Rage Catch-All

After originally preordering it and having the most atrocious graphic bugs for the longest time (the recent Catalyst version 11.12 finally removed the last headache inducing one), I played the game start to finish within the last week. I'd made my piece with buying a broken game from id Software and just wanted to see, if the actual game was worth $60. So I stumbled out of the Ark a second time...

Jeff-66 and mcdonis make a lot of good points and I agree with all of them, but I actually liked certain parts of the game. Here are my thoughts from playing on normal, finishing the game after roughly 14 hours with no races in Subway Town touched and never trying to get into the TCG or any of the three mini-games.

I enjoy the gunplay. The sounds are nice and I, as the player, feel empowered in a slightly different way by pulling the trigger on most of them. Contrasting that, I am bothered by the fact the weapon arsenal is larger than it needs to be. Come on id, do you really have to fill the 1 through 0 keys with weapons, just because "that's how shooters have always been and are supposed to be"? Do I really need an assault rifle when I can buy the Authority MG one mission later? Do I really need a sniper rifle AND the crossbow?

I like the enemy AI with regards to the hit zones and how enemies advance and retreat. From the perspective of how they use cover and how little they alternate their attack pattern though (at least on normal), they are too easy to predict and there should be at least twice the number of enemies (I guess that changes on harder difficulties).

I was quite fond of the character animations (Kvasir being the prime example), though they don't show it off much. Safe for the few useless NPCs walking around town and the quest givers, everyone is standing, sitting or kneeling. This is a post-apocalyptic world and I am supposed to believe the good folks of Wellspring are wetting their pants because of the Authority, yet they are chillaxing, even with the Drones floating over their heads. Wasted potential in my opinion. Oh, and meaningful facial expressions obviously weren't in the budget either.

I was at times really engaged by the instances. id software knows how to set a mood optically and acoustically (Dead City and Jackal Canyon being my favorites). Yes, I am essentially running through very impressive tubes without any real freedom and everything is heavily scripted. And yes, I cursed a good dozen times for trying to leap up a foot-high obstacle and being blocked by an invisible wall. Once I made my peace with it and reminded myself that this is an id shooter, it didn't bother me much anymore. What did bother me was the anti-climatic last level. Very lazy and if I had any doubts that the game release was rushed at this point, this cemented it.

The outside world I am lukewarm about. Is it the fact that it's essentially also just a series of somewhat wider tubes I can drive in with my car while at the same time being really pretty? Is it the ease with which the vehicle fights can be won by exploitation while enjoying that they driving and combat was designed with a focus on fun rather than realistic vehicle dynamics and damage models? Or do I just see more in what they were trying to do while at the same time realizing how badly they failed?

What about the side shows though? The racing was fun, but once I beefed up my car, utterly boring. As an example, I beat the second Starky race without using the afterburner once. I didn't care for TCG or the other three mini games because there was nothing to gain and I already knew it was a 12h game, so I didn't want to invest time. Had this been a 40-100+ hour epic, I would have eaten that stuff up.

Which brings me to the graphics. To use a misogynistic acronym: HFFA - hot from far away. The engine really shines in open zones. As soon as you walked close to anything that would have benefitted from a high res texture (e.g. posters, screens, pictures), it looked muddled and blurry. I don't know if a high res mod would have fixed that, but then again I am not willing to fix an aspect of a game that the developers marketed as the key area of improvement of their new tech.

The picture below pretty much sums up how I feel about Rage.

IMAGE(http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/715/2012011200001.jpg)

Ideas: A, execution: F. They tried to be too much at once (RPG shooter, open world, crafting, mini-games and race mechanics) and I am convinced they didn't have the time they hoped to finish the game. This becomes utterly clear when comparing the quality of the zones they demoed a good year or two ago and had time to perfect - like Jackal Canyon and Dead City - to zones like the Well or Capital Prime.

Looking at the open world, it's easy to see how they lost focus. Fallout 3 did it right, but the travel got tedious. Borderlands brought in vehicles but ultimately the world felt empty and pointless. No doubt, they wanted to marry the two and designed two pretty kick-ass outside zones, but in the end they didn't have time to fill them with life, so 90% of the content was instanced instead. What remained was the vehicle part of Borderlands.

From an RPG perspective they aimed lower than even Borderlands and still missed. No character progression whatsoever other than choosing a (barely useful) perk and upgrading defense three and survivability two times. The quests and "story" were on the level of Borderlands and the only they got going for them was the "interactive cutscene" (i.e. animated characters and voice acting) when receiving quests or handing them in.

