Poll: Rage is 9 years old

[BFG10K]

So I just finished playing Rage; this is my third time doing so. It looks quite good at 2560x1440 with 4xAA, rock solid 60FPS:

Spoiler

What I liked

• This is Borderlands + Doom 3 + Fallout 3.
• Semi-open world has the same exploration and immersion benefits of open-world without feeling overwhelmed or bogged down by useless filler content.
• The guns feel really solid to use. Even the starting pistol can still be devastating end-game.
• Level design of internal zones is very good. A nice mix of caves, buildings, factories, and sewers.
• The graphics are really nice to look at despite their technical limitations (see below). A side-effect is texture surfaces have a very grainy and unclear look to them, which actually fits into the context of a grimy post-apocalyptic world.
• Unlike many games with currency, the economy doesn’t eventually collapse into uselessness. It’s still worthwhile buying things end-game, especially armor piercing bullets and vehicle repair kits.
• Crafting mechanics are really simple and just require the right ingredients, and can be done during combat. No grindy work benches, safe spaces or technicians required like some other games.

What I didn’t like

• Mega-texturing is one of the worst failures ever in 3D gaming. Even with my NVMe drive I still get texture pop-in for half a second, though it’s hugely reduced compared to HDDs, and even SATA SSDs. It’s no surprise they completely got rid of that garbage in IDTech 7.
• All lighting is pre-baked so there’s no dynamic lighting.
• Frequent random sound drop-outs with no solution that I could find.

Overall this is still a really fun game to play.

And no joke, here's the original Doom running on a pregnancy test kit:

Spoiler

 

[pmv]

Really? I haven't got round to playing it yet. Well, I started it at one point then put it aside. 9 years? Really? Where does the time go?

Now I remember it, I didn't care for the car-racing stuff. That's why I lost interest.

 

[Artorias]

Mega-textures is a really interesting concept. I feel like artists would greatly benefit from this if it was refined more.

A great summary regarding its failures but also positives. Perhaps it came too soon.

 

[DigDog]

i think i played the first two of the Wolfenstein "reboots", and did not play the others because of the INSANE install size, but i have watched some YT videos, and they look like a poor man's COD clone.
I played Rage 1 and really did not like it. It tries to be like Doom the original, but it's nothing like it. First off, the guns suck. Second, the maps suck. Enter room, mob spawn trigger. proceed to next room. And the driving was completely out of place and the story was truly mediocre.
It was supposed to be a graphic wonder, and instead it was grey and with tons of popping textures, which - and i quote id - "cannot be fixed without a major overhaul".
Fixed 1 week later by a bedroom hacker by changing .ini settings.

Doom 3 was really bad. Reeeeally bad. Even Quake 4 was better (and it's practically the same game), but it was just so incredibly boring, repetitive, with zero fun. Lock you in room, spawn mobs. OH LOOK, i spawn a mob behidn you! SUCH CLEVER!

I have not had a chance to play Doom 2016 or Doom Eternal, but i heard that they were both good.



Final note: SHAME ON YOU for forgetting Hexen and Heretic. Neither of which i like.
But i did not expect such oversight from you.

 

[BFG10K]

Mega-textures is a really interesting concept. I feel like artists would greatly benefit from this if it was refined more.

Disagree. Mega-texturing is an inherent failure because it requires constant streaming, absolutely destroying any caching opportunity. When you play Rage your HDD is a solid light unless you stop all input, because data is constantly being thrown out and pulled in again.

Also it has horrendous disk space requirement in exchange for very low detail overall. Doom Eternal has far more detailed textures for far less disk space, with zero pop-in.

And finally it's basically unusable for modding, because nobody is going to edit a gargantuan multi-GB texture.

Final note: SHAME ON YOU for forgetting Hexen and Heretic. Neither of which i like.
But i did not expect such oversight from you.

Huh? That franchise was started and exclusively developed by Raven.

 

[DigDog]

uh .. i knew they were id's side project - designed in-house, built developed externally. John Romero was project director, and id published the game. It also runs on the doom engine, which today may be normal, but in 1995 it was enough to call it a Doom game.

 

[JimKiler]

Doom 3 was really bad. Reeeeally bad. Even Quake 4 was better (and it's practically the same game), but it was just so incredibly boring, repetitive, with zero fun. Lock you in room, spawn mobs. OH LOOK, i spawn a mob behind you! SUCH CLEVER!

I have not had a chance to play Doom 2016 or Doom Eternal, but i heard that they were both good.



