just finished RAGE today. some thoughts..

the good

-Subway Town. absolutely loved it. wished it was a lot bigger. i really dug the whole Blade Runner vibe to it. if there's a Rage 2, or expansion pack, it needs to come back. same with the characters. i didn't care much for the ones in Wellspring, but Subway Town seemed to be full of interesting people. i wanted to know more about them.

-the driving/racing. i read that some didn't like it. wow, don't get that at all. i loved it. it was really refreshing to do different things during the game and not just run around with a weapon killing mutants all the time. maybe FPS fans aren't normally used to that sort of thing but it was very well done.

-weapon selection. i never felt like i was relying more on one or two weapons all the time, unlike in some other games. i felt they all got equal use. some missions, like the ones against the Shrouded Clan, i think i ended up using 4 or 5 different weapons going through it. they all had their advantages and disadvantages, and i thought it was great how some weapons were more effective against some enimies than others were. id knows shooters and they once again did a phenominal job with the weapons in this game.

-graphics. just fantastic.

the bad

-no day/night transitions. this was really disappointing. pretty much all games now have some sort of transition between daytime and nighttime. you need to feel that time is actually passing and not just at a standstill. why was it never nighttime in the wasteland? that's just sloppy programming. id really missed a great opportunity there. imagine how cool it would've been to be outside in the wasteland in the middle of the night fighting mutants. maybe more harder-to-kill ones would come out then. lots of possibilities. major missed opportunity there and really disappointing not to see a day/night transition. hell, i remember some video games back in the 80's having a switch between day and night. cmon id, get with it!

-it felt too safe. the townspeople of both Wellspring and Subway Town kept telling me how deadly the mutants and authority were but did any of them actually die at any point? i know you hear of some ST residents dying at the Blue Line Station but it's no one you knew. neither the mutants nor the authority really felt like much of a threat. they should've had certain citizens join you on some quests, with some surviving, and some dying. it would've made the game far more interesting and fun.

-needed to allow for more exploration. there were a few areas in the wasteland that looked interesting but you couldn't get into them for some reason. for future RAGE games, id needs to open things up a bit more. the maps were big enough, but you should've been allowed to access more places.

-characters don't participate enough. as much as i liked some of them, especially the ones in Subway Town, i wanted to have more interaction with them. why can't some of them join me on the odd mission? more interaction with the characters is definitely needed. imagine an option where you'd get to pick who you'd want to join you on your mission, and some missions could be made so whoever goes with you, wouldn't make it back alive. so many great possibilities there.

-Dead City. hated it for some reason. maybe i'm so used to the "city in ruins" look that has been done a million times before, (and better like in Half- Life 2, FEAR and Crysis 2) but that level just didn't do it for me. the wasteland (and Subway Town in particular) were far more interesting.

the ugly

-the ending. wow, just brutal. it wasn't just that it was so brief.. only took a few minutes to get through Capital Prime.. but i was simply amazed at how few enimies there were at the end. i think there were maybe a dozen or so authority soldiers, of which only maybe 2 or 3 were heavily armored. the rest were weak cyber-mutants that were incredibly easy to take out. just carry about 50 wingsticks with you and you can take them out with one shot. what kind of ending was that? it was the easiest mission of the entire game! i think i had more trouble in the sewers than i did at Capital Prime. major disappointment. and what's with Portman handing you a Pulse Cannon right before the last mission if there was no big boss to use it on anyway? they even tell you to load up before you go, load up for what? to fight a dozen soldiers and some weak mutants? if they weren't going to have a boss, then at least they could've thrown you in a room with 50 authority soliders with turrets everywhere or something. i didn't even mind the ridiculously brief scene of the Arks opening up all over the earth, fine, but at least give us some satisfaction of beating the game. every game should end with an epic battle. and RAGE didn't even come close to that. hell, it would've been nice if they would've at least allowed you to go back to Subway Town and kill the handful of soliders that were there harrassing everyone. loved the game, but wow, that anti-climatic ending was crap.

I agree with everything you say with a few minor exceptions. For example, a day/night cycle is simply incompatible with the megatexture technology and id never could have added one. They also had to limit the size of the map because the download was 22gb as it was.

Weird, out of all your criticism's the only one that made sense to me was the exploration. and you spent a lot fewer words on that one. I liked dead city too.

This.

The game never really gives you that much reason to care about the story and the characters.

I discussed this as one of the weak points in the game. Here's my

http://imbacore.blogspot.com/2012/02/rage-pc-review.html


I gave the game a 7.7. Fun, but it has some flaws that bring the game down.