In the end, Rage was a disappointing game in many regards. I am pretty sure that I won't remember much of Rage, but Spider Bots, Jackal Canyon and Wingsticks are the few things that really clicked with me and that have me looking forward to what an id Software may churn out with - according to Carmack - shorter development cycles and focus on content rather than tech.

To finish, I just leave this image of Subway Town here, to contrast what Rage was and what it could have been.

IMAGE(http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/5246/subwaytown.jpg)

Woohoo! New graphics drivers for my mobile workstation were just released. Game runs just fine now, so I'm looking forward to checking it out.

So, worth ten dollars??

NathanialG wrote:

So, worth ten dollars??

Yep.

EDIT: Crap, the Gamefly deal for Rage yesterday was $6.79, but that seems to be done this morning.

NathanialG wrote:

So, worth ten dollars??

Yep. 10-20 hours of entertainment, depending on how deep you get into the side content like the CCG and the races.

I got maybe halfway through this before I got distracted. I had applied some of the config file tweaks around the web, which worked great at the time. I think they patched it several times afterward, though, and now when I launch the game I get severe flickering. I've renamed several config files in my install, but can't seem to get it back to normal.

Any idea what the key file I need to reset is for video problems? Searching the web just brings up a lot of stuff on the launch issues.

MannishBoy, I never found the right files to tweak. I just suffered through the texture pop and flickering. Certis mentioned that id still hadn't patched this on a recent Conference Call and I had the same experience playing it this summer. The graphics weren't as bad as upon release, but even with my NVIDIA card I still saw too much texture pop.

Polliwog wrote:

MannishBoy, I never found the right files to tweak. I just suffered through the texture pop and flickering. Certis mentioned that id still hadn't patched this on a recent Conference Call and I had the same experience playing it this summer. The graphics weren't as bad as upon release, but even with my NVIDIA card I still saw too much texture pop.

I had it fixed on release to where it ran great after the driver updates, but this is something entirely different than that. It is whole screen flickering of epileptic inducing proportions. Not individual textures.

I think it was when id patched things to make some of what I had done irrelevant and probably is the root of my issues.

I'd hate to uninstall/reinstall to fix as I'm not even sure with the Steam cloud stuff my settings might not come back.

Picked this up during the Summer Sale and fired it up today. Textures loading in slower than Unreal Engine 2 and all the time. Super cramped FOV without an option to change it. I started to get a headache because of the FOV and shut it off. This game is by id right?

BNice wrote:

Picked this up during the Summer Sale and fired it up today. Textures loading in slower than Unreal Engine 2 and all the time. Super cramped FOV without an option to change it. I started to get a headache because of the FOV and shut it off. This game is by id right?

There are console commands you can put in your config to change the FOV.

EDIT: Wow, figured out my problem. Playclaw was causing it. Playclaw is game capture software i use sometimes.

Weird! I'm glad you figured it out.

Speaking generally, it's a pity that the onus is on you, the consumer, to solve this. Reminds me of trying to install Carmen Sandiego onto my family's computer from floppy disks in the 90s, seeing it break, and then spending hours puzzling out what went wrong. Installing a game that didn't require some tweaking felt like a small miracle back in the day.

That's the thing with a PC though, lots of components interacting in a way that hopefully does something awesome, but occasionally something weird.

I played a bunch after fixing the FOV and I'm enjoying the game. I feel like it's at it's best when you are doing a long mission and simply exploring an area while fighting a ton of bad guys. This is probably because the guns and wingstick feel so satisfying. I find the fetch quests, NPC dialogue, story, not quite open world and looting kind of meh.

It seems like they wanted to branch out a bit as a studio and try some stuff but didn't go far enough. Like it's supposed to feel open world but the world is tiny and lifeless. Aside from the occasional plant, one-time jump collectable and sewer, it seems like the world is simply there for you to drive over from quest to quest.The loot aspect is weird as well. Loot is usually about progression but you don't progress though loot and instead your character buys armor upgrades, weapon upgrades and weapons in a shop. The loot also isn't really loot as most of the time it's just there for you to make like 8 different objects and a lot of the time the loot for a specific object is clearly placed for the player so why not just have the single item?

Strange design decisions aside, I really am enjoying the core game and hope with Doom 4 id just concentrates on delivering a phenomenal shooter. They clearly still have it in them as the straight shooter sections in Rage are a lot of fun, I just hope they can fight the urge to follow the AAA trend of having to deliver a "cinematic experience".

