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id Software Releases RAGE

Posted by Soulskill on from the back-in-the-post-apocalyptic-saddle dept.

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.

7 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Id releases Engine, tech demo... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Gaming press interprets tech demo as game, responds accordingly.

    1. Re:Id releases Engine, tech demo... by beef3k · · Score: 3, Insightful

      more like "iD releases tech demo in guise of a game, marketed and sold to consumers for 60 bucks"

      In that context harsh critics are righly deserved

    2. Re:Id releases Engine, tech demo... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re:Id releases Engine, tech demo... by MrZilla · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, I've always preferred id's 'tech demos' to most games. For some strange reason the tech demos seems to give you more actual play time and less movie watching.

      --
      mov ax, 4c00h
      int 21h
  2. Texture popping by Phasmatis · · Score: 4, Informative

    Be aware that the PC version has a serious texture popping issue. I've yet to read someone state they DON'T have this problem, no matter the hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5oEdfT4OWY BTW, and here's the extent of your in-game graphics options: http://i.imgur.com/Rlvr6.jpg The game is designed to set its quality settings automatically relative to your hardware capabilities, but this very rarely works well in practice and also doesn't account for people like me who prefers a lower, but still playable frame rate in exchange for higher quality graphics. Anyways, sounds like the game was designed for consoles first anyway (at time of writing the FOV can't even be changed despite someone finding out how to enable the console). Way to go Carmack.

  3. Uhmmm, ok, call it a full-price tech demo then? by SplatMan_DK · · Score: 4, Informative

    Gaming press interprets tech demo as game, responds accordingly.

    Are you serious?

    May I politely point out they're charging full price for it? In fact it is the exact same price as Battlefield 3 which is due in 4 weeks...

    The US price for RAGE is 59,99 USD (sity bucks)
    The EU price for RAGE is 49,99 EUR (approx 66,62 USD)

    Can we call it a full-price tech demo then? Or perhaps a "full-price-cross-platform-tech-demo"?

    You know ... just to make sure nobody gets confused about the situation?

    - Jesper

    --
    My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
  4. Re:Linux status by Yuioup · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's what TTimo has to say about it:

    http://ttimo.typepad.com/blog/2009/09/id-software-and-linux.html

    The line you're looking for is the last one:

    "It is likely i will be involved with idTech 5 in the near future, I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done."

    This post is from 2009 but I think it was posted after id was sold to BethSoft. Let's hope he succeeds in convincing his bosses.