I think "fun but flawed" is an accurate and honest assessment. Some of the criticisms you'll see elsewhere really get into the realms of being nitpicky, but overall yes - the game is fun to play but mildly disappointing when you think how much better it could have been. 7.7 sounds almost right on the mark to me - I'd call it a brave experiment that didn't quite go according to plan but where it worked it worked very well indeed.

I noticed this too, and honestly I feel that it hurts the immersion since you have no concept of time. Ultimately though I can understand why they didn't include it, and I'm glad that they didn't try. But this is a great example of the (pretty hard) limits of id Tech 5.

Agreed. 'Nuff said.

Most of your points really resonate well with me, but an addition to the ugly segment should be with regards to the minigames in the story. The Five Finger Filet does nothing to move the story along, nor does its attendant achievement. I regarded it as nothing more than player abuse. I tried for at least three hours before I gave up on it. I took me out of the game experience totally for that time. Same with the Strum / Deliverance achievement-same as above.( If we really like this type of game, we would resort to playing Guitar Hero, not Rage) At least the other two other games related to the story really well, Tombstones and Rage Frenzy giving us a solid reason for the card collection efforts. The most gratifying element was the graphics. I hope they take your comments seriously, because this should have been a home run game in line with the epics like Halo, Modern Warfare, and Doom.

i had no idea id's current technology didn't support a day/night transition, i guess that explains that. very disappointing though. they're obviously gonna have to fix that very soon because it's simply unacceptable in this day and age to not have that in a game. it really takes you out of the game when it's always day.

overall though, i did enjoy it, but like someone else said, "fun but flawed" describes it pretty well. i'd probably rank it around a 7.5. it would've been an 8 if the ending didn't svck so much. it definitely had potential to be among the greats, but there were just too many flaws to overlook. hopefully they improve on them for the next one.

What's the source on "day and night cycle not supported"? I understand they didn't implement it because they then could make sure everyone played it under the same conditions and had eg. shadows in specific angles where it would look the best, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to do at all.

The sky is just a picture. Have a look at it, it never changes. Just a sky-box from the last century eh'.

Environment shadows in id Tech 5 are baked into the mega texture. It's therefore impossible to change them in game.

Very few first person shooters support day/night transitions, actually. That's one of the big features of FarCry and Crysis.

Just because a game engine does not support dynamic day/night transitions doesn't mean that the developers can't create night-time environments, by the way.

Stalker has completely dynamic weather and a day night cycle with changes in attitudes in many NPCs.
The Fallout 3D games although not technically FPS games can be played a such.
Skyrim, well my Mage just shoots at stuff eh', has day - night and dynamic weather.

It's just the dedicated deathmatch and team deathmatch games that use static environments really.

You can make any static scheme you wanted for sure. You don't have to use that particular picture for the sky for starters.

The whole damn game is a static environment. It is designed as a corridor shooter with pretty walls and that's what we got.

Nah, Sheridan has it right. The lighting effects are baked right into the textures and streamed off your hard drive. Its a tradeoff they made with the id tech 5, but the long term plan is for that same technology to make ray casting possible in the id tech 6 which will have lighting effects like nothing ever done in games before. Here's a quick example of the possibilities:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_sVslJMY44&feature=related

Note how perfect the glass is on the coffee table, the curves on the couch, the textures of the floor, and the lighting and shadows. That kind of perfection of geometry, lighting, and textures is still a long way off for video games but the next generation consoles should enable games that can do at least some of those things.

most FPS's i've played have had it. Crysis being one. Half-Life 2 also had day/night levels, F.E.A.R. did as well. i believe even Left 4 Dead had it. whatever reason they had, i hope it changes for RAGE 2. i love playing night levels. the atmosphere is almost always better at night.

A simplistic implementation of day/night cycles might be to keep a separate megatexture for light intensities, multiply a lookup into that by a value that varies over time, then multiply the end result by the main diffuse texture. You'd need some special handling for some surface types (such as stuff that glows) and it would of course need more storage space and take more time for transcoding (although it might be just a simple 16-bit texture which could compress quite well), but it could be done.

There's no reason why Rage couldn't have had night levels. A night level in Rage would have been just a bunch of different textures after all. Look at Subway Town - that's mostly dark. Look at the Eastern Wastelands - not a huge jump from that to a full-on night level. When you combine this info with the well known fact that id wanted to get away from their "dark games" reputation, you're left with the deduction that it was a deliberate artistic choice.

The sky actually looks more like a dome than a skybox; there are areas in the game which are a giveaway on this. Moving skies (at least some kind of cloud animation) should certainly have been possible, but to be honest that's really getting into the realms of nitpicking now. So people don't care about gameplay, they don't care about a uniquely textured non-repeating world, they just want to see their moving skies, eh?

