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Id's Rage

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I have an nVidia 560GT Ti; but I'll see how the game works with the latest stable drivers

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Just played a few minutes, so I don't have much gameplay experience. But graphically the game isn't good, or at least sub par.

I think they only focused on detail in ground textures, characters and vehicles.

The rest of the world are quite square boxes with flat rather low resolution textures, no form of bump or normal mapping.

Also, the 4x mouse speed in the inventory menu vs in-game is a bit annoying.

I did experience constant texture popping, but not as terrible as that youtobe video. The textures pop in quite fast, but it is noticable and a bit annoying. It's like stuff appearing in the corner of your eye.

Going to try with some beta drivers now, maybe that'll improve the graphical quality.

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Argh. I think the beta drivers made it even worse. The game isn't running smooth, every few seconds there's a very short pause. Also, I was standing in front of the door for the first mission and I had really bad tearing.

Some screenshots I took:

http://steamcommunity.com/id/elmuertecom/screenshot/542907315056605711

http://steamcommunity.com/id/elmuertecom/screenshot/542907315056611195

http://steamcommunity.com/id/elmuertecom/screenshot/542907315056616920

And that's on a i7 2600 with 16GB RAM and a Geforce GTX 560 Ti.

Going back to the WHQL drivers to see if I still have those graphic issues.

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Latest WHQL drivers work best for me.

It's definitely a id shooter. Headshots do nothing, you move ridiculously fast with a lot of bobbing. Driving the first vehicle you get feels wrong, it feels a bit like vehicles in early 2000 where they just move over the surface and don't use physics to push the vehicle forward. Maybe the buggy I'll get works better.

As I said earlier texture quality is often quite terrible. It's best to stay away from objects and walls as much as possible, otherwise you'll travel back in time to 2000. It has a really weird effect when you're holding a highly detailed weapon in front of a low quality environment. I haven't noticed any repeating texture stuff like in all games, so that mega texture technology works great.

Another thing that bugged me was the spoilers in completing tasks. The first mission is to kill a bunch of people. And at the moment you kill the last one you'll get a "task complete" notification. But I still had to walk to the other side of the room. So anything could have happened. But because I already completed the task I could simply walk to the end.

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Apparently the lack of quality in textures might be to do with id Tech 5's auto-optimisation. Chances are with that machine (same GPU as me, internet high five etc.) you can run better textures, but the game engine chooses not to let you have them. There are already people working on config files that let you force certain levels of textures, at which point you'll need to do benchmarking to see if they actually run well.

Be nice if a PC tech company allowed some video options natively, huh?

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Another thing that bugged me was the spoilers in completing tasks. The first mission is to kill a bunch of people. And at the moment you kill the last one you'll get a "task complete" notification. But I still had to walk to the other side of the room. So anything could have happened. But because I already completed the task I could simply walk to the end.

Can't say I agree with this. Due to the fast running, I seem to often pass right by a guy that I need to kill to complete a mission. Without that notification, I could reach the end of the level and try to turn in the quest only to have them not reward me. I feel like this is a fairly common game mechanic and not any particular fault of id/Rage.

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Apparently the lack of quality in textures might be to do with id Tech 5's auto-optimisation. Chances are with that machine (same GPU as me, internet high five etc.) you can run better textures, but the game engine chooses not to let you have them. There are already people working on config files that let you force certain levels of textures, at which point you'll need to do benchmarking to see if they actually run well.

Be nice if a PC tech company allowed some video options natively, huh?

How to force higher resolution:

http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks

But the end result is still "meh":

http://www.geforce.com/Active/en_US/shared/images/articles/ragetexturetweak/RageComparison-Animated.gif

In some places texture use is simply awful:

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/542907315058973294/4DB58132D42B307D6592A988D09AE8D0DD593C08/

I did not enable GPU transcoding, that made texture popping very noticeable.

btw, one awesome thing about rage is the animation and reaction of the enemies when they attack / get hit.

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Despite the various technical issues. This is a fun game, much better than DOOM 3. It's like a more simplistic Fallout 3 with cars, quite a bit like Borderlands, but without any XP and skill system.

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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.

I bet Finnish rally drivers don't, though!

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Apparently I'm over 50% now (shouldn't have read post on Rage on other forums :( ). It's a rather short game.

(warning: sort of spoilers below this)

Gameplay is starting to approach :tmeh: status. Looks like they only had money for 3 AI routines. The most challenging foes are actually the weak mutants because they jump all over the place. The light human foes "hide" behind various things, and pop out once in a while in an attempt to hit you. You can usually keep shooting them because part of their body (often head) can still be seen and hit. The heavys simply walk towards you, they don't try to hide or even dodge bullets. The tactic here is to simply take cover, pop up when they stop shooting, and unload your pistol a bunch of times (no need to waste powerful ammo).

I had one boss fight so far (in an arena segment, ugh), and simply circle strafing him while constantly shooting got me through it. He didn't even try to attack where I was going, but kept attacking where I was a second ago.

I really want a map for the outside area. You have a small radar in the hud, but no actual map. It would be nice if you could see what the layout of the roads is. You now simply follow the path drawn on the radar.

