Rage Catch-All

Perhaps, but in terms of keeping physical stock it's got to hurt (a really small amount) keeping two types of stock for essentially the same thing when you don't need to.

This game almost melted my CPU.

Still, I'd give the DLC a try if it weren't for the massive pile.

Just finished reading about this over at x360a, and for $5, I'm in too. It will definitely be one of the first games I play off the mega pile in 2013.

I bought the DLC and so far I am enjoying the added bits. Once completed I will give my full thoughts.

On a side note Steam told me the DLC was ready to play so I replayed the ending of the game and when I got to the end it did not let me continue. I looked and steam DLC download was only at 40% WTF steam. I ended up having to replay the disapointing ending 2 times before getting kicked back to rat tunnel.

So how does this DLC load? Do I need a completed game or can I just jump right into it? Does it carry over your gear or Metroid you?

I found a review of the DLC here.

Here' tidbit about loading up the DLC:

An interesting question to bring up when discussing single-player DLC is: "How do you access the new content you just bought?" Some games have the new content selectable from the main menu but with RAGE, things aren't quite that straightforward. This is one of those games where you need to load up one of your old campaign save files.

As far as I can tell, you can access The Scorchers from almost any point in the game as the door you need to access to kick off the DLC is located at the very first camp in the game. If you have a save that's near the end of the game, I recommend playing from there as the ending has been modified somewhat. The ending itself is still bloody horrible but afterwards, you now have the option to go back into the wasteland, which allows you do explore and do any side quests you missed.

I am raging at rage right now. Anyone else stuck at

Spoiler:

the scorcher base where you pick up the crystal and you have to use the skull.

*edit*

Spoiler:

Never mind, I figured it out.

Well, I decided to take the plunge on the DLC. It sounds like it's about an evening's worth of entertainment, and that sounds pretty reasonable for $5.
I lost all of my saves after a drive crash, so I started a new game. I'd forgotten what a nice intro it had; I like the music they chose.

I also like the way the protagonist plays with/checks out each new weapon he finds.

Hmm.. does anyone know where you go to start the DLC? I wandered around the Hagar settlement but didn't see anyone that offered to talk about the scorchers. Is the DLC started in another location?
EDIT:
Ah, I think I found my answer:
To begin the new quests, you'll first need to complete the Ghost Hideout mission for the Hagar Settlement. After finishing the first Main Story Mission, you’ll be able to take on the optional DLC quest

First main story mission, here I come! Then the DLC.

And... I'm in! Sure enough, once you've finished at least the first main mission you'll be able to start the DLC from Hagar settlement. It looks good so far; some nice area design, and we actually have some WATER, yay! And a bit of fern-like growth, which is a nice change of pace from the dry dead wastes above. The player emits a rather girlish squeal of terror near the beginning, which was pretty amusing.

There's also some gratuitous, though not necessarily unwelcome opulent nether-orb shots quite early into the adventure.

Admit it. The squeal of terror was from you, wasn't it?

Rallick wrote:

Admit it. The squeal of terror was from you, wasn't it?

Well... I guess I can't rule it out. My tears were dried, though, as the sun-warmed cheeks of Sarah loomed and jiggled in front of me as I awoke from my fright.

Finished!

This DLC took me about 3 and a half hours to finish. The story wasn't exactly riveting, but it did have a dead-eyed simplicity that was, at least, transparent. The bad guys stay bad, the good guys stay good. The hot stays hot, and the cool stays cool.

I enjoyed the presence of water in this DLC; we had a waterfall, an underground lake, and other pleasing splashies occurring here and there. Mushrooms and ferns, too!

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/ragewater1.jpg)

The Scorchers are somewhat amusing; they'll often spout various lines from famous authors, such as Shakespeare or Shelley. They'll also profess love for their fellow Scorchers, talk about extracting body parts, and emit whimsical folk axioms and nursery rhymes if you sit out of sight and let them ramble. They'll also downgrade the player to an it; "It tossed a grenade!", spoken in the same sing-song tone as someone reprimanding a child for misbehavior.

The new nailgun weapon is actually pretty neat; you can (inexplicably fully automatic) fire nails at people with the primary fire. If that doesn't seem rude enough, you can propel a nasty looking length of rebar at someone, which can impale them and stick them to objects. If that's not rude enough, you can also use the railgun mode to really put the hurt on with a "it shoots through schools" cheaty-scope.

There's a couple amusing brief cutscenes with Sarah, the primary new NPC. She's rocking the Daisy Dukes and also appears in your trophy room at the end of the adventure. Err, yes. She's living there. Hmm.
Make sure and go back and talk with her after everything is done; she has a rolling list of phrases and some of them are amusing.

