures and models, and the textures themselves look like shit. Also the game crashes when I try to load a mission on the dam - when I try to enter the door and load the next map it just never loads.

So far I am highly disappointed with Rage, and I wasn't even expecting anything great, just some solid shooter. This is sub-id quality so far, at least on my machine. 

Ok, not fluent but almost tolerable FPS.


played another 2 missions, it is getting worse. Modern FPS crap. Enemies are standing in cover and you are playing whack the mole (or moorhuhn). Gimmicky miniboss battle down in that garage. Indoors are utterly confusing. Picking up more junk. Getting bombarded with things (forge this, speak to that guy, now you have 2 missions, rush through that place) and the UI does not help. There is some kind of inventory which you toggle with TAB. If you hit ESC you get the menu. Some in-game hints are "popup windows" where you have to move the mouse to click accept, ESC does not work. The menu is super delayed and shit, you get a "press enter" logo screen all the time. Quick weapon change menu also is controlled with the mouse which means you cannot use it quickly (like with I guess the analog sticks on the console). Also you do need to use iron sight. Bleh. Mission design was just so that I fought through several stories of a building and then LUCKILY got out somewhere else where another buggy was standing so I could drive back the canyon home. The cute girl whose crotch I was staring at earlier is not in the town anymore, I guess she was killed in that incident I totally did not notice earlier.


You guys are probably used to this but for me it is just plain annoying. This has nothing of an id shooter. It is a (so far) not well designed and clunky attempt of a standard modern FPS with some hub design and vehicle gimmicks. 

see, I knew it! 

Lol, seriously though, my copy will unlock in about three hours. And from what I have heard it will take another hour to initialise.

Some of the things you have mentioned do sound fairly annoying. However I am still not perturbed. I gather that this game is pretty much huge (as in there are a lot of hours of gameplay there) so maybe it will progress into something a bit more challenging.

The UI 'beef' you have mentioned is mostly the sort of thing which can be patched (slow mouse in menu, key layouts dont work, mouse required for weapon cycle). And I am expecting a BIIIIIG patch. You can tell that is going to happen just by reading the internet, which is full of posts like yours, only some (most) are a lot less constructive.

Atleast there is still Quake LIVE!!! :D

Speaking of which, in my Quake LIVE all of my enemies are green and identical. Is that just to make the game more fair? If so then GAYYYY!!!!! 

in a review that total gameplay with side quests is under 10 hours. 

I don't think there are any creative people left at ID.

The way they were banging on about how great this was going to be ...
And then you get this.

A Borderline clone with no room for exploration.

I played the 1st missions on hard.
I only got killed by the game for wandering off.
Fucking hell, this is BAD ! 

Yeah the first mission thing. I wandered off too and got killed, I assumed it was because I got sniped or something, but now it seems like clip was replaced by trigger_hurt 1000000. 

There's irony in the name.

I, personally, live in the UK, and here it is now October 7th. I have waited for the damn thing to launch. Steam said 2 hours to go at 5 to midnight, and now it is half 12 and it says 1 hour to go. Bleh - the buggers cant even tell time!!! 

commencing decrypting

I updated the drivers as well, but the installer hung in the latter phase. I think it will be alright......maybe? 

IDK, but according to Steam, Biff has spent 17 hours on it. 

what does the game's file structure look like? is it too much to hope it's standard id style archives that are renamed .zips with easy to modify files? 

Well, base directory is 2.5gig, virtual textures is 11.4, and mp is another 7 gig again.

Looks more like an Unreal style set up to me. Lots of files in all the folders.

ps it ran for about an hours and then crashed, now crashed on starting again... dear dear iD, for me you had such a flawless record for stability up till now :P 

are very surprising IMHO! 

Get over it, since some key memebers left id (or were devoured by their ego, whatever) its all been pretty much smelly pants other than tech wise.

Anyone been playing E.Y.E ?

Oh and the protagonists metrosexual pretty macho boy look in the new DeusEx so puts me the fuck off (and its marketing that decided on that wanker, I am sure).
At least they got a mod to get rid of the piss filter, only nvidia though for now. That and a new skin for the dudes face and I'll give it a go. 

Killes, your just jealous cause Adam Jensen looks sexier than you do. (No really, I don't see the problem, he looks believable and fine, the face has character, more so than many other FPS heroes).

I'm still trying to finish downloading Rage, but not really expecting so much really, just kind of curious of seeing the tech in action. 

so do you HAVE to dl 20gb+ to get rage on steam? if so, that's insane. bring back real dvd's.

i pay a fortune just to get 60gb bandwidth a month in nz, and that goes pretty damn quick with torrents. 

You can still buy it on dvds obviously... 

k so I'm basically stuck at the first safe-town thingy. If I drive out to the right the game crashes, if I drive out to the left it crashes... both locations I've previously been to to do missions. I actually reloaded an old save and replayed the whole hour or so again but it still crashes at the same point.

Haven't even managed to compare the normal shotgun to the DLC shotgun yet :p

The engine is weeeeeeird. Often it looks like someone has randomly set certain textures to the wrong render mode, or bits of geometry are in uber-low LoD all the time. Also the environments have no physics objects. You can't bat monitors off tables or even smash vases, which these days strikes me as fairly shocking since that's just a default feature of modern physics engines and generally assumed interactivity :E

Combat, to early to tell. The structure I don't really mind, it's just a slight expansion on a linear shooter which I can dig tbh, but people are right in that the clipping is pretty retarded. There is no reason why you couldn't climb around a bit more than they let you :( 

It's not only the tech though, is it? I'd say it's spending more years than most can afford achieving a silly high quality content density. A shame they seem to do that while not giving gameplay enough focus but that's kind of a industry wide problem only iD seem to be taking it to the extreme.

I'm wondering how wise it was to step out of the engine licensing business - I think it will be a lot harder/less likely that they will invest enough in keeping the whole tool chain competitive with Bethesda studios only compared to what's going on with UDK and maybe cryengine. Carmack probably has a lot to offer still but unless they have a strong tool focus to go with it I think they will be less productive than many competitors in the future. 

Very organic. But the textures dont seem particularly hi-res. Some of the lighting and subtle DOF effects, along with the LD as a whole is jaw dropping. The enemies and gameplay are not as bad as I thought, I definitely prefer this to Borderlands. After updating the drivers to the 'hotfix', everything runs almost perfectly, the hanging flags artefact for me, but before i installed the hotfix driver I had a lot of texture popping and character popping, and before I used the vsync commandline thing I had a lot of tearing. Also some flickering artefacts. But that is gone now. Just the flags that I noticed. And only in one place. Fudzilla rekons they are working on a comprehensive patch which will include graphics settings in the menu. And if Fudzilla says it, it must be true (not)!!!

The clipping seems a little weird, but it doesn't bother me too much. It seems you cannot toss yourself from a building. And some places are inaccessible.

I have not been insta-killed for wandering off yet.