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DooM_RO

RAGE is apparently a very solid game!

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Csonicgo said:

And yes, I think a very few, yet vocal PC gamers have become spoiled, somehow-entitled brats. Making games for a platform that has x^y configurations is probably the most unrewarding thing ever to do anymore, especially if this ridiculous backlash is the reward for it.

Wanting to get what you pay for is emblematic of being spoiled and impatient and overly demanding?

If no one complained no attention would be payed to the fact it doesn't work properly. Yeah there's a respectful way of voicing your concerns instead of posting hateful shit over some computer game, but still.

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DoomUK said:

Wanting to get what you pay for is emblematic of being spoiled and impatient and overly demanding?


I would understand if it were such a scenario that there would be no chance of an update in ever. BUT, since that isn't reality, I don't see why everyone is angry. I really don't.

DoomUK said:

If no one complained to attention would be payed to the fact it doesn't work properly. Yeah there's a respectful way of voicing your concerns instead of posting hateful shit over some computer game, but still.


Too bad that the latter is almost ALL the noise. It's not exactly the bug reporting that's the problem but the "OMG U SUK FIX ITTT!!!111" like Fry from Futurama. Unprofessional? As all hell!


At least id is willing to fix any errors and AMD/nvidia are working on a driver fix. If they weren't, I would be very concerned. I don't understand why there are still people that are angry even after they said they ARE working on a fix. I really don't! I WANNA PLAY NOW WAAAH

Good god. There's ridiculous, then there's this. Read the whole thread and try not to punch your screen.

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I bought this game on the Xbox so I've had no technical issues with it at all. Pity about the PC version though.

On the game itself, I've been enjoying it very much so far; the fact that the game contains little plot and poor characters is actually a bonus to me since I just don't care about those elements in a game. The shooting sequences are very enjoyable and the racing is amusing.

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The apparent reason for the texture popping has already been highlighted in the screenshot entryway posted. The problem appears to be that on some systems the game is determining the available video memory to be zero. We know that in Rage texture data is streamed to the video hardware dynamically in-game, according to the viewers' location in the world and the current load on the renderer due to scene complexity. This effectively results in the game deciding it is unable to make any textures resident. Cue popup.

I can see two potential issues here:

1) ATI is misreporting available video memory.
2) Rage's internal video system profiler is (stupidly) accepting a zero value for available video memory irrespective of other indicators that #1 is erroneous.

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It's okay. id Software are big boys now-- they don't need to be defended. While I still respect id a lot, am readily willing to acknowledge they all worked their asses off and I'll still pick up Rage, that doesn't mean they deserve to be able to coast based on who they are alone. They'll make up for their losses with their "sewer unlock" shit from people who buy it used on consoles because everyone beat it in a week, became bored of it and sold it.

People are acting overly zealous but I don't really blame them. Too often people have been paying for broken or bugged games at release and considering their issues include everything from crashes to pop-in on both ATI and nVidia cards, it really seems like id Software did not test the game properly prior to launch-- blaming it on non-existent drivers isn't really a viable excuse. This is on top of the increased price-point, hype, claims it was very story-focused, linearity and whatever else. Would it really have been that hard to add a vertical sync option? Or any video options, for that matter? Higher resolution textures?

When people feel parted with their money and lied to with absolutely no options for returning a product, they tend to react poorly. This is what is happening. While this may be somewhat of a new experience for id Software and I'm sure it will be mostly resolved, what they're experiencing is more a mounting rage against the gaming industry in general and shitty PC ports. I've purchased my fair share of crippled PC games in the last few years and it is extremely frustrating.

Bottom-line, $60 is a lot for a new game and it should work. You'll always have issues but when the game is essentially unplayable (unless you don't mind a lot of eye-strain) for anyone with an ATI card and a minority with nVidia cards, it is inexcusable. There are other games like Hard Reset, which also have fantastic shooting mechanics, are about the same length, don't have a story, look arguably better and launched at half of the price. It doesn't make excuses for what it is and doesn't try to be anything it isn't.

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Edward850 said:

The lack of video options is actually engine design, as it auto scales to maintain 60FPS.

Yeah? And what if I want crap shadows but Ultra textures? Maybe a gamer has priorities with what he wants to look better. This just screams unprofessionalism.

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Gamers should realize that they don't have a clue what they are doing when it comes to video system configuration. Granted, its far better to afford manual config options when the automatic solution can fail so badly but that doesn't change the fact that a user can still screw up just as badly.

Yeah there should be settings to control things like resolution and anti-aliasing and perhaps a few more sliders for more finely grained (but logical) options like texture quality.

However giving users the ability to misconfigure their game means the developers have to account for this possibility with a hidden rationalization step (so the options "stick" in the UI but aren't actually respected) and/or contend with dozens more render paths that are only actually beneficial to the small minority that do change them.

