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Id's Rage

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So I figured I couldn't really go wrong buying this game and the place I got it at had it for 45 dollars, which is a good price for someone living in Europe.

And then I read this and suddenly I am very worried, especially since I can't get a refund...

Others who have played it are saying it's a bad console port. D: I hope everyone is wrong and that I didn't waste my money.

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Hmm... Didn't read that whole review but confirms my fears that they still made a linear shooter. Will probably skip it and play when it's cheap.

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yup same, I saw GB's quick look and I think it looks fairly standard shooting wise, but god damn... thats a pretty game...

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I received it as a birthday present, so I'll be playing it this weekend and see how it goes. But yeah, so far it looks like it's the worst tech demo Id released ever (apparently there are also a shit load of technical issues, specially for people with Radeon GPUs):

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/04/raging-about-rage-pc/

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But to be fair, it's pretty cool tech. As an environment artist I get really excited over stuff like this then saddened they decided not to license it.

On the plus side, mod tools, so I'll probably pick it up just for that, but on the other hand if I was going to make anything real, I'd do it in Unreal because its free and used by everyone.

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Played a bit. Going to wait for drivers, because the pop-in is absolutely horrendous right now. It seems that AMD is having trouble balancing the BF3 beta fixes and whatever id needed them to do. If you install the latest you crash to desktop while playing BF3.

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Comments from people who I know/trust and have actually played the game are saying some of the more critical articles (ie: Ars Technica, Joystiq) really are trying very hard to make the game sound as bad as possible and the reality is more in line with what Eurogamer and IGN have said — which I can believe because it's far from the first time the former sites have been a little exaggerated with their opinion pieces.

So my inclination is to not be a dickhead and not buy the game based on a few bad reviews while ignoring the torrent of positive reviews (ew Metacritic, I know) that are out there, although I'll admit I was initially wobbled a bit. I guess my expectations of the game have been sobered somewhat though as it was fairly ambiguous what to actually expect before (some people were clearly just expecting another Fallout 3 or Borderlands).

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The response to this game has seemed fairly curious, it's like people are shocked that Id made an Id shooter.

The game structurally sounds very similar to Raven's perhaps undeservedly overlooked 2009 Wolfenstein game, which was also a series of linear stages set around a central hub, with some light exploration and progression systems. (The Giant Bomb crew was also comparing it to Halo 3: Odious Tea on their podcast this week.)

Anyways, playing this is very much on my to do list. Always been an Id fan, so i was always going to get around to it regardless of reviews.

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For once I'm happy that a game doesn't have same release date all around the world.

Maybe this is for the best, so people in USA can beta test the game for us Europeans... :tmeh:

But I'm confident that by the time my Amazon order comes by mail, the game will be fixed and ready.

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So my inclination is to not be a dickhead and not buy the game based on a few bad reviews while ignoring the torrent of positive reviews (ew Metacritic, I know) that are out there, although I'll admit I was initially wobbled a bit.

Uh, sorry, but not spending my money on a luxury item can't be equated to being a dickhead.

Personally, it's not even really my genre but if it would be non-linear and less shooty (do any of the positive reviews contest that?) I would have bought it just to check out how the latest iD tech looks.

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Uh, sorry, but not spending my money on a luxury item can't be equated to being a dickhead.

Personally, it's not even really my genre but if it would be non-linear and less shooty (do any of the positive reviews contest that?) I would have bought it just to check out how the latest iD tech looks.

Just to clarify I wasn't aiming my comment at you or anyone else, but at myself: I was completely prepared to buy it and was very much hyped for it, but after those initial scathing articles I very nearly didn't bother. Then I saw that actually those perspectives are the minority and it'd have been fairly retarded of me to skip it based on them and have gone back to my original plan. :tup:

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I think id has kind of experienced the Molyneux effect here. Since Rage has been so long in coming, and every time it has been shown the focus has been on its technical brilliance, people kind of expected it to be some sort of shining example of graphics, AI and optimisation. Add in the fact that QuakeCon happened recently and that John Carmack gave quite an interesting keynote regarding Rage's technical systems, and I think the hype for all those facets of the game was pretty high.

As it turns out, the reality is that, like most things produced by tech companies, Rage is a mixture of impressive new ways of doing things and complete blindness to established, working methods. Those things are fairly obviously two sides of the same coin, and they result in really cool things, such as the fact that you don't really need to optimise Rage at all for your system as it will figure out how to make itself run at 60FPS while looking the best it can, and really stupid things, such as the fact that you CAN'T optimise Rage at all for your system since your options are limited to resolution, antialiasing and whether to enable a completely unexplained (by the game) feature called GPU Transcoding.

Add in the fact that it doesn't seem like id paid much attention to the AMD GPUs (all the really major instances of texture pop-in and such seem to be coming from them) and that it doesn't seem to care that some of us would rather have stability than prettiness in specific places. What I mean by this is that there are instances in which Rage will decide to allow certain things, such as texture loading time (hence all the pop-in) and pretty major screen tearing, in order to get what it wants out of its own engine. That's a peculiarly "tech company" thing to do, sacrifice basic expectations for some kind of grand vision, but the real crime here is that even PC users have no choice in the matter. Due to the aforementioned lack of options, there isn't so much as a choice whether to allow this deliberate priority shifting, let alone to enable a fundamental option such as vsync.

