id Software Releases RAGE

Today marks the launch of RAGE, id Software's post-apocalyptic first-person shooter that's been in development for at least four years. Early response to the game is mixed, but mostly positive. Eurogamer wrote, "This certainly isn't a video game like the ones we're used to playing in 2011, smothered in celebrity voice actors and shoulder-grabbingly intense expository cut-scenes, and varnished by psychologists so we never look in the wrong direction when we're sprinting away from a set-piece. Instead it's something simpler and more old-fashioned. Judged on game design and content, then, it's slightly anachronistic, but as a toy box full of things you can only do in games, RAGE is warm-hearted and refreshing." The review at Opposable Thumbs was much more critical, saying, "None of the game's ideas are thought out or fully explored, so the game feels like a series of dead ends in a world that is hard to care about, in which you play a bland character doing boring things against stock enemies using weak guns." If you'd like to see a look at the actual gameplay, Giant Bomb has a lengthy video with commentary.

Comments

Id releases Engine, tech demo...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Gaming press interprets tech demo as game, responds accordingly.

Re:Id releases Engine, tech demo...

[TheRaven64]

Doesn't sound too bad. When Quake 1 came out, compiling a map was typically an overnight job on a typical machine of the era. Even the simple toy levels that I put together took over an hour to run vis and bsp on. It sounds like a machine with 16GB of RAM would get similar performance. Of course, with the Internet being what it is, I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with a distributed map compiler. Once you've done the top level of spacial subdivision, you can probably parcel off the work to remote nodes that can then run to completion. If people who want new maps make their machines available for this then you could get the rendering time down quite a lot. This wasn't feasible with Quake 1, when most users were on 14.4kbps modems (if they were online at all).

Re:Id releases Engine, tech demo...

[TheRaven64]

Is it sold to consumers as a game? I always got the impression that Id games from Quake onwards were sold as engines with a demo game attached. If you want to create a game for their engine, you have two options. You either pay them a huge pile of money and get access to everything including redistribution rights, or you make your game require the end user to buy the engine and call it a mod. For Quake 1, the initial install was about 50MB, and my quake directory ended up being about 500MB from all of the mods. Aside from a little occasional deathmatch, I rarely played the game that Id shipped. Things like Team Fortress were much more fun.