I assembled a disjointed series of impressions/thoughts of RAGE, but never posted it. I'm about halfway through the game, so I thought I'd post the tidbits I've collected so far.

Scratched wrote:

That's the thing with a PC though, lots of components interacting in a way that hopefully does something awesome, but occasionally something weird.

That's a pretty great quote! I like that it still retains wisdom when applied to [PC][KIT CAR][RELATIONSHIP][VOLUNTEER GROUP]/.

I had some time this evening to throw another couple of hours into RAGE. It's definitely an odd beast, with some things that I love (sentry turrets, sentry bots, remote RC bomb cars, craftable items) that seem a bit at odds with the feel of the game; it's almost as if at times it wants to be a more deliberate, slower-paced, non-shooty-McShooty-face-man's FPS with a ton of options at times - then it throws you into a boss battle with glowing weak spots and rocket launchers with respawning ammo and/or turret segments.

I wish there were more journals or personal momentos or... Come on, iD, you kept me more emotionally involved in Doom 3, with the eagerly anticipated emails and PDA entries and stuff. How about a note from one of those soldiers about his reluctance to accept this deployment? Or his raging hemorrhoids? Or his bloodthirsty nature, to exonerate my face-clicking? Something! Anything! I'm receptive! They've introduced (and vilified) the Authority as some shadowy over-watch, and yet they just seem to sort of sit around waiting for me to kill them in their cozy little bunkers, and occasionally send harmless (and cute) drones to fly around the towns.

** tangential Moose rambling begins **
*Wayne's World-esque screen wipe*

Some of my favorite sections of Doom 3 were at the very beginning, when there was no shooting. It was with child-like wonder that I wandered through the first areas, thinking "This is Doom. And I have no gun. And there are no monsters. And I am reading emails and PDA entries. Sentence Fragments. I am speaking in them. Such is my grin." If John Carmack showed up my door tomorrow, stinking of chili-dogs, with his boot still stuck in a monitor, and asked me... "So, smart guy, how would you start Doom 4?"

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/cdog1.png)

I'd say "Johnny Boy, I'd start it with the player's view focused on a slowly spinning, slightly off-balance ceiling fan. The player could roll left or roll right, and see his wife, or his slippers on the other side of the bed. He'd have to get up, put on his slippers, and get some coffee. We'd see our character pass by a mirror at one point, and pause to look at his reflection. Normal looking guy, a little out of shape, maybe in mid-30's. After a series of menial tasks he'd make it to his car in the garage, and try to start it. It wouldn't start on the first try, and he'd let out a weary sigh. That's when Doom 4 would flash in on the left side of the screen, but then quickly fade/fuzz out as if by static, as our character thumps the ignition and tries to start the car again. With a wheeze and a sputter it starts, and he's ready, waiting as the garage door slowly climbs, racheting and squealing as it hits the top of its rails. It's a sunny day in the quiet suburban neighborhood, and the camera follows a dog running down the street for a moment, and a man mowing his yard across the street.

Then we see our character's hand reach over to the passenger seat, fumbling for his ID badge, and he grabs it and looks at it for a moment. He's a "sanitation engineer" for the Union Aerospace Corporation. He pins it on to his shirt, and then our view pans to a GPS on the dash. It starts to beep, and then we realize the little scene is over. We're this guy! We have to drive to our job. Things go downhill, but not, of course, until we have to mop a floor or two and suffer through a few encounters with insultingly smug scientists and security guards while we do our rounds.

My reverie is broken as John erupts into laughter, holding a chili dog in one hand and pointing at me with the other. Ha ha ahahahah! Nobody wants to play that bullsh*t! AH ahahahah! (Personally, I felt his second burst of ahahahah was unnecessary.)

I actually had a dream about that, chili dog and everything! It's weird, man. I don't know.

* /wipe *
** /ends **

Back to RAGE, I've enjoyed the fact that I'm often out of cash. I'm playing on Nightmare difficulty, and my insistence on using the sentry turrets/bots/car bombs as much as I can, as well as my stubborn, arbitrary refusal to buy any fully-automatic weapons (which you often find ammo for these weapons by the hundreds in missions) means I often don't have much money to spend on ammo. I think that's swell.

I think I'm going to end up with overall favorable impressions/memories of the game. It's a nice treat to get a FPS not focused on the online/co-op side of things, and without a military-campaign feel. If there's stuff to do beside shooting (or at least cool things like deployable sentries/mines/etc.) all the better, I say!

I will respond when I have more time. I liked RAGE quite a bit when it came out.