None of this is really all that surprising, when you consider the sort of people that run id, but it's pretty weird within the industry today. Perhaps it's just because Rage has been in development for so long that people have forgotten what kind of a company id is, and perhaps it's because Rage has been in development for so long that id hasn't noticed what kind of industry video games exist in now.

/weird tech shit

The game isn't bad, it's an id shooter with open spaces and vehicles. The shooting mechanics themselves are quite fun, and the sound and feel of the weapons are fantastic. The animations on the enemies are also pretty great, though the AI is standard for shooters in this day and age, there's nothing special about it as seemed to be the implication from coverage in the past. The story is adequate so far, but the voice acting is pretty good so that makes the dialogue seem a little better.

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Sometimes I wonder what is the point of pre-ordering. I am still waiting for my copy to leave the Amazon warehouse, but they still haven't shipped it and I pre-ordered it months ago.

Isn't the point of pre-order that they ship it earlier so you get it on the launch day, or for international customers maybe one day later. Now this means I will get it a lot later if they don't even ship it today and shipping estimate was yesterday...? :(

I see it's already available for Europe in Steam, so for example if I had bought a digital copy, I could already be playing it.

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Yes, digital is the future and don't always go for the cheapest option. That's the lesson I have learned.

For example price difference between Amazon.co.uk (28€) and Steam (49,95€) was almost 50%.

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For example price difference between Amazon.co.uk (28€) and Steam (49,95€) was almost 50%.

This is exactly the reason I still buy so many physical games, digital versions are just such a ripoff. I would actually rather buy digital at this point, I literally don't want to find the area of spacetime to store my game boxes anymore. Yet, I end up buying things physically anyway, because Steam and co. just won't give me a break on new releases.

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I'm a little more than an hour into it, so take my comments with a grain of salt. I'm playing on PS3 and not seeing fun-hindering graphical issues, though I do fully acknowledge a fair amount of texture pop-in and whatnot. As far as gameplay goes, it actually reminds me of Borderlands insofar as the quest structure - MMO-type fetch quests squeezed into an FPS. I say it like that because the game really does feel like a corridor-shooter with really huge corridors (rather than an open world game). That said, I'm eager to see if the game opens up a little more and offers a wide enough variety of quests to make me actually want to learn the world and explore it.

Other miscellaneous notes -

  • When you die, you have the ability to execute a QTE-like sequence that triggers a defib to revive you and shock nearby enemies. Kinda cool mechanic mostly because your performance in the QTE doesn't determine whether you live or die, rather how much health you recover.
  • Inventory management seems pretty good. Junk items in the world don't get to have a name in your inventory and get dumped into a single slot for later selling. You also can access four weapons plus respective ammo types just by holding a trigger.
  • There's a really hilarious animation when you're driving a buggy and hit an object on the road. You basically fly out of your chair and land face first into the pavement, only to stand back up as though nothing was wrong at all. Great stuff.

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Stuff like that (the last bit) always annoys me in games. I think the first time I saw it was in that rally game by a Finnish company. Come on -- people use seatbelts when they are chased by crazy postapocalyptic gangs.

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Stuff like that (the last bit) always annoys me in games. I think the first time I saw it was in that rally game by a Finnish company. Come on -- people use seatbelts when they are chased by crazy postapocalyptic gangs.

They don't because they may have to leave the car quick in case the postapocalyptic gang tries something funny. Finnish taxi drivers do the same.

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Tomorrow I'll be able to comment on Rage PC running on my PC, if Steam will finally allow me.

I preloaded the thing... twice... and when I pressed "play" a few hours a ago it started decrypting, which takes 2 hours!? It's done now, but it's complaining that my graphics drivers are out of date, even though I have the latest stable drivers...

Anyway... not in the mood to play the game right now.

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it's complaining that my graphics drivers are out of date, even though I have the latest stable drivers...

You'll probably have to install beta drivers, especially if you're on an ATI card.

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Yeah, I installed beta drivers for this game, and I'm on nVidia, which is supposedly better for it. This and Battlefield 3 have more or less demanded beta drivers to run at their best, it seems.

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Yeah, I installed beta drivers for this game, and I'm on nVidia, which is supposedly better for it. This and Battlefield 3 have more or less demanded beta drivers to run at their best, it seems.

It seems more and more that it might be best to not get technically complex PC games on release date. But maybe it was always like this (khm Daggerfall khm), I used to buy much further from release than I do lately. I think mostly I pre-order on Steam nowadays. Then, sometimes you're just too excited to postpone playing a game everybody is talking about...

Also, I wonder how much game-specific code there is in graphics drivers, that gets enabled only when running a specific game? It sounds almost as if parts of game rendering engines are basically written by NVIDIA/ATI folks.

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Yeah, I installed beta drivers for this game, and I'm on nVidia, which is supposedly better for it. This and Battlefield 3 have more or less demanded beta drivers to run at their best, it seems.

To be fair, Battlefield 3 is a beta at the moment, so beta drivers for a beta at least makes some sense. There is supposed to be an official patch before it's release.

Also, I wonder how much game-specific code there is in graphics drivers, that gets enabled only when running a specific game? It sounds almost as if parts of game rendering engines are basically written by NVIDIA/ATI folks.

I think it's more of a reverse effect, where NVIDIA and ATI are constantly trying to optimize their drivers for what new game engines are doing.

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