This is exactly what Willits said... RAGE was the victim of poor marketing. I knew exactly what I was going to get, and I loved every second of it (except the abrupt ending). But for most people, they heard the phrase "Wasteland" and saw a "Bethesda" logo on the box, and they thought they were buying Fallout 4.

Like others have said, do some damn research. Don't bash a game because you think it should of been something else... that just makes you look like the uninformed, self entitled brat you are.

When I see an id Software logo on the box, I know I will get cutting edge graphics and the best shooting gameplay available. RAGE delievered ten-fold.

So true. The experience gained in life almost always leads to this conclusion.


The original isn't that bad either. As long as you don't misunderstand it as a heavy machinegun.
It's not designed for permanent rapid fire.
But i have to admit not being an expert in the Stalker games.
That's my brother's preference.
He even made some weapon physics and bullet hit mods for the original that were well received.


I heard something about this.
H&K usually makes forward oriented, ultra durable and reliable weaponry so this was to be expected.
H&K where the first to use polymer for guns in the early 70s. More than a decade before Glock entered the stage...

German craftsmanship was always of interest for the enemy.
The AK 47 is a rip off of the Sturmgewehr 44 carried by the german soldiers in WWII.
I even heard that US soldiers swapped their Thompsons with captured german MP 40s during that period.

^ This!

"RAGE looks first real beautiful, then
You discover that its very static and
lifeless, with less than average action
moments.The art direction and design is
superb, but its more of a virtual
walkthrough through that world, due to
very rare and limited physics, baked
lighting etc."

some guy wrote that a long time ago, I agree

op, why did you insult this forum and game with a link to a horrible third person/console trash? I own me2 but it was complete waste of $, never finished, maybe loged 2-3 hours....

I was under the impression that News sites and the like were just supposing at game features despite only being shown technical demos with a heavy emphasis on vehicular combat.

That anyone came away expecting something other than an arcade-oriented presentation that harkens to the illogical world of Mad Max after the race and Mutant Bash footage is beyond me. The whole of the world is too willing to make assumptions or accept poorly written articles as word-of-God type stuff.

Perhaps if any decision here hurt id's presentation, it was the belief that shooter and racer audiences are cut from the same cloth. Races are by nature an artificial and arbitrary setup, a very barebones frame work in concept that exists in real life situations in the same arbitrary fashion as it does in games. Racing games have never really progressed beyond the whole seasonal and session divisions that we see in older "Mission" oriented games like Doom.

FPS games have progressed to a point of selling based on immersion and are barely "games" with rulesets to follow any more. As a genre, the "modern shooter" has progressed far and away from the requirement of anything more than a rudimentary skillset, and has become more of an interactive film medium than a game themed after a world setting.


Interactive experiences and games are seeing greater divides every year, and the lack of industry distinction has created a confusion between pure gaming scenarios and immersive interactive experiences. Ironically, the immersion crowd which has eschewed most "game" oriented presentation considers itself the "core" audience.

This game svcked...I beat the story mode in 10 hours...and the lack of story did not make me want to explore.

I just signed up to +1 the OP and flog this dead horse. It was a good post, well said, and I totally agree. And I like to think that the devs (or pubs, whoever is responsible) will hear this bit of discontent and up their game.

I just want to put this out there - RAGE probably features the most disappointing game ending I've ever come across. It's like they just cut a quarter of the game out. There's no cinematic, no battle royale, no narrative conclusion. It just STOPS. That to me has transformed an entertaining-if-flawed shooter (8/10) to an absolute ballsack disappointment of a game (5/10). I've never been so angry at the conclusion of a game. Talk about "entitlement", talk about "nerd rage": I genuinely feel cheated. It's like watching you're watching a film at the Cinema and it stops just before the final act - like the X-man never made it to the Statue of Liberty, or Neo never broke Morpheus out of custody. You're left thinking: what? How did they get away with this? That's not what I paid my money for....

I'd also like to add that a lot of guys are knocking the OP for criticising RAGE's lack of narrative class. If RAGE had been a straight corridor shooter, I'd have agreed that that was an unfair criticism. Who looks for story in an id game? But the structure of "go here, push this button, come back, now go there, you're the ONLY ONE who can push that button!" is totally undermined by the open-world approach RAGE adopts. RAGE forces story down your throat, and try to get you to believe in its world. It lost the focus of trying to make an adrenaline-fuelled shooter, and instead created a broken world with little narrative consistency. And yet the very structure of the game is striving for just that. RAGE has a identity crisis which tears it apart - I'm sorry, but it it's true.

Nowhere is that better demonstrated than the end-game experience. You trigger the final cinematic, and get dumped out to the main menu. That world which id tried so hard to create just vanishes. You can't go back and finish side-quests, complete races, or "hang out" as the game seems so keen for you to do. You might try and claim that that's narratively impossible; than in the wake of the authority's (presumed) downfall the world as we experienced it was over. I say "nonsense". There are a million ways for the post-game story to have unfolded, and id should have contrived an ending which allowed the player to experience the world they were supposed to invest in. It would have been easy to support in-game, seamless DLC, the expansion of more towns and stories - a la the Borderlands model. But something clearly went wrong behind the scenes, and we've been left with a broken package.

Very, very disappointing. RAGE has some wonderful moments - I've not had this much fun in a shooter for years. But I also don't think I've ever felt quite so... used by a game before.

Bleh. Try playing Mass Effect trilogy since 2009 all the way to 2012 and finish ME3 without the Extended Cut. Now THAT was a ballbreaker. RAGE is just a minor gripe compared to what-in-the-world-was-that of ME3.

No. I tried the demo but the third person and the constant hand holding was enough to keep that experience to under 15 minutes.