Personally I believe that in order for PC gaming to continue to survive we have to be willing to sacrifice a degree of customization.

I would much rather see a system within a game that dynamically and adaptively ramps up quality according to the specs of the host system than an open-ended UI for configuring video options which can be likened to a flight-sim cockpit.

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Hey guys,getting an ugly ass motion-blur in the middle of the screen.Anyone know how to set it off?
EDIT:Also most textures look bad (low quality),even if I have a pretty solid machine.
EDIT2:And I'm getting Bulletstorm-esque 16bit shadows.What the flying fuck is going on here?

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killer2 said:

Hey guys,getting an ugly ass motion-blur in the middle of the screen.Anyone know how to set it off?
EDIT:Also most textures look bad (low quality),even if I have a pretty solid machine.
EDIT2:And I'm getting Bulletstorm-esque 16bit shadows.What the flying fuck is going on here?


Post a screenshot, people say that the game's auto configuration system is retarded so that might be the issue.Also if you have graphical issues(like slow loading textures) check the steam forums(lots of help there)

NEW ATI DRIVERS ARE UP TOO!Supposedly they fix a lot of problems.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU121AMDCatRagePerfDriver.aspx

Also, you should check this out as well http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1236250-rage-support/page__p__18743528#entry18743528

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DaniJ said:

However giving users the ability to misconfigure their game means the developers have to account for this possibility with a hidden rationalization step (so the options "stick" in the UI but aren't actually respected) and/or contend with dozens more render paths that are only actually beneficial to the small minority that do change them.

Are you fucking kidding? The only settings that can be misconfigured to the point of breaking a game without the game or user's rig just being a total pile of shit would be ones you alter in an external CFG/INI/LTX/etc. file. In-game options have always been safe to alter with the worst issue being bad framerate. (With the exception of Far Cry because that game was such a broken piece of shit that highest settings made my laptop crash in loading for no reason and it crashed my desktop's GPU every time I tried to play for more than a couple seconds. Piece of shit game that is.)

"Auto select" graphics options should be an option as it has been in the past for people who don't know what their system is capable of and won't take the time to figure that out, not a replacement for actual configurations. For PC gaming to survive, it needs to be treated as PC gaming, not a place to shoddily port console games or to produce games made for people with the technical intellect of the average plug-and-play console player. I know what my machine is capable of more than any program thinks it does. You know why? Because while DX:HR bitched at me for my system not having "enough memory" when I started playing it on whatever settings were set there, here I am six hours into the game on higher settings running it with no issue.

I mean for god's sake, RAGE has the same amount of graphics options right now as Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (resolution, AA levels, brightness), and that was a blatant console port.

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Xeros612 said:

(With the exception of Far Cry because that game was such a broken piece of shit that highest settings made my laptop crash in loading for no reason and it crashed my desktop's GPU every time I tried to play for more than a couple seconds. Piece of shit game that is.)

Funny I can't remember any of that. Probably because I don't play FPS games on shitty laptops and my desktop could handle Far Cry's max settings without breaking a sweat.

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Xeros612 said:

Are you fucking kidding? ...

Note that I wasn't talking about Rage but games in general.

Also note that I said the removable of manual configuration options should only be considered when the automatic configuration is robust enough.

Furthermore, no, you don't have a clue what you are doing unless you know exactly how all these configuration options interoperate and what they actually do in any given game. The days of configuration options mapping 1:1 to a known video system feature are long gone.

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DaniJ said:

Gamers should realize that they don't have a clue what they are doing when it comes to video system configuration. Granted, its far better to afford manual config options when the automatic solution can fail so badly but that doesn't change the fact that a user can still screw up just as badly.

Yeah there should be settings to control things like resolution and anti-aliasing and perhaps a few more sliders for more finely grained (but logical) options like texture quality.

However giving users the ability to misconfigure their game means the developers have to account for this possibility with a hidden rationalization step (so the options "stick" in the UI but aren't actually respected) and/or contend with dozens more render paths that are only actually beneficial to the small minority that do change them.

Personally I believe that in order for PC gaming to continue to survive we have to be willing to sacrifice a degree of customization.

I would much rather see a system within a game that dynamically and adaptively ramps up quality according to the specs of the host system than an open-ended UI for configuring video options which can be likened to a flight-sim cockpit.


I'm sorry but I don't agree. Even John Carmack himself said recently that in the future they're going to focus on making their games work on the PC first and then port it over to consoles.

Rage is a console port. More specifically, an Xbox 360 port. No one can deny this. The PC manual doesn't even show a keyboard anywhere in the manual but has a picture of an Xbox 360 controller on both the back page and second page. There obviously wasn't much play-testing done for the PC market or there wouldn't be so many issues. The fact that not one reviewer was allowed access to the PC version (even PC Gamer based their review on an Xbox 360 version) prior to release really begs the question of did id Software know about the issues and shove it out anyway due to being exhausted from working on it so many years and because