http://www.shacknews.com/article/71845/2011-game-developers-choice-nominees-announced


Best Technology and Best Visual Arts de-[censored]-nitely belongs to ID Software/Rage - the whole Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception thing is a joke ... Rage outruns it in both of these. Rage outruns many other games if not ALL in Best Technology.

Zenimax should make a complaint. ASAP.

They seriously messed up with the wrong here, i can see the "chuck norris of gaming" being quite upset about this, if he saw yet.

Too bad there's nobody in community yet that would already take matters in their own hands (ex. reddit) ... so i'll see what i can do but im very busy ...

It's bad form for a studio or publisher to complain about awards, it just means next year they'll have a sour opinion of you.

But I agree that it's surprising that RAGE isn't a candidate. I haven't seen RAGE in all its glory so I'm not in a position to talk about art, but ignoring them in the best technology category?

Live and learn...its not the end of the world.

There is a saying that sums it up "That which does not kills us makes us stronger".

Theres always next year.

I fully agree with you. How on earth is RAGE not even a candidate for any of this?

If anything, Skyrim has so many technical issues that it doesn't belong on that list for 'Best Technology'. It may be a great game, but I honestly don't see what's impressive on the technical side of things there.
RAGE on the other hand is incredible on the technical aspect. High performance (60 FPS) on consoles, unique texturing and dynamic resolution scaling to maintain high framerates in demanding scenes - how can all of this be ignored?!

When it comes to the visual aspect, then RAGE in my opinion is of "true quality" with impressive art styles and unique detail, whereas the other games on the list like Battlefield 3 and Crysis 2 are games with rather typical geometry and tiled textures with a crapload of post-processing to cover up for worser elements. Anyone who has played either Crysis 2 or Battlefield 3 will agree that there is an obnoxious amount of lens flares or pixel-distortion effects in those games.

Rage itself was the 2011 Utter Epic Fail. I posted about Rage failing in the marketplace months prior to its release. The main reason is because it had no REAL multiplayer. Combat Rally Racing was more like an arcade game than a multiplayer Rage experience. An FPS with no versus mode deathmatch in today's ultra competitive market is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with no jelly.

The second reason I predicted they would fail is because of the release date....they released right along-side one of the most anticipated games of 2011 - Gears of War 3 which outsold them by leaps and bounds.

A reason Rage failed that I didn't see was the whole PC graphics card debocal. I should have seen this considering how many PC gamers continually complain about all the issues they have with games upon release.

Don't get mad that they didn't receive acclaim and awards....it boils down to the fact that they could not keep themselves popular during the months of October-Novemeber when the awards were being decided on. And the reason why they couldn't maintain popularity amongst game websites and award givers was because they didn't keep themselves visible in the marketplace for very long because of the lack of MP which gives games extended play, thus giving it extended exposure.

I warned them this would happen and alot of people on the forums argued opposition....I was right and they were wrong.

Rage's failings as a game (no standard MP, PC launch-mess) and the game's release among other big game launches has nothing to do with Rage's technology or visual artwork.

Rage should be a candidate for best visual arts and best technology - excluding it must be a mistake.

Agreed with both

Which brings us to what Advisory Commitee has to do.

It's their JOB TO FIND TALENT AND AWARD GAMES FOR WHATEVER CATEGORY THEY DESERVE REGARDLESS OF THEIR COMMERCIAL SUCCESS, MARKET EXPOSURE, and REVIEW SCORES.

Man this is your world, american commercialism. No money under table - no nominees, no good reviews.

NX1000,
The real reason for the fail - consoles! An example, you can see in the demo of the id tech 5 before many years the textures and the cactus details.( http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=L3qNLUlQ7e0#t=139s ) This is only one reason from thousand.
Can you tell me why we don't have hi res textures dlc ? I can tell you why, becouse consoles. They will be very very sad of that. Must look the same. They spend soooo much time for xbox and ps3. 7 years.... for what ? The game for 7 years must be twice bigger, open world, rpg elements etc. Yes id fail

It's a good and advanced tech demo. It is a pitiful game. There is the reason in a nutshell for the awards, both this and the recent GOTY stuff.

There is more game in Skyim's intro than all of Rage.

Wonderful progamming and wonderful art do not a good game make ... grasshopper.

So because the gameplay is poor (in your eyes), the game is not allowed to be nominated in categories not related to the gameplay at all?

In very many peoples eyes actually. That is why it bombed.

I get a huge kick out of the attitude that the game has failed because some of us were not nice to it BTW.

As to wether it should have recived nominations for tecnical excellance I kind of agree with you to some extent but they apparently do not.

The game altough pretty has several serious shortcomings technically, well at least from my point of view:

It is static. A huge problem with immersion in a game. Skyrim while not as hi res in texture and does repeat texture has far more immersion with a simple weather system and day and night.

It's a boxed in corridor shooter engine and according to Carmack is useless for an open world game. I have little interest in corridor shooters.

Skyrim is on that list? Hahaha.

RAGE did honestly not showcase the engine at its full potential. The PC version is lacking, and 60 FPS on consoles has already been achieved by Call of Duty. Crysis 2 is definitely my pick.
Uncharted 3 is being graphically overhyped by the fact that it does all of its magic on a PS3. $ony has spent a lot of money on marketing their 3D tech, which is fine. The truth is that people are misled to believe that the PC hasn't achieved this before. I remember a Voodoo card with 3D drivers from 1998 or so.

