It is definitely the best FPS I ever played(and that is a very very long list). Here are the positive and negative highlights:

good:

-all environments are extraordinary good looking, full of details and very immersive, no other game of any genre even approaches this quality, although when you come closer to surfaces the texture is not so good(blame consoles)

-all creatures in the game(including NPCs) are superbly animated, it is a joy to watch them in everything they do

-enemies react dynamically towards you in every way and can always surprise you and the fluidity of their motion, right to the moment of their demise, is of unprecedented quality

-very good campaign structure with nice slow progress, although it is not RPG it really feels like it, this actually changed my mind regarding classic RPG stats/customization, here you have a very meaningful variety of choices and the economy drives it all.
Although it would have been nice if there was more armor and especially gloves customization

-I am not a fan of racing games, never bought a single racing game ever, but I do like to drive in games(Half Life 2, Battlefield 2142), and driving here is super fun, you really outdid yourself in this department, with an option to upgrade your vehicles it is even better

-minigames are great, I thought Bioware and Bethesda do good minigames but you showed them!
with that card game I must have spent at least 6 hours..

lacking:

-no physics whatsoever. Since Half Life 2 each game has less and less physics, Rage has zero physics, even bodies get stiff almost instantly(and also lose solidity so they fall through other bodies). You can't even break a vase or any set object, such complete stiffness of the world collides with the otherwise immersive environment.

-sky is a static picture!
Seriously, a picture? No moving/changing clouds or anything, have you really never played Oblivion/Fallout 3/Farcry2/Crysis? Don't you understand how much better everything feels when you have a real sky in a game? I find this very puzzling...

-water, I don't understand why any game after 7 year old Half Life 2 has much worse looking water, seriously what's up with that?? Just look at water in Half Life 2, it looks like water!

-there are no animations for exiting or entering the vehicle which is a real shame since it would be an opportunity to look at your character, also it doesn't feel good when there is no transition, you know...like in Halo combat Evolved...

-job missions like covering water worker or caravan were fantastic, but there are only few of them, why didn't you make a metagame similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with battling factions and measurable progress so your efficiency(number of protected NPCs, time limit(if you finish some missions faster you get the option of additional submissions, etc.)) is meaningful and makes the whole game extremely replayable

-you should really take a look at a game like Killing Floor, fire every weapon in that game, reload them, move with them while in ironsights mode and then compare all of that to Rage weapons. You will find that they lack a certain weight/"realism"/punch to them and the animations are not as detailed...this is also very puzzling


To conclude, Rage is far better than I thought it would be. It really brings new standards to many areas and I hope with future DLC you will make it a lot more replayable(that metagame I was talking about). After all you can easily clock over 100 hours in Fallout 2/New Vegas...

Congratulations to ID for making such extraordinary game, I'm sure if it was a PC exclusive it would have been much better in every area...it is hard to work with a 6 year old decrepit console hardware..

Agree with you on all points. It is definitely the best shooter i've played in a long long time. Animation and environments truly revolutionary for a FPS. With a couple of tweaks that hopefully make it in a form of DLC, the main things I would love being addressed is:

After the campaign is over, make it so that we can still shoot things without starting a game over. What makes most sense without walking over the story would be to make Mutant Bash TV episodes available through the menu and give out ammo for that episode accordingly. Yes I know I can always use a Save pt.

Make the Wasteland more a live...random Mobs, Rare Spwans, More herbs and junk to get. I would have also loved a zone early on where it was about survival...I think if the story started with you coming out of your ark and having to make it on your own for the first hour or two of the game would have been great!

I don't know if you gusy rememeber the After the impact website when it was first under activision, the tone and mood of what RAGE was going to be in there was absolutely awesome. Where you are sitting at a camp fire raosting some rodent and worried about drinking clean water....Yes, I know RAGE doesn't take itself to seriously but that doesn't mean it can't do something compelling as well...Here's to hoping.

Yes, Rage is far far better than Borderlands or Fallout 3/New Vegas in every way you can think of but those games had live world to count on for replayability.

I think this can easily be tweaked in...

Edit your post. Don't quote huge posts that are directly above the post you quoted.

btw, how come this forum has such low traffic, is there another Rage forum that is deemed "official"?

Have developers ever posted here?

Can't say for sure, but my guess is that most people come here to gripe, and most gripes are coming from PC players, and only like 15% or something of the total "Rage" sales were to PC gamers.... tiny market?

