Mine just unlocked on Steam, it looks like this game is either going to be great or fail epically. I can’t decide from reviews whether it’s more Borderlands or Fallout 3/NV (I like Borderlands more, personally).
I’ll say more when I play it a bit tonight (can’t do too long since I have two midterms this week).
Anybody have any impressions yet?
Let me amend that: by “unlocked” I meant “began decrypting” which appears to be even more painfully slow than usual. I’ll try and play if it finishes decrypting (at about 30% right now) at a reasonable hour.
Okay, I played some. I have to say, I’m not sure what to make of the game. It seems like it will open up eventually, but it drags everything out MERCILESSLY on the way there. Each mission so far has been the same hallway with the same arbitrarily handleless doors and beds blocking hallways we’ve had since Half-Life 2.
I mean, for all intents and purposes Borderlands was pretty linear in the non-hub zones, but at least it was pretty and liked to hide chests every little place.
I heard this game is really big, expansive, etc etc, but at least in the opening you are on rails HARD. Even the spots between towns are pretty much narrow canyon corridors, if you try to go the wrong way, you will be welcomed with a rocket to the face, and you’ll likely find yourself unable to retreat.
This also has my nomination for the scariest game evar!! Because of the mutants? No. You’re fearing for your life against enemies? No, though they did a relatively decent job of making the AI threatening for melee enemies, at least with the mutants. I’m talking about texture pop. Every time you turn around: HOLY SHIT WHAT IS… texture loads oh… it’s a couc OH MY GO oh, a lamp. I’m not kidding, every. Single. Time. You. Turn, texture pop. This isn’t Mass Effect, where when you first load an area things pop, this is like how Deus Ex: HR sometimes lagged on asset loading when you rounded a corner, except with texture pop. Apparently the only platform this isn’t an issue on is the PS3 version, and they had to use every core to do it. This screams poor optimization, even for the state of modern console engines (cough Unreal cough), to me, the graphics are hardly phenomenal. They’re not quite HL2 graphics (objectively, subjectively I like HL2’s graphics more), and at least they have more color, to whatever tiny degree, than most “brown, three shades of gray, and muzzle flash are our entire color palette” shooters nowadays.
So far the story is… nothing special. If you don’t want spoilers for the first hour or two, don’t read this. It’s a case of unique premise, same results. You were apparently generic man 17A sent up on some sort of project called the Ark when a meteor was going to hit Earth. You eventually came back down and everyone else in your pod was dead, while you woke up from stasis. You have some special ability with nanotrytes (or something similarly goofy sounding) that give you standard FPS regenerating HP, and the ability to come back from the dead and shoot a massive electrocuting shockwave from your body on a well times button press. Then you spend time doing chores for people until you get a buggy. That’s where I am. There’s something about the metal from the meteor being really valuable, and for some reason there are mutants with glowing green eyes that run at you like chimps.
While the story (so far) isn’t really special (seriously, it feels like they glued the vaults from Fallout with the bare concept for the main character from STALKER together), the world is pretty cool. The main reason I keep playing right now is just to figure out what these murals I’m seeing are. There are some wall paintings of a meteor coming from the sky, okay, but there’s also this recurring mural in Ghost (a bandit group) territory of a giant Cthulhu… octopus… thing with stars around it. If that doesn’t come back I’m going to cut a bitch for wasting a perfectly good plot and/or boss fight.
There’s a crafting system, but my money based on the little experience I have is on it either becoming excessively grindy and not at all a worthwhile addition to the game, or else hilariously redundant, once you’re getting the materials you need by the bucketload.
The game keeps hinting at things “go here, there’s bandits. Go into the sewers, there’s some valuable shit down there since nobody’s lived there since the impact, but it’s infested with mutants.” But a couple hours in, I’m still waiting to see it. I really hope the railroad disappears sooner rather than later, this seems like it could be decent if there was less railroad, and maybe a biiit less generic FPS.
I think this was supposed to be a straight up shooter with very light RPG elements. So more borderlands than Fallout 3. And it’s definitely a lot more on rails than Borderlands. It’s also supposed to be shorter - about 12 hours.
So I knew going in that it was more Doom with some hubs to play around in than an epic post-apocalyptic RPG.
Which was fine. I was still psyched about a new Id shooter and a new Id engine to marvel at…
Until I started playing it.
Id developed the engine around the consoles. They developed this whole texture streaming technology in order to be able to use higher resolution textures and not crash the console by going over the limited memory on those platforms.
The problem is two fold:
In other words, just what you’d expect from console textures. Which look bad at the Sub-HD resolution RAGE runs at on consoles, and look laughable at PC resolutions of 1080p, nevermind my resolution of 2560x1440.
So they developed this technology that requires incredibly fast, on the fly texture loading, without any tangible improvements to textures on ANY platform.
It’s a bad joke.
I can’t believe Carmack actually boasted that the PC version had the same textures as the console. I didn’t worry about the statement too much, because of the new tech they were using. Now I realize I should have worried.