WOW that list is a joke...
idTech5 has FAR more technological advance than any of those.

However, Rage did not. That's why they didn't win... anything. I feel rather meloncholy, but I knew it wouldn't be nominated because:

-Toddlers and whiny PC gamers that think textures have to be HD
-Openworld fanb0ys who think that anything outdoors has to be openworld
-Simple-minded people who didn't get that Rage was SUPPOSED to be classic style gameplay, in semi-openworld terrain.

But oh well... let's hope Doom4 does take idTech5 to it's limits, for people with monster computers... all so that an award can be handed. Well not really, there's the fact that we want to see the engine at it's limits, lol

I built a fairly monster computer for Rage. Now Rage will not do SLI and does not really tax it much at all unless it lags out without using my hardware to any appreciable extent. Thanks consoles, thanks id .... fer nothing at all.

Well yes, indeed it's understandable that you feel cheated.

I did read somewhere that Carmack wants to focus on PC again, and by that I hope he means Doom4 won't be toned down for consoles. I'm not as mad about the console thing, but then again I didn't spend alot for upgrades.

All I ask from id is that Doom4 go on a different direction, I don't mind if Rage2 focuses on consoles again, I'll buy it anyway (cuz I liked Rage)

So do I because it didn't fail.

Rage is a mixed bag. In many ways it's so far ahead on the technical curve, but in many others it chooses a different set of tradeoffs to the establised convention. What that means is that in technical terms it's going to put everybody outside of their comfort zones, so it's technical merit in any of these reviews is going to be entirely dependent on how comfortable the reviewer is with being in that position.

While I agree RAGE should have at least been mentioned, the likes of Uncharted 3 (for both), Deus Ex HR (for Visual Arts) are also worthy.

RAGE did some cool stuff and I loved the art direction but technically it was just as many steps backward as it was forwards. It wasn't a consistant package and sacrificed as much as it made gains on. Skyrim also being a true open world engine does technically put that aspect of technology to shame.

rage is the underdog of gaming. all these forum threads about rage are going to give me an aneurysm (j/k) I can't express my feelings for this game compared to others.

No it's not. They have the high-resolution source textures and they're 1TB in size. The textures are compressed for distribution / storage reasons. Please tell me how you want id Software to distribute the uncompressed textures? On 20 Blu-rays?

They also had textures compressed at 150 gigs for the game. Id was going to release it for the PC, but thwy releasized that the source textures were already low becuase the consoles could not tell the diffrence. As a result the next patch will add bicubic-upsample+detail texture. If they would have have made the source art higher resulution we would have a better looking mega texture.

Rage is not an open-world game so what you are saying is your opinion solely based on what kind of game you prefer, which is invalid, other's and me like this type of semi-open world progression, new paths open as you progress, against having every path open at the start, this is what openworld means, you people MISUNDERSTAND what open-world means, it's doesn't mean "NO invisible walls" ... it's a gameplay descriptor and not about how much LAND you can walk on. I do not like invisible walls my self either and would like games that have side-stuff and secondary things in the pathable areas that are just to explore the sorroundings, but i do not want to access the whole world already because what's the point of the ADVENTURE and exploring ; what would you explore if you already see the whole map revealed in the minimap and no barriers or challenges along the way ; that's like turning the fog of war and shroud off in a RTS game ; the gameplay is designed around the point of not seeing the map.


ID Software just didn't pursue the ADVENTURE side of things as much as it should, big boss fights for example, and a massive boss at the end was missing, they threw in some parts together from many games, the formula has to be refined or revamped to split out of being a mix, to a completely genuine and well working genre.


IDTech5 is capable of making map sized how they want if they want to develop more code, people percieve engines as static things ("it can do this but not this") THEY ARE CONSTANTLY UPDATING THE ENGINE AFTER RAGE'S RELEASE.

Out of my experience and my anolyze of what i gathered i can tell you that what John Carmack meant with "the engine won't necessairly be the choice of other games" ... pointing to open-world like skyrim ; the DATA NEEDED would have been many 100 of GIGABYTES to run (full-quality from source-art compile), because you obviously need A LOT OF textures, it's just the DATA requirement that makes a PRODUCT impractical, it has little to do with engine capability , since they can code it if they want to, it's not impossible.

Do not mix FULL-QUALITY BUILD with "Source-Art" .... source-art is unplayable, it's raw, and it's "many terabytes".

I think Rage is quite possibly the most misunderstood and controversial game of the decade and that alone explains why it wasn't nominated. Those award nominees are chosen by industry peers which means in all likelihood the judges were overwhelmingly involved in producing Dx games and may have had little knowledge of openGL engines much less the megatextures or data streaming technology behind Rage. To such people an advanced engine means adding things like dynamic lighting and shadows, not taking them out because their incompatible with huge texture files. It means ambient occlusion and physics and squeezing as much into the game as possible without crippling your average PC.

These are the same arguments I hear endlessly online about the game and that you can find even within this thread. It has bad drivers and doesn't support sli, must be id's fault. It doesn't have even ambient occlusion, how can you call it an advanced graphics engine. People just don't understand the technology and the old adage applies that great artists are never appreciated in their lifetimes. In this case, not even by other artists who obviously just don't get it because its too far outside their parochial views and, as such, is automatically suspect.

Its funny to read people's reasons for this not getting nominated for the awards listed in the OP,;reasons that have nothing to do with those particular awards..