I agree though, this forum is usually dead, you have to check in twice a day (morning/evening), trying to follow any live thread... yeah ain't happening

Edit: Out of curiosity, I know YEARS late right?... but idsoftware.com, is awful, they don't have anything there, one link to Bethesda and an announcement that rage has been released, you have to find them on twitter for any type of info - it's irritating.

strictly as a FPS, maybe, just maybe. Borderlands and fallout are both better games than rage imo. Content alone make both games better than rage, period. as far as replayability goes, rage has none imo at all. If RAGE sees any DLC maybe things will change, but we'll see.

I urge you to think carefully about this.
What other content surpasses Rage other than various randomize generators? Think about the details, the vehicle play, the combat, the enemy behavior, the combat options...You basically repeated what I said but conflating the categories.

Also now I can never go back To Fallout 3/New Vegas, remember those omnipresent invisible shields around every object in those games and how you could never shoot through huge holes in objects/fences/walls...

And Borderlands, tiresome gazillion meaningless guns with only a few basic ways of gameplay...

One note, you state there is NO physics, this is incorrect.

There is physics, there has to be or you wouldn't be able to drive in the game. Also note when an enemy dies his weapons flies in a random direction, bounces, wobbles and spins to a stop. In car combat mode you can see lots of physics, someone rams your car and you go into a spin or end-over-end crash. That's what I think is physics in a game.

Maybe you meant less interactive objects because that's what your examples seem to imply.

Sounds like you're also a fan of rag-doll physics which is when an enemy dies they resemble a rag-doll and limbs are limp and body contorts and folds in unnatural positions. I really don't like rag-doll physics because it's not very much like real life. It looks comical IMO. When the enemies die in RAGE they don't go stiff. If you detonate a grenade near a bandits body you can send that body flying if it doesn't splatter from the explosion.

Wait, what? Rage and Fallout 3/NV are completely different games from completely different genres. They have nearly nothing in common other than a post-apocalyptic setting. While Rage excels in visuals, it can't even begin hoping to hold a candle to the vast superior storyline and character development in the Fallout universe. If you want to compare Rage's (or rather idTech5's) superiority to Gamebryo, then by all means, do so (idTech5 wipes the floor with that engine), but the story, development, the open world setting, choose your own path/adventure/allegiance/karma/etc - Rage has none of those things. Rage is a First Person Shooter with a minuscule RPG feel to it, with a very claustrophobic "open world" and mostly linear gameplay - Fallout is first and foremost an RPG with some FPS elements thrown in, with a vast open world to explore at a pace of your own choosing.

Btw, neither one or the other are "better". They are "different". And I happen to like both for what they are.

without going into loads of detail, RAGE has hardly no content(~15h max). You replay the same 8 maps twice, then games over. No character development nor weapon customization. There is one of each gun, few different ammo types. nothing that makes you want to start over, for example different character build etc.. Rages replayablility is basically replaying the game, and unless you missed quest or use a different weapon, its the same run through.

With fallout/borderlands, you have character development. There is loads of content to keep you occupied for more than +15h. There are tons of guns in both games, sure many of the guns are 'useless' but you have lots of options. These games make you want to replay because each time you replay the game your virtually playing a different game then the time before (different character builds, Factions, etc...)

but if you think rage is full of more game content then fallout/borderlands then I must have missed a disk or something along the way or your just kidding yourself.

EDIT: by content I mean game content not game engine, or visual content....

rage as a story and a gameplay experience wasn't thought out one bit. if they had thought about it they would notice that they needed to add...
-weapon customization
-character customization
-factions
- drop in co-op
-more intriguing guns
-about 20 more quests
-maybe a small perk/talent tree
-follow NPC's
-not have 90% of the world drive terrain
- enemy randomization drop in at random times
-LOOT, gear u can equip
-a multi layer story, not just a these are the authority, you shouldnt like them
-o and... TEAM DEATHMATCH. DUH!

WHAT THE HELL did id do for six years? handcraft each grain of effing sand?!

Yes, most of that I said already, latest S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has many of those things...
But the thing is...just because Rage doesn't have those things it doesn't mean it's not a very enjoyable great game, it only means that it hurts more that it didn't realize its full potential.

I think people keep wanting RAGE to be a better version of another game with some of the feature requests (Fallout, Borderlands), thing is it does what it does do well. My only real gripes would be lack of side missions on the Job Board and the Eastern Wastelands only felt like a hint of what the Western Wastelands were as far as amount of content went, it did have some fantastic locales but it was too short in comparison to the first half. First half took me around 19 hours the second only around 6 or 7 (this is looking for everything).