Time for a bit more rambling! I managed to get another couple of hours of RAGE playtime today.

I just hit the Gearhead Vault, and so far I'm enjoying the more challenging areas. It's great to see enemies using sentry bots. It was a pretty atmospheric moment, crouching behind the hulk of concrete while I heard a sentry bot's legs clanking and scraping on the roofs of burned-out cars, trying to pick its way through the rubble to my hiding place. The whole area is oozing with character; the rusted shells of cars dangling off of the treacherous levels of a collapsing parking garage, the smoke rising from burning heaps of garbage, etc.

Some areas call Bioshock to mind with the combination of spectacle and decay:

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/rageshock.jpg)

Another Moose-appreciated thing is the lack of enemy respawn. There are a few places where hordes of miscreants accompany a boss encounter/setpiece/etc., but generally I've found you can walk around an area in blessed peace and quiet after dispatching with its inhabitants. This is great to look at locations from different angles, explore the (admittedly rare) small side areas/offshoots/etc., and look for items and secrets you overlooked.

It's nice to get a chance to go through some office buildings/homes and see some of the more normal settings, imagining what sort of things would have happened here before the cataclysm. An office possibly filled with people who wanted to get home from work and play some games.

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/dayattheoffice.jpg)

Quite a few of the enemy animations have been impressive; I just wounded one soldier, and he rose to a half-sitting position and continued to take pot shots at me while trying to drag himself backward to cover.

I've also had to be a bit more careful; those big bozos in the hockey armor (who sometimes can be overhead talking about their previous lives as professional hockey players) can dish out a heck of a lot of damage, as well as soak up a fair bit as well.

As wonderfully satisfying as the dynamite crossbow bolts are to use, I've been a bit more sparing in applying them to the crotches of my foes; it doesn't seem as if you can loot the ... err, chunks of your foe after detonation, and with cash being in short supply, I have to be careful to try and scavenge what I can. I love having to sell off ammunition to fix my car/etc. I never expected to find such a mechanic in Rage, so it's been a great surprise.

Ahahah! Did anyone find the cool Doom easter egg level? I just discovered it and it's a nifty touch.

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/gear1.jpg)

Cool to see some activity this in thread. I enjoyed RAGE, it was overlooked and unfairly compared to... something. It was actually a lot more linear and "classic shooter" than they made it out to be. Honestly, all they needed was a bit more interesting free roaming and more RPG-lite (see Borderlands) and they would have had a hit.

Maclintok wrote:

Honestly, all they needed was a bit more interesting free roaming and more RPG-lite (see Borderlands) and they would have had a hit.

Yep, that's how I'm feeling. They made a rather lovely world, but there's not much to do in it besides the spoon-fed missions; no random areas to discover (except, sort-of, maybe, the sewers). I also am not too fond of the predictable respawning bandits; several times I've wanted to get out and look at something interesting, and those dirty drunk bozos were racing around trying to kill me. I guess the repeatable "murderize the bandits" missions require their inclusion, but I wish they had just given us a "challenge horn" or something we could toot if we wanted to fight a pack of jerk-faces after killing them for the first time.

I think an overworld map would be a great addition. 'Follow the power pellets to the next mission' works, but it's a poor substitute for a map we can look at to gauge our position in the world.

I ran across a couple of amusing bugs this evening. Except for the mega-texturing bug (oops, feature) where textures don't repeat but take about a half-second to load if you spin around, my playthrough has been remarkably stable and bug-free.

Tonight, however, some gremlins crawled into the gears.

While driving around in my tastefully painted Monarch, I spied a miscreant driving a (probably stolen) vehicle. I didn't want to engage, so I jumped out of my car and hid. He zoomed on by, but when I hopped back in my vehicle it decided to shoot off into space, perhaps harboring secret dreams of being a satellite.

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/rage5.jpg)

As my vehicle spun wildly, traveling upward for almost a full minute, I couldn't help but be impressed by the distant landscape; for a view I imagine wouldn't be seen too often, I thought it was quite lovely. Then I projectile vomited onto my steering wheel, fell back down (which only took a few seconds), exploded, and died.

Later, returning to subway town, my character apparently popped the red pill before descending into the sneakily hidden resistance base. I dropped through the world, and was able to wander around at my leisure observing the bottom of the area:

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/rage6.jpg)

I took this shot earlier and forgot to post it. While some of the textures are rather hideous up close, there are those textures that have a startling attention to detail. Everyone's favorite lil' sentry bot (I'll often call mine Spanky or Peaches) has a nice bit of texture detail. You can even zoom in and read some of the lettering on the legs! Short range mobile artillery unit, Go! Protect me as I cower from these unwashed mu-tants!

