Hi all,

Guns n Roses song title says it all...Rage is the girl I fancied when I was pissed one night but after a while I just wanted to run and leave her...

I got Rage for the PC and have to say it runs with no crashes or significant freezes indeed with the new driver updates and patch, so I'm a lot more fortunate than a lot of people for a start. But I've had a strange experience with Rage :

Dragged my partner in and said "Wow you gotta see this"....at first I loved the colour palette, the drab look of the place...very atmospheric. The I started "noticing" things - some little and some HUGE that are mounting up and up, some of which :

THE BIG THINGS
Graphics : My god almighty John Carmack what the hell were you drinking for 6 years? Up close they are DREADFUL. I mean my PC can run Crysis 2 with DX11 and MAXXED OUT...so its no slouch. But this engine is just terrible. As an experiment I reinstalled Doom 3 and added Sikkmods update and some hires packs and it looks BETTER than Rage. I remember reading an interview with Carmack after Doom 3 was released and he said "lighting is now done....the future will be increased detail". INCREASED DETAIL? LIKE YOU MEAN WITH THE SUPER PIXELLATED RAGE ENGINE?

Gameplay : Car racing....shiny spinny pickups.....like we've never seen that in Quake Arena? Vehicles have no feeling of weight or realism. The Warthog from Halo 1 was the standard years ago...but this has all the realism of Mario Cart Racing. I dont even do the races after the first few they are so boooring and unrealistic.

THE LITTLE THINGS
Bitmap skybox - how 1990's is that?
Glowing things you pick up
No animations for little things like picking up items, getting in and out of the vehicles
Same old same old enemies with the same old same old movement patterns
Monsters that spew vomit....yeah never saw that before.
Big boss monster where you have to hit the shiny bits when he's "exposed"....erm Final Fantasy or any PS2 title anyone?

I've now dropped the difficulty down from Nightmare to Easy to just get the thing over and done with. This new "engine" will NOT be used for any further games - I bet most of the industry is laughing behind closed doors right now...ID software have now seriously lost the plot. This new game shows they have nothing new or innovative to offer in terms of plot, design, gameplay or imagination.

I can't even imagine console gamers being impressed. Witness titles like Halo 3, Crysis 2, Killzone 2 and even MGS 4.

I have a PS3, 360 and uber gaming PC rig so I'm not biased one way or the other...

ID - it was nice knowing you back in the day, but its time we now retired you and left you with good memories of what might have been. In the words of Stephen King's character Will from Christine - "You cant polish a turd".

ID RIP.

yawn . . . stretch . . . .yawn again. . . .

Id Tech 5 is fine. The fact that the game is running at 60fps on consoles while using unique pixels to cover every single inch of the environment is a feat of engineering. Id is in a position where yet again hardware (storage in this case) is the limiting factor. The games textures were around 1TB before getting compressed down to 11gb. MegaTexture works great. It does its job and it does it well. Storage limits are the biggest issue they had to deal with. Technically the game is solid. Id Tech 5 is one helluva base to iterate on. Its only going to get better from here on out.As for the gameplay...its ID. Shooting stuff is what they do - and the shooting mechanics in this game were solid as hell. Rage is marmite. You love it or hate. Now piss off.

When you talk bad about idTech5, it just shows how amazingly ignorant you are.

First off: ???? Rage the GAME wasn't the tech demo. It was a game, okay? :wink_smile:

The tech demos are the videos where they showed idTech5 and the different things it can do, looking AMAZING, with no blurry textures, all HD. That's always what they do to show the capabilities of the engine. Like in Doom3. Doom3's textures are seriously blurry, but in the idTech4 tech demos they always showed full HD textures. Why? To show what it COULD look like, not what it was gonna look like.

Tech demos show what the games COULD look like, not what they'll look like.

Remember Rage was supposed to look virtually the same on all platforms. What does that mean? It means the PS3 and 360 look like [censored], and they do, and no offense to console gamers but I haven't seen any game on the console look better than on PC... just the face of 720p is scary to me.
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Bottom line: idTech5 is an amazing engine, which lets you run amazing graphics with relatively low requirements. The megatexture technology creates a unique world, which, if uses HD textures, will look better than any other game. The megatexture technology also allows rendering only what's in your field of view, which makes all the difference, and if texture popping is a problem, then you make it render outside the field of view as well.

I'm telling ya,' Rage was the proof that the engine works, and Doom4 will be proof that it's good.

So you're comparing Rage to Doom 3 with Sikkmod and high-res textures are you? That's not even a valid comparison; you can mod the original Quake from 1996 to look better too. Compare Rage to Doom 3 out of the box and you might be worth taking seriously.

And, once again, megatexture is a tradeoff. That means that you accept lower in one area in exchange for better in another. Your criticism is just focussing on the area where id accepted lower and completely ignoring the areas where they got better. That makes it an invalid criticism too; you need to look a both and judge whether or not the tradeoff was worthwhile (in your opinion - and personal opinions do not equate to universal truth: sorry to have to break that to you).

As for the industry laughing at id: I seriously doubt it. Anyone who knows anything about graphics programming is more likely to be astonished and overawed by what they've done here.

0/10 for the troll, must try harder next time.

Actually Rage IS a Tech Demo...as a decent game its lame.

My opinion is as valid as everyone else's so no....I WONT piss off

It's not just my opinion either...have you read the forums or reviews? It's not an epic fail but certainly an overhyped fail.

I've read the forums and reviews, but I've also played the game and spoken with other people who've played the game, and formed an opinion from that too. And that opinion includes the inconvenient and slightly messy facts that a lot of people are having an enormous amount of fun with the game, a lot of people are having no tech problems whatsoever, and a lot of people presenting negativity are doing so from a pretty damn shaky platform.

My opinion is that the game is fine but flawed, that there's a major hate on for id on account of them embracing consoles (like it's somehow a bad thing that they like to be able to make money and pay their staff), and that they're getting an uninformed backlash on account of the sale to Zenimax. I contend that a huge amount of what's being propagated in the forums and reviews is utter bull.

Every single id game ever released (at least since Quake) was decried as a technical showcase with little in the way of deep gameplay. Every. Single. id. Game.

You can go back through the history of reviews, you'll see comments like "id make engines, not games" and so on. The evidence is there for anyone to see.

This raises the question of "why is there such a big hoo-hah over Rage?" It's not as if people shouldn't have expected things to be the way they are. When you see the words "id Software" on a game you should know what you're going to get: a technically impressive engine with fairly non-taxing, simple, fast-action gameplay. Sorry if anyone thought it was going to be different this time, but colour me puzzled as to why anyone would have thought so.

Rage is just fine. but ID tech 5 engine is technically back to the past. it's not innovative, and no WOW. I believe that they could do better than this. if ID will make like this, don't even do any business in gaming. very disappointed.

...Angry Freelance Astroturfer

You are a meme waiting to happen.