Otherwise an awesome game.

people don't want RAGE to be a better version of any other game, I think a lot of people were misled, or misled themselves to what the finial game was exactly (i understood that RAGE was gonna be mainly a single player game based on an epic campaign).

RAGE is a good FPS, imo it is just that. It's not the best FPS, but its not the worse FPS. it is mediocre as far as game play goes.

The second 'half' didn't really feel like 'half' did it. I think that's where a lot of negativity comes from because like me, I think a lot of people were under the assumption that this game was gonna have an epic campaign that would take them much more time to complete then it did (like at least double). The game was good, but it feels like a lot is still missing(side missions, job boards and main story plot). And I don't think adding DLC to further extend the content in RAGE is gonna sit good with a lot of people.

Btw, I don't understand how people are saying that they finished Rage in 15-17 hours?!

I am up to 20 hours now and I just got to the subway town...it must be those buffoons who just ignore half the content game provides and run to finish the main quest, damn I hate those people. They should not even speak about games..

People are listing NPC followers, wearable gear, skill trees, factions (I thought we already had those), etc. These are elements from other games. I actually ended up getting a lot less linear game than I thought I would be getting based on what I knew, it's as open as Borderlands is and a damn sight more exciting and together than that was pre DLC.

There's no real grounds to debate the best/mediocre FPS thing as that is your opinion, but in my opinion it feels a lot better than half the other FPS fluff that's been released for a long time and brings back fond memories of how the genre used to feel, MF solid. I agree with the Eastern Wastelands as I mentioned, but I got 25+ hours on my first playthrough and am now 11 hours into my second + the co-op missions (which are very good) and a little bit of online racing (a lot better than the SP variations, although I didn't mind those).

I would be more than happy to purchase decent DLC, there's not many games that last as long these days.

The bugs are the only thing i can undertand people having a legitimate fgripe about.
But even then, i think it should be taken with a grain of salt, because PC's have more variables now than ever with hardware and software combinations and this is a new engine.

A lot of the gripes i see that are game related seem to come from an uninformed pre-purchase viewpoint.
People have posted on here that they were lied to about the game being open. but if you paid attention, it was always "open but directed" it was never supposed to be a sandbox game.
people have complained it was "too short" after rushing through the game. hey, you can beat F3 in about 5 hours, too, but you can also have about a 160 hour playthrough as well..
others lament no TDM.. This game was never going to have any of that on release.

I think a lot of people had false expectations and preconcieved notions on the game based off of id's past titles.. They have said from the gate that this game would be focused on different gameplay than previous titles.

I have been having a blast with this game! beat it in about 17 hrs and am now on my second playthrough, paying muych more attention this time throguh.


Cheers!

I finished in ~17.5h. I didn't rush it, I took my time, I looted every body, I did all side missions played card game, played tombstone a lot and completed all races except two rally races. I even half-assed explored some of the western wasteland.

I honestly don't know how I could have put more time in. there is only about 10h of actual game play, the rest is eaten up by job board and mini games.

I actually think this is the biggest problem the game industry faces IMO. Preorders. People have bought and payed for a product they haven't tested, seen and most times have no idea of what there in for. AND then when their pre bought game arrives and its nothing what they expected, or has bugs/issues the first thing they do is go on the fourms and [censored] like little children who didn't get there own way. IMO ANYONE who preordered any game shouldn't complain about their game because they agreed on the purchase before the product was actually completed.

Agreed.

I dont actually buy a whole lot of games, because either i know i wont replay most of them, or dont know enough about them to make that kind of purchase.
mostly I will rent and buy later, if the game is up to my standards

Maybe I am far from the norm, but if I am buying a game, especially pre-order, i will find out all i can about it before shelling out the dough.

I think also that's where a lot of 'hate' comes from too, people that are mad at themselves for a poor decision. and since they cannot hold themselves responsible for there poor decision they go on the internet and complain how they want their money back or this or that (you know standard fourm QQ's).

Another thing that bothered me about weapon animations is that when you reload the hand goes immediately back to putting the clip in, like you are putting the same clip you took out back in. Didn't reload animations in COD4:MW finally break this horrible tradition?

There is a lot of puzzling stuff like that, it's like ID developers didn't pay any attention or didn't play any other games to learn from them..

I really can't think of any game that has better combat/AI/animation/weapon effects variety than Rage.
Care to name those games?

Exactly. I scoured the Rage website, which was very informative, and watched all the videos they provided. I knew exactly what I was getting into and was therefore satisfied (and then some!). The devs can't be held responsible for gamers who purchase blindly, assuming it's a completely different game. All the information was out there and easy enough to find.

I'm really interested in your answer.