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/rage7.jpg)

phone bs

Puce, there are a myriad of threads in could ask this, but have you moved onto being a device? Or lengthy answer is required, I'm simply curious if you've made the leap or am satisfied with the tools you're given to work with at this point.

garion333:

I do have one game that I'm working on (it's an old-school turn-based RPG in the vein of Phantasy Star) that I've coded myself from scratch. It's been a labor of love for a long time, but it often gets put on the back burner (especially when I'm working on something else, like my long-delayed final Fallout project, Chapter Three of Tales from the Burning Sands). It's kind of a big happy mess, in need of some substantial editing. Some day.

Well. I polished off RAGE tonight! The in-game clock seems pretty accurate, and I clocked in at just over 27 hours. I believe I finished all of the missions, cleared all of the sewers, but only finished about half of the races. I liked the robotic voice and some of the glowing architecture in the final level, but it was a bog-standard corridor crawl in terms of the enemies. I expected to find some enemy turrets/sentry bots, but instead received those odd mutants (that remind me of Ewoks for some reason) leaping all over the place. My sentry bots were quite useful to keep the enraged Ewoks off of my back, and I used plenty of sentry turrets as well. I tend to use those everywhere, though, so I failed to surprise myself.

I was happy to hear Mark Lanegan doing the outro song! I've always liked that guy's work. The ending was... well, rather brief. I never thought the game did a good job of embedding the central conflict in the player's mind, so I honestly didn't care too much about the Authority; everyone moaned about them constantly, but they seemed to mainly stand around and be a bit brusque; I never saw them arresting or killing anyone. I wish they had made a strong character or added a twist to make them more compelling.

I loved the variety of weaponry, especially the turrets, sentry bots, and RC cars (though, honestly, I didn't use them too often, as the player's progress seemed to trigger a lot of spawns in areas. Still, it's a great idea.) Any FPS that gives me options for engaging besides the usual "put crosshair over face, click left mouse button, repeat" gets a thumbs-up. The variety of ammunition was fun to play with; I ended up using a pretty good variety of weaponry, though as is my norm in FPS the pistol remained my first choice when feasible. One thing I wished for was a proximity mine of some sort.

I also appreciated the mini-games; finding cards to add to my deck was a neat idea; I love things like that, where things found in a game can influence the game's minigames in some way. All said, though, I think I enjoyed that holo-game the most; even though there wasn't any skill involved, it was still fun to watch and play.

Rise. Rise from the ashes! RIIISEEE!

So apparently (RPS) they will release their first DLC on12/18, called The Scorchers. This would be the 1st DLC, 14 months after the original game came out and with now marketing or press build-up whatsoever. What's wrong with Bethesda? Compare that to the hype every single one of the Skyrim DLCs gets.

Anybody interested enough in some more megatexture shooting to pick it up?

Well damn, I might be down if I actually still owned the game...

Blind_Evil wrote:

Well damn, I might be down if I actually still owned the game...

I am sure you'll be able to get it for around 5-10 bucks during the upcoming steam sale.

My laptop wouldn't run it.

Luggage wrote:

Rise. Rise from the ashes! RIIISEEE!

So apparently (RPS) they will release their first DLC on12/18, called The Scorchers. This would be the 1st DLC, 14 months after the original game came out and with now marketing or press build-up whatsoever. What's wrong with Bethesda?

What the hell?

Hmm, $5? I think I'm in for for a few more hours of Rage for that much. It also looks like there's some new areas (and hopefully new missions), and not just survival mode/time trial/arena stuff filler.

I really hope they toss out some DLC for the pre-order bonuses as well. I want to fire this up eventually, but it just seems wrong to not have a double-barreled shotgun in an id game...

shoptroll wrote:

I really hope they toss out some DLC for the pre-order bonuses as well. I want to fire this up eventually, but it just seems wrong to not have a double-barreled shotgun in an id game...

One thing I've notice over here is that there's retailers still with physical copies of the anarchy edition. I seem to recall that was the limited edition, so that says something unfavourable about how it sold, or at least that they ordered in too many.

Scratched wrote:

I seem to recall that was the limited edition, so that says something unfavourable about how it sold, or at least that they ordered in too many.

I think this is an industry where "Limited" doesn't usually mean that. I was able to snag a "Limited Edition" copy of Warcraft III new off Amazon at least a year after release.