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[Tilla]

Note: this game is not an RPG. At all. There are items. That is the extent of the 'RPG system' people are using to compare to borderlands and fallout. This game is a real shooter, with some mild elements from RPGs tacked on and not really that important. Any comparisons to Borderlands are really quite shallow

[Sowelu]

My one and only comparison to Borderlands is in the graphics.

And yeah, they don't even have the same art style, but it's the same.  exact.  landscapes.  That same brand of ugly wasteland, of cluttered featurelessness in inhabited areas, that same kind of crazy-yet-boring appearance in the enemies...

I mean damn, maybe the mechanics are alright, but if I have to look at the screen the whole time I play something I at least want it to look good, right?  Amazing rendering quality does not mean good artistic merit, and I don't see any visual artistic merit in Rage at all.  Nothing to distinguish it from Borderlands whatsoever.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I haven't seen anything too... well, boring, exactly, about either Borderlands or Rage. In both games I quite liked the scenery. Now, perhaps it IS generic, but then again, what isn't? They have a post-apocalyptic plot, so they have a post-apocalyptic wasteland. And by cutting down the RPG elements, they got the actual shooter elements done rather well. The enemy behavior is nice, even though they are still pretty dumb when you're actively avoiding them (*crossbowheadshot* "What was that?"), but the later Authority units are at least trying to play smart. And they're rather realistically dumb sometimes, especially in longer-range engagements when you snipe them and change positions. Quick with the grenade throwing, as well. If not perfectly accurate: "Fire in the hole!" *tink tink* "Grenade!" "Watch where you're throwing that thing!" *BADOOM!* "Man down!" (actually happened, but possibly paraphrased)

Voiceovers are pretty good, and the enemy soldiers' speech is actually somewhat varied. NPCs aren't annoying, most of the time, and the dialogues are well written. All in all, I'm enjoying the game so far. No problems with graphics, either, runs surprisingly well. I notice the texture streaming thing, but it doesn't aggravate me much, and apart from having to force VSync through the NVidia control panel, everything is fine.

[Tilla]

Okay now I'm finally angry at, err, Rage.

Quoth the Carmack: “You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements. We chose the latter. We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version.

“A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases.”

[buckets]

Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it.

Not sure if serious...

[Sowelu]

Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it.

Not sure if serious...

Why?  What he's saying is "putting time into game mechanics, plot, art, voice, level design, etc. is more important than having a faster engine; therefore, it doesn't matter if we design for an engine the speed of a PC or a console".  Which has been true since forever.

[buckets]

Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it.

Not sure if serious...

Why?  What he's saying is "putting time into game mechanics, plot, art, voice, level design, etc. is more important than having a faster engine; therefore, it doesn't matter if we design for an engine the speed of a PC or a console".  Which has been true since forever.

Oh I agree completely, it's just kinda ironic to hear Id say plot, voice and game mechanics are important XD

In a slightly more serious matter, I'm loving Rage tbh. It's alot better than I thought it would be, it's great to see Id at thier best.

A little more variation in the mission would be nice though.

[Virtz]

On topic.

[Tilla]

Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it.

Not sure if serious...

Why?  What he's saying is "putting time into game mechanics, plot, art, voice, level design, etc. is more important than having a faster engine; therefore, it doesn't matter if we design for an engine the speed of a PC or a console".  Which has been true since forever.

My problem is more the dismissive tone towards PC. Carmack has betrayed us, is it even worth living anymore?

[Sean Mirrsen]

Actually, I don't really mind if all the big-name "profit-before-reason" companies move to the console markets. idSoftware's games have rarely been anything more than engine demonstrations anyway.

Also, fairly blatant sequel hook at the end of RAGE. And the game as a whole is too damn short for the 20-something gigabytes it occupies. And has zero replayability. Trends like these in gaming are one of the primary reasons I'll never be leaving the Bay12 community - Dwarf Fortress offers infinite replayability, and as development progresses, its procedurally-generated worlds will surpass the hand-crafted worlds of the likes of the Elder Scrolls series in structural complexity and emergent detail. And that's not to mention the fort mode.

[hemmingjay]

Rage is a fun(for 2-4 hours on avg it seems) well made, but shallow shooter. It has a couple unique gimmicks that were revolutionary when the game was designed back in 2008 or so. Somewhere in the dev cycle the industry saw a change towards DLC as a secondary income stream and it is clear that iD intentionally quartered it's content. The 20-25GB game is bloated because it offers the base for the 2-4 DLC's to work with. I have little doubt that most of the work is complete on those DLC packages or that iD intends on milking it's console audience for all it's worth. I also have no doubt that they will be in no rush to deliver the pc versions as the pc users have shown a great propensity for torrenting dlc for games like Fallout: New Vegas.

Carmack said that PC isn't the top dog and he is right. It's a smaller dedicated gaming audience with immeasurably more technical issues. He confessed to being a businessman and no more. I don't hate him for that. I hate him for not knowing better than saying it in the age of Twitter.

[Sowelu]

Nah.  Carmack isn't a businessman, he's an engineer.  "A small part of the market has extremely high-purity fuel, a very large part of the market has lower-purity fuel, let's design our engine to run with the largest group and then make it as awesome as possible anyway".

I respect the guy, he loves what he makes (even if gameplay hasn't been the strong suit since Quake 2).

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I respect the guy, he loves what he makes (even if gameplay hasn't been the strong suit since Quake 2).

You respect selling out to the lowest common denominator?

This game has, once again, proven that my disillusionment with the gaming industry is justified, especially when it comes to shooters. What happened to originality? It feels like companies ran out of new ideas in the early 00's.

[hachnslay]

shooters didn't change much since the game that let you look up and down for the first time. Who made that again? right.

[hemmingjay]

I think the disappointment most people feel about this game is that everyone expected iD to push boundaries and this just didn't. Looks good on the very narrow selection of "right" hardware, and is a solid shooter, but it left everyone I know with an empty feeling. I think a pure shooter or a pure type of any genre game is bound to disappoint our collective very high standards.