We really are getting the console textures, and they are ugly. We are also getting new technology, that at this point in time is broken.
Apparently you can use the GPU to help accelerate the loading of the textures, everyone is hoping this is something that a driver update can improve, otherwise this game is unplayable.
We also need a FOV mod, a V-Sync mod (the tearing is terrible), and a high resolution texture mod (assuming it won’t mess up the new tech even more). As well as an SLI profile for anyone using an SLI system.
In short this is a shoddy console port. Stay away, at least until the issues are resolved (if they ever are).
I can’t comment on gameplay mechanics or story, since I haven’t gotten very far yet.
What the hell happened Id?
Video fo the current issues with texture loading on PC:
Xbox 360 has this issue and a lot of pop-in, but the texture loading issue on the consoles is a hell of a lot smaller.
I’m hearing that the game looked impressive and ran fine on PC back at their last live demo. So Here’s hoping a quick patch/driver update does fix these things.
This makes me a little sad. I bought this game with very little foreknowledge because the little I did see seemed like it would be a Darker Fallout…
I let Dues Ex collect dust because I just didn’t like it that much so I hope I don’t get burned twice in a row.
That’s some ridiculous. Could they not spend 5 minutes on the PC version just to have it load all textures all the time? They have the speed and memory for it - it’s routine. Why even give us such a ridiculous console handicap?
id has always made shitty games but great engines - so other people would take their engines and make good games out of them. But now they’ve decided to make cutting edge (??) engines for 2004 hardware and it’s a joke. Completely useless. Fuck John Carmack.
I hope this fails as hard as Crysis 2 and they’ll remember who their audience is.
Hmmm…
Might be an issue with the autodetect hardware stuff:
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/558669287209033616/E1F7E6A574DCB47E56459D8F8B7E75B9443624DA/
It crashes on initial load for me. 
-XT
This game runs effin’ great for 3 MHz and no VRAM.
No kidding. John Carmack is a miracle worker!
I know, this is the greatest Commodore 64 game EVER.
So it looks like if you’re willing to do a bit of typing, there’s a fix for all of the pop and general blehness of RAGE.
Edit: One complement I have to give is that the vehicle controls are actually pretty good compared to the implementation in most PC games.
I don’t know if it’s possible to have a thread about a PC game without Kinthalis and SenorBeef slinging turds at consoles. We know. New PCs are so much more powerful and are capable of so much more. We get it. Everyone got it the first 10 threads that you’ve injected that into.
With that said I haven’t played it but I think the graphics look really good in pictures, but then again I guess all the textures are loaded for that. The character designs seem pretty cool too. Doom/Quake/id type games just aren’t my thing but I do like the appearance of this one.
I think it’s going to be something like 3 discs on Xbox. Wow! I think I heard there is a single game that takes up 8 Xbos discs coming down the pipe.
One of the discs is multiplayer, only 2 for single player.
The hell are you talking about?
Also, the game is pretty much fixed with the new drivers and if you go here:
You can create a custom config file and make the game actually look good.
I’m running the first config, except I turned on threaded rendering and increased my video ram to 1536 MB.
According to Carmack the consoles are limited to 4k textures which do not look good, while the PC can handle 8k or 16k textures depending on your video RAM.
Here’s a comparison:
The only thing left to fix is performance in SLI/crossfire systems, and that’s coming in a few days.
So far all I can say is that the game seems terribly linear, looks amazing, and I suck with a shotgun.
(PS3) user here, and I’m noticing the graphics much more as I’m playing. There always seemed to be a layer of haze when outdoors, I thought it was just designed that way, but then I started looking closer to some of the textures.
Still not much more improvement since I played last - it still makes me mostly want to boot up Fallout 3. Those little mutant buggers are a PITA (Stand still and let me blast you with my shotgun, damnit!), and the gun-switching method is always sure to give you the wrong weapon when you need it the most (Crossbow!? I wanted the shotgun! whack).
Good thing I rented before buying. I got a few more days with it so I’ll see how it goes…
I submitted a ticket to cancel my Steam pre-order earlier.
I’ve had enough with it. I have officially given up on this game.
I made my way through the Dead City, killed all the baddies that pop up suddenly out of no where, (seriously, at least one jumped out of a closet-type room with four walls, ceiling, floors intact that was empty before) battled the horrid weapon switching/melee attack problem (PS3 at least), defeated the big-boss man (very disappointing fight, it felt like Super Mario Bros. again), and was done in by a small pack of mutants w/a slimer dude (he shoots slime and it covers your screen so you can’t see). Due to the awesome weapon switch, instead of grabbing the shotgun or MG, it choose my bolt launcher (1bolt/~3 seconds) – was beaten to death with their clubs. Fine, super, start at the last load screen before the boss right? Nope, brought me to outside the city before I even entered.
F-that, I’m out.
Don’t get me wrong, I consider myself a veteran FPS/RPG player. I had high hopes for Rage, but am very disappointed. I ended up playing Diablo 2 all night long instead.
Anyone know someone who actually likes the game a lot?