Stalker uses a deferred renderer which is completely different technology. So completely different technology A does things differently to completely different technology B? And people think this is some kind of big deal?

Different technologies have different tradeoffs. A deferred renderer is very fillrate and bandwidth intensive but it lets you do interesting things with lights. Megatexture is very bandwidth intensive but it kills off texture tiling and kills off the old number-of-draw-calls bottleneck (which everything else still suffers from). In both cases there are things that a traditional forward renderer with tiling textures can do but that each case can't. Where's the big deal?

You didn't really read what I wrote, did you?

F.E.A.R, Half-Life 2, and Left 4 Dead do not have Day/Night transitions. They have night-time levels, but that does NOT mean that they have day/night transitions. Go wait in Ravenholm and tell me how long it takes for the sun to come up. Here's a hint: it never will.

Theoretically, I suppose this is possible. But performance isn't really the bottle-neck here. Rage is already 22 GB in size. How much bigger would it be with the extra information, even if the texture data was spliced together at run time? Many players would argue that Rage is already too big.

It's the game. That's what counts. The engine does not matter one bit to the game except that is does or does not produce an amazing experience.

As Rage is a tech demo and not really a game it relies entirely on the engine. The experience although hi res is shallow and apart from the player physics and attack animations which are done well there is not much to hold ones attention. A mindless shooter, wow that's new. They labored for 7 years and produced a nothing game.

Stalker is all game. We have a very beautiful world, not as hi res as Rage, but more beautiful in many ways. A completely dynamic everything from NPCs to weather. Day/night implemented so well I just stop and stare at the sky sometimes, the night time is amazing. It's not for anyone who wants a mindless shooter though. You will just die if you try your run and gun nonsense in front of any of the NPCs. A lot of people rage (heh) quit after the bandits at the start own your sorry ass with ease. You will need to think a lot just to survive. A far more dangerous place. Rage is a sunny safe place with few challenges. Stalker is a deadly world where the environment gets a lot of kills, to say nothing of the creatures that wander the place. The NPC humans come in many flavors from scuzzy bandits with shotguns to hi level military with scoped weapons, snipers and an amazing AI that will flank and pursue you till you are dead.
There actually is no comparison possible. One is shiny toy for newbies, to make them feel good about themselves. The other a masterpiece with player humiliation as a high priority. Stalker also has a host of community mods some which extend the game in many ways including graphically.

I'll be honest, half of the reason I bought Rage is simply because I'm so interested with the technology that powers it. id Tech 5 is radically different from other FPS game engines simply because of the MegaTexture idea. Granted, our current level of consumer gaming technology limits the application of MegaTexture somewhat, but I really think it is the way of the future.

id Tech 5 is way ahead of its time, in some ways for the better, and in some ways for the worse.

Mmmmm, you could say that about all id engines to date. They've always been somewhat ahead of the hardware curve and the initial experience with them has rarely been pleasant. A key difference this time is that the "I can run BF3 maxed out!" crowd are so used to running everything maxed out, they try to do it with Rage, it doesn't work, and then they blame the developers.


And you could say that about every id game since Quake.

Yeah. I really thought with all that time and the clips they teased us with that things were gonna change.

Hi ho. (Kurt Vonnegut's reaction to the destruction of Dresden. He was a POW and dug corpses for days after the raid)

You don't like Dead City because you're used to post-apoc ruined cities in post-apoc games? lol RAGE is a post-apoc, ruined civilisation. I thought Dead City was an epic level. Like most of the levels in the game it's pretty much a master class in design, and coupled with the fluidity and freedom in movement of the enemies - they're almost all perfect maps. The Distillery mutant battles, and the Jackal Territory with the Jackals whooping and cawing and utilising zip slides and appearing out of hatches and firing from sniper nests and distant huts - just awesome. Someone on here is talking about S.T.A.L.K.E.R? roflcoptor! No comparison.

On my first go all I could think when playing the Dead City level was "This is awesome, this is awesome, this is awesome." Along with "Doom 4 is gonna rock, Doom 4 is gonna rock, Dooom 4 is gonna rock." Because if Doom 4 is even half as well done as that it's gonna be great! Also all the blood and crap kinda evoked images of a future DOOm for me. What was odd about that level though was, at least to me, that it appeared too early in the game and that it introduced a giant mutant augmented by Authority/Ark technology. It hadn't really been apparent in anything but NPC passing conversations (rumours of people going missing) that the Authority were ultimately responsible for creating (and looking to control) the mutants.