Final note: SHAME ON YOU for forgetting Hexen and Heretic. Neither of which i like.
But i did not expect such oversight from you.

I could not agree more, i played that and Far Cry 1 around the same. Doom was pretty but so repetitive and boring. I dreaded it after a while because of the walk forward and something spawns behind you. Far Cry was such a breathe of fresh air which gave you choices of how to attack an area and which direction to take to get to a place.

I have yet to play Doom Eterenal, but the previous iteration, Doom 2016 was awesome and I love it. The arcade mode gives it replay value or if you don't have a lot of time you can just play and rush through a level.

 

[BFG10K]

uh .. i knew they were id's side project - designed in-house, built developed externally. John Romero was project director, and id published the game. It also runs on the doom engine, which today may be normal, but in 1995 it was enough to call it a Doom game.

Nope, Brian Raffel (Raven) was director, Romero was just the producer.

 

[pmv]

I could not agree more, i played that and Far Cry 1 around the same. Doom was pretty but so repetitive and boring. I dreaded it after a while because of the walk forward and something spawns behind you. Far Cry was such a breathe of fresh air which gave you choices of how to attack an area and which direction to take to get to a place.

I have yet to play Doom Eterenal, but the previous iteration, Doom 2016 was awesome and I love it. The arcade mode gives it replay value or if you don't have a lot of time you can just play and rush through a level.

Different tastes, I guess, but I liked Doom 3. Specifically I liked the slower pace and the super-creepy atmosphere. Perhaps it had a bit too much of the cheap-surprise-spawning, but I think I just like eerie, creepy atmospheres in games ('look around you marine, everyone is dead'). I suppose I am a fan of games meant to be played in a dark room. i don't hate them but I'm not a huge fan of fast-paced manic shoot-em-ups, which is why I didn't like doom 2016 as much (as well as getting stuck part way through it). it just had no atmosphere. Far Cry was OK.

 

[shortylickens]

I like single player doom and single player quake.

rage is garbage. really nice shiny garbage.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Rage was a fun pop-corny kinda thing if you're looking for a brain-dead shooter with some decent mechanics. Pretty game too.

Given the game's map layout, lite RPG elements, and every level getting a second run to pad out play time, Rage might have done well as a now very popular "Metroidvania" where new weapons and equipment allow you to unlock new sections or zones instead of the standard old quest format.

Haven't played the second game, but my understanding is its gone full boring modern open-world and fits solidly into the "magenta" game genre.

 

[Zeze]

I remember I played this game for exactly 30 minutes and quit because I just couldn't get over the "pop-in" of the textures. It completely ruined immersion and bothered me so much I couldn't even play.

 

[pmv]

I think I started it (Rage, I mean) - joined the sadly long list of games I got a bit of a way through and never got back to. Usually that's because I hit a ridiculous difficulty spike and get fed up with it (why do so many games have sections that suddenly get a million times tougher than the rest of the game? Not even end-of-game boss levels, just bits in the middle of the game that are insanely hard for no reason - currently forever-stuck on Zombie Army 4, Serious Sam 3 and a couple of others).

I think with Rage it was that I found the compulsory driving/racing bits too boring. Not into driving/racing games.

 

[BFG10K]

I remember I played this game for exactly 30 minutes and quit because I just couldn't get over the "pop-in" of the textures.

NVMe drives greatly reduce the problem..

 

[Zeze]

NVMe drives greatly reduce the problem..

NVMe came out in a different world long long after Rage came out.

I know no other games with such pop-in techniques. The engine is just badly made.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

NVMe came out in a different world long long after Rage came out.

I know no other games with such pop-in techniques. The engine is just badly made.

-Yep. You cannot "look around" while driving and it occured to me that you probably can't do that because the engine wouldn't be able to load in the textures while the character is moving at speed.

That said, I still feel that there was a nugget of a good game in there, and if the devs had been even just a little smarter about your toolkit and weapon design the game would have been a cult classic FPS Metroidvania.

Instead it's just forgettable pretty trash on the wayside of progress.

 

[BFG10K]

NVMe came out in a different world long long after Rage came out.

You can replay it on modern hardware and have a better experience.

 

[Zeze]

Talking about this game makes all of us feel so damn old and even a smaller minority than 'mainstream' gamers.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Just Patient Gamers @Zeze.

I played this game 9 years after it was released, cause what's the point of owning a game you bought in some random Steam sale unless you play it (or at least launch it).

It'd be like only watching movies right as they're released but never talking about movies more than a decade old.