I actually sort of enjoyed the video poker (one of the new mini games.) I've never used a "real-life" video poker machine, so that was kind of fun.

I'd say it was perfectly priced at $4.99.

Just finished the main game and although I enjoyed it I can understand the faults. (especially that horrible ending cutscene)

I actually used the sniper and shotty the whole game. I should have tried out different weps but only discovered how awesome the pop-shotgun shells were in the last instance and hadn't bought the recipe for them! From reading this page, i also did not realize you could increase your defense and health permanently! Oh well, worth 10 bucks but not 60. That's why I only but single player games on steam sales.

Looking back on this game, is it better than people said or about the same?

I'm looking over my reactions to the vids and demo and since I'm no longer burned out on Fallout 3 and Borderlands, I'm considering giving Rage a go.

Rage was the shooter of the year for me that year and it is the best thing iD has done since the original Doom IMHO. I would buy a current gen HD re-release of it in a second. The 360 version could look really nice at times and really crap at others but the shooting was solid and there was some interesting (if under-explored) stuff going on with the world/story.

If you're looking for a violent post-apocalypse game, I would highly recommend Mad Max. I've been playing this week, and I love it. It's more driving and punching than shooting, though.

My impressions was that Rage was a decent shooter but hard to get into. It took elements of Borderlands without the loot drops and elements of Fallout 3 but even less depth.

It was fun for awhile and decent checking out if its cheap enough, but it's not something I'd look for a ton of gameplay out of. The one thing I remembered when I checked out was that it got very tiresome towards the middle as you ended up with a lot of bullet-spongey enemies and to be effective you had to constantly upgrade your ammo and keep doing it because there was no "auto-upgrade".

Plus I thought the entire crafting system was kinda crappy considering how little depth the game had. Felt like a distraction.

The shooty bits and vehicle driving were fun. They should have focused more on that.

Crazed Java wrote:

The shooty bits and vehicle driving were fun. They should have focused more on that.

I think that IS what they focused on.

Yeah, if you want a beautiful, shallow game with great shooting and fun vehicles, go for it. That's all it is.

Sometimes that's all you want out of a game. Playing something for nostalgia regions isn't always bad. Speaking of which, I think Rage is sort of an example of why they've never made Half Life 3. It would end up having a lot of the same problems. Making something great out of that formula is very difficult, and reinventing it would be risky and prone to failure.

If by "shallow" you mean that it doesn't have RPG elements, loot drops, and all of that, then please, sign me up for more shallow.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

If by "shallow" you mean that it doesn't have RPG elements, loot drops, and all of that, then please, sign me up for more shallow.

Like I said, sometimes that's all you want out of a game. "Focused" is probably a better adjective.

I'm one of those weirdos who thinks loot drops and RPG elements are negatives more often than they're positives, so I'll have to take another look at this. I remember liking the demo well enough.

This was a game I really wanted to like but never fully did. I found that I didn't care about the story, didn't care about the characters, and after seeing a few hours of the world, I didn't care much for it either. After awhile my desire to play waned and waned until I stopped playing altogether.

The shooting bits were ok but I got frustrated that enemies took 3 or more headshots to kill. The game is a pseudo-RPG / Shooter hybrid and it ended up doing both poorly IMO.

Mad Max is good but its drastic under use of female characters is almost criminal. It's not a shooter of course, more of a post apocalypse driving and collecting game. If you like going to locations and checking off lists of things to do and/or collect you'll really like it. Overall I am enjoying it

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm one of those weirdos who thinks loot drops and RPG elements are negatives more often than they're positives, so I'll have to take another look at this. I remember liking the demo well enough.

Well, like I was saying, games have "progressed" beyond the classic shooter formulas of HL2 and the like. Rage wasn't particularly successful commercially and critically trying to make another one of those. It did have some open world elements to allow for the vehicles, but mostly it was more of the same.

I think that's the problem they ran into when considering a HL3. You can try and staple on all the crap modern shooters have added into the formula, or you can make the same thing as HL2 with better graphics. There's no "win" scenario commercially/critically unless you could come up with something completely different which might be impossible. Maybe they can figure something out if VR actually becomes a viable commercial thing, but that's a ways off and may never come to pass.

CptGlanton wrote:

If you're looking for a violent post-apocalypse game, I would highly recommend Mad Max. I've been playing this week, and I love it. It's more driving and punching than shooting, though.