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I've heard quite a few people complain that the game is in general too easy, it's probably worth just playing on the harder difficulties. (Unless you already are and are finding that too easy, it would be very disappointing to see such a low ceiling in an Id game.)

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Supposedly the game has now been patched to fix some technical issues and add at least a few more graphical options.

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Correct, you can now enable vsync (which you really need because there's a lot of tearing going on) and you can set the texture cache. I'm not sure what that means, but it's probably the texture size you want to use.

Increasing the difficulty only changes hitpoints and regeneration as far as I can tell. It doesn't improve the AI, you just die faster and the enemies less fast. It's not like with DXHR were the AI actually become smarter (or at least, that's what I experienced).

I just finished the Doom 3 segment of Rage. Yes, there is a part in Rage which is pretty much Doom 3. It has walls of tissue and blood, and for a large part its small corridors with the usual predictable triggers.

It also contained a super obvious boss fight.

Gee... a dead end room with a view, and a rocket launcher. What could possibly happen here.

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Increasing the difficulty only changes hitpoints and regeneration as far as I can tell. It doesn't improve the AI, you just die faster and the enemies less fast. It's not like with DXHR were the AI actually become smarter (or at least, that's what I experienced).

Speaking generally, even when games are balanced like that, i think that by forcing the player to act more cautiously and intelligently, it can often lead to scenarios wherein more dynamically interesting gameplay comes from what is already there.

Anyways, i'm not trying to argue. I've just read a lot of comments that say the game is more enjoyable on the harder difficulties.

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Correct, you can now enable vsync (which you really need because there's a lot of tearing going on) and you can set the texture cache. I'm not sure what that means, but it's probably the texture size you want to use.

Yeah, I think it is the texture size. I presume it's like changing the textures to 8k as we discussed earlier in the thread. Vsync annoys me a little, because my drivers apparently don't support smart vsync (though I'm using the latest nVidia beta drivers so if mine don't, whose do?) so it just switches itself off again if I turn it to smart. I don't really want to turn it straight on because I'm worried about the performance impact, but you're right, the screen tearing in Rage is atrocious, so I'll probably end up doing so anyway.

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In general yes(*). But for Rage it doesn't really matter much. On a higher difficulty ammo is probably going to become more of a problem than trying to stay alive. Although sometimes is better to just Rambo your way through (won't work with heavy foes though).

*) There are a bunch of games where being cautious will only make it more difficult for you. For example, in Bulletstorm you shouldn't be more cautious on a higher difficultly. In stead you should make sure your foot touches enemies as fast as possible.

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I really want a map for the outside area. You have a small radar in the hud, but no actual map. It would be nice if you could see what the layout of the roads is. You now simply follow the path drawn on the radar.

The thing is, the map would have no value. The world between dungeon/hub areas have little to nothing to offer, save for a couple of stunt jumps (that offer little to no motivation to complete) and random encounters with other vehicles.

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My friend has a pretty much the same rig as you do elmuerte, but do you have a regular HDD or a SSD drive?

My friend has SSD and he said he had no problems with the game. The textures load up nicely when everything comes from the fast SSD.

I still haven't received my copy of the game, but at least Amazon did send it late in the afternoon on friday so it should come earliest on wednesday, I think.

I have a Q6600, 4GB of RAM, ATI HD5770 and a 320 series SSD, so only the ATI card is giving me scares that will it cause problems in the end.

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No SSD. I don't have any loading issues, going from one area to an other takes about 2 to 3 seconds (so I can't read any of the hints). And the texture popping is only corner of the eye stuff, although it has been improved a lot with either the patch of Saturday night or my settings tweaks.

But that doesn't change anything to the fact that Rage's texture quality is really poor in a lot of areas.

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At Quake Con, didn't Carmack talk about providing a super high res texture update for RAGE possibly in the future. He didn't seem sure that was going to happen though.

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At Quake Con, didn't Carmack talk about providing a super high res texture update for RAGE possibly in the future. He didn't seem sure that was going to happen though.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised. Somewhere I read that the internal build for the game sits at like 125gb... Carmack must be shitting himself knowing he only got to put out 20% of that.

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From a discussion I saw elsewhere if they did release that texture pack you'd need an obscene amount of GPU RAM and such to make it anywhere near playable, so it's not something that's going to be particularly useful to 99% of people.

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I read the same yesterday, was it from Eurogamer's news post maybe?

The texture pack is +100GB and you would need a monster graphics card to run that.

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Still doesn't explain why quite a lot of textures have a really really low LOD while the average is much higher.

I feel like Rage was made to be looked at from a distance (+5m)

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Still doesn't explain why quite a lot of textures have a really really low LOD while the average is much higher.

I feel like Rage was made to be looked at from a distance (+5m)

Something I've heard from others and jives fairly well with my own experience is Rage is meant to be seen on the move. It's basically supposed to be a pretty backdrop for action, not something to be looked at and admired on its own terms. That feels right to me, as it does indeed look quite nice when you're driving around or in the middle of a fight, but if you stop to consider it it falls down in some areas.

Edit: Analogy just occurred to me, it's basically set decoration.

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