I was fully expecting to see two of those augmented mutants as bosses in the final level, and maybe being forced into using their tracking and weapons one against the other to defeat them. In Subway Town the Chinese guy with the voice from Doom3, "I know, I built his cage!" Noburu, or something, you walk in on him talking about a thirty-foot-something, then he starts to tell you about it but thinks better of it. This is after you've already encountered it obviously. Just seems odd to me. Like there was more story in Dead City than appeared in the final game. Retrospectively the whole level makes sense. Ark technology in a hospital crawling with mutants, and a huge giant mutant wandering around with bits of tech hanging off him. Like, "The Authority were here."

But during a first-play this revelation could easily sail over a player's head. Meaning, along with the other genuine lack of impact the Authority seem to be having on settlements, it just compounds that feeling that the Authority is just an empty suit of an antagonist and there's a chance you can't care enough to really invest in taking them down. So yeah, I agree that introducing a character you're meant to care about and either having him/her die, be captured, or transformed would have been a good way to reallly get the player involved and to set about destroying the Authority with gusto and a bit of uh, RAGE.


That's a complaint about Achievement/Trophies, not about RAGE. You only tortured yourself for hours because you were intent on bumping your gamerscore. lol There is no reason to attempt something you can't do, that many times - to the point of hating it - other than mindless achievement points. Blame M$. They should keep the achievement but drop that frickin' score nonsense. These days players check the achievements before they start the game. It's ridiculous going into a game with set guidelines provided by things that force you to play in a way you wouldn;t otherwise or to do things you wouldn't otherwise do - on your first go!

I got the 5 Finger Filet on my second go, and popped the Steam achievement (no points!) but I was playing for playing's sake, not for an achievement. Quick tip though, just focus on the dot and the line. Ignore that there are hands on the screen and that they are apparently yours, they rail against your intuition. lol

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The day/night transition thing. I don't get it. RAGE was like Assassin's Creed in that the Wasteland was a to-from area, not an expansive Fallout 3-like world to explore. Whoever playing RAGE is spending so long outside that they'd need to see day turn to night is spending altogether too long in an area of the game that isn't even a main focus of the game. If you;re hunting respawning bandits in your buggy, then sure, but wandering around looking for adventure? You should be in a town or settlement looking for a quest to send you into the shooter areas of the game. Heh ha!

Personally I think the skies look gorgeous. Better than Fallout 3's/Vegas's. Also thought it was a nice touch that I could spot the scarred moon on my first journey from the Ark in Dan's buggy, with Dan driving and talking while I was looking at the world going, *jaw on floor*
But meh, I don't spend a great deal of time looking to take note of cloud formations and how they move. So when I do look up I see epic looking skies and then go on with my day.

This.

Thing is - a lot of what people are looking for from Rage... well...

If you were playing a hard-nosed ultra-realistic ultra-serious military shooter you would expect those things. if you were playing a cold-as-ice sci-fi thriller you would expect those things. If you were playing a mean-and-gritty down-on-the-streets punk noir title you would expect those things.

You.
Are.
Not.
Playing.
That.
Kind.
Of.
Game.

You're playing a fast-paced arcadey science-fantasy bubblegum romp. It's an id Software game, that's the kind of game they make. With the exception of Quakes 2 and 4, and the first level of Doom 3 (which had some black humour to counterbalance the seriousness), that's the kind of game they've always made. It's not just unfair to compare this kind of game to other kinds in different genres - it's completely incorrect. It's like saying that Fallout 3 is a worse Japanese RPG than Final Fantasy 7. Of course it is!

If you want to play a different kind of game there is an easy solution. Just go play a different kind of game. There you go - problem solved.

Masterclass LOL. Nice story, did you know there are over 40 Stalker novels written by fans?

Great discussion I see! So:

The Good:

Shooting - it's satisfying, shotgun is the best among all id games u feel it's weight and power
Animation - amasing, it is something really new in games, something that haven't been done before, like "id" themselfs have said: "A Pixar level"
Amasing Human Models as well as enemies.
Image - uniquely painted world, it's like a sketch came to life, and yes the result justifyes the trade-offs. If there could be a new technology most fitting for future id games, especialy doom 4, it undoubtedly would be id "Super Mega Texture and possibly in future Mega Geometry and Mega Lightning" Tech)
Driving - yes, driving! For a guys that never ever made any driving elements in the past, it is trully a great achievment!
Level design - linear though, but it's still id! Dead city - my love!
Sound.

The Bad:

No secret areas.
Low enemy variety, especialy mutants.
No Ending.
Low challenge.

The Ugly:

I don't think there's anything that fits this category.

Enough of pitting this game against that game. It causes flame festivals and it's why we don't allow "vs" threads here and for this thread it is off topic I believe.

So, drop the "stalker vs Rage" gig going on in this thread please.