I bounced off of Mad Max hard. I'm so over the Batman-esque combat.

I'm sure I'll buy it again six months from now. lol

ClockworkHouse wrote:

If by "shallow" you mean that it doesn't have RPG elements, loot drops, and all of that, then please, sign me up for more shallow.

My issue with that is they lifted so heavily from Borderlands and Fallout 3 and weren't particularly subtle about it. It made it difficult to reconcile because there was something of a "loot" drop to get items for crafting, the crafting was a pain (I don't really want to make drones and ammo. I just want to shoot stuff.) and then it was difficult to tell what was supposed to be a container and what was there for show.

So I just kept feel like the game was punishing me for not spending more time upgrading ammo, but that meant I had to spend more time crafting, and figuring out what resources I had gathered and wanted to sacrifice (because every component was used in like 3 different things). Woe would be me if I decided not to craft lockpicks or master keys or whatever it was used to unlock doors.

That is my real complaint is they had this distracting mechanic that made the game feel shallow. If they had removed a lot of that crap it would have been a better experience. I kept being told when the game was new that later enemies weren't bullet spongy if you made better bullets. Uh...I don't want to run around making my own ammo or worrying about gathering the right components.

Which is odd because I thought they did some of the side games well. I wasn't a huge fan of 5 finger filet but it was a neat side game and I thought the card game had some appeal. So they demonstrated an ability to do things other than just shooty bits and driving bits. I don't want to make it sound like it's just "Arrr...me just want a shooter!"

Also, I think all the things I described would have been far less distracting if it weren't clear they were lifting heavily from other games.

Loot drops? I don't remember this game having loot drops. At least not in a Diablo/Borderlands/Destiny/ETC sense.

No, just random components. I don't remember it being anything as random as other games and certain rare components were not random drops.

One thing I liked about Rage was that a gun was a gun. I enjoyed the crap out of Borderlands and Borderlands 2 but the constant Diablo-style weapon dropping min/max thing wore out its welcome with me pretty early.

And you can really feel the iD influence on the game because I always thought since the original Doom they just create a nice flow to combat. I'm describing it poorly.

I also enjoyed the races but I am told I am some kind of apostate in that matter so take it with a grain of salt if you find them unbearable. I believe racing is largely optional.

Got Rage on a steam sale a while back. Played it for an hour and moved on. Worth another try? I need a more on rails action game after a long stretch of Witcher 3 and Fallout 4.

RooksGambit wrote:

This was a game I really wanted to like but never fully did. I found that I didn't care about the story, didn't care about the characters, and after seeing a few hours of the world, I didn't care much for it either. After awhile my desire to play waned and waned until I stopped playing altogether.

The shooting bits were ok but I got frustrated that enemies took 3 or more headshots to kill. The game is a pseudo-RPG / Shooter hybrid and it ended up doing both poorly IMO.

Mad Max is good but its drastic under use of female characters is almost criminal. It's not a shooter of course, more of a post apocalypse driving and collecting game. If you like going to locations and checking off lists of things to do and/or collect you'll really like it. Overall I am enjoying it

I tried this back a few years ago. It started OK, but I lost interest rapidly. Part of the problem for me was that I got it on PS3, and I've never really meshed with console shooter controls ( I suck beyond all hope). If I had gotten it on the PC I might have liked it.

Rykin wrote:

Rage was the shooter of the year for me that year and it is the best thing iD has done since the original Doom IMHO. I would buy a current gen HD re-release of it in a second. The 360 version could look really nice at times and really crap at others but the shooting was solid and there was some interesting (if under-explored) stuff going on with the world/story.

I really enjoyed Rage. The game was under-rated and overlooked and a lot of it had to do with its identity crisis and perhaps Bethesda's limp marketing efforts. Rage would hint at systems more fully fleshed out in other games but never jump in with both feet on any of them, except for its rock solid shooting and mission design. Personally it's interesting for me to see an open-ish world shooter play with crafting and other "shoot n' loot' mechanics without getting mired in stats and endless grinding.

I too would buy a current-gen remastering immediately, especially if they smoothed out the performance of those mega textures, reduced load times, etc.

I was a fan of Rage. The shooting mechanics were great. The weapons were fantastic. Enemy movement was refreshing. I also enjoyed the car combat and the races, to a degree.

Story? I completed the game and I had no idea what was going on. I was there to blast a path towards the end goal, whatever that was, wherever it may have been.

Crafting? I knocked a few things together here and there. I usually had everything on hand when needed.

I remember that I was impressed enough that I would have purchased a sequel. The gameplay was solid.