And yet you played through Skyrim. You're a man of contradictions, just like Maurice Chavez.

If you have a point you should make it.

I hate third person. There is no hand holding in Skyrim if you make just a few changes to your config. If you don't there are markers as to direction and little else. Not surprising with a game that is so large and massive that after 700 some hours there are areas I have not been to.

Rage is a tiny little thing with walls everywhere so it's hard to get lost. There are single areas in Stalker larger than all of Rage and Skyrim is at least an order of magnitude larger.

Mass Effect 3 had about 7 minutes of actual play in about 15 minutes of game, the rest was cut scenes explaining the next bit.

There is nothing but hand holding in Skyrim and if you make those changes you'll effectively break the game since the quests were designed with the marker in mind. Then again, RAGE is not like STALKER or Skyrim, it's in the different genre. It's not a open-world massive "do-what-you-want-go-where-you-want-f-storyline-lets-do-some-sidequests" game.
Yeah, but you know, third game in the trilogy, let alone a trilogy that is tightly knit together with the story, is a poor entering point.

Actually it's the 5th TES game but whatever. I have Morrowind and Oblivion. In Skyrim I routinely turn off the markers, it's more fun that way.

A bit of a Stalker story. Because the A-Life runs all the time we lose things. One guy in a massive mod recently had to find a particular Fleshy, a pig like mutation, and kill it for a particular part for some guys special dinner which then lets you do other stuff, I forget. Any way after wiping out the Fleshy population in the map it was supposed to be on, looking for the part, he finds it two maps away and to have gotten there it would have had to have gone right past the bar where a large number of Stalkers always hang out.

We are still trying to figure that one out, but it makes the game so very alive when all the AI does it's thing all the time.

It's more fun to have no damn idea where the hell should you go, because there are no descriptions whatsoever. Okay.
I was talking about Mass Effect trilogy, not TES.

Yeah, I stopped reading after "massive mod".
FYI, I played the original STALKER. Nothing exactly groundbreaking, just a good shooter.

You should try some mods. They make it a completely new game and some are just amazing. Make sure you play on master, it's easier.

Yup. You need direction? You don't enjoy having no idea what is going on ... oh well.

Well the entire series + more maps in one game is indeed massive.

Well then the game being amazing is not the game's achievement, but the mods, ain't it?

Hmm, you persist in missing the point, perhaps it's just your way.

An amazing game that has been wide open to mods from near the beginning so it is not surprising some very good ones have been made. Some of the recent Narodnaya Solyanka variants incorporate the entire series, well at least it's maps, in one massive mod. If getting lost in Stalker is your kind of fun, it is most definitely mine, these mods are like heaven on earth. Damn the zone must be getting to me, I think meant hell. Oh well.

Uhh, yeah, I like knowing where to go. 'cause I like completing quests and quests can take forever if you don't know where you should go. There should be at least a description, or a map mark (not a compass mark, a map mark).
Again, STALKER ain't exactly amazing. Good? Yeah. Interesting? Kinda. Nice to see post-Soviet setting in a videogame? Sure. Amazing game? Uhh, nope. The A-life system is either incomplete or was just plain turned off and as a result Oblivion is more alive than STALKER, the sidequests are boring and generic and remind me of Arena and graphics are a bit behind its time. Plus, the optimization is poop. And don't even let me start on how the locations being separate instead of promised open-world is crappy. Everybody who praises it, praises not the game itself, but what mods do to it.

I once spent about an hour in COP just following a Chimera around one night. I had excellent equipment, high grade night vision,an exoskeleton and powerful weapons but I kept my distance. Chimeras are very dangerous.

Any way just followed hm around. He wandered along not far from the road and came upon a pack of Dogs attacking a Fleshy. He killed 3 or 4 and took their Fleshy and dragged it into the bushes. After a while he came out and wandered along some more in the same direction and came upon a pack of Fleshys which he chased around a bit but did not kill any. Then he came upon a wild Boar, big ugly pig, and a short battle ensued. He won it easily and continued along to the bandit container camp where he sat and watched them for about 10 minutes. I let him go after that and went back to whatever I was doing.

It was a magical night.

You've made it sound boring though. The last thing I'd want to do in a game is waste my time following AI.

You really have no idea ... do you. I have spent thousands of hours playing Stalker. The AI is amazing and unusual because it does it's own thing. It has nothing to do with you unless you manage to get inside 'notice' range.

It takes that 'it's all scripted to your player' junk that fills so many games including Rage, and flushes it.

You have never encountered AI worth following around is all.

No, I just see it as boring because if I want to see critters doing their thing I'll watch Discovery, or a film; I play games to do what I must do not to spend the day watching npc's living their lives ya know.
Combat AI matters alot to me, but the npc virtual lives mean nothing to me. All a game needs to keep interest is to have spawn spots that spawn a large variety of enemies at a random given time, thus always keeping every playthrough through any region always different, and giving the effect of life.

I believe Rage had this for the wasteland, as the live demos showed mutants running about in the wasteland. For some insane reason they took this out and we ended up with a COMPLETELY lifeless wasteland

Perhaps you're right though, and if the mutants in Rage "lived lives" on the wasteland I might sneak up and spy on them just for a bit. I'd only do it for a bit though, then shoot the hell out of them

Oh my, combat AI. An expert Stalker in any of the factions, yes AI levels, has a 50% chance of headshotting you with the first bullet, inside reasonable range, and 100% on the second. All these people have scoped weapons and you show them your head at your peril. Fighting with a group of them is an art.

There is nothing even remotely as deadly in any id game, and the Chimera would just murder any beast short of a Cyber. The 30' attack jump is usually all it takes.

You would probably not enjoy the zone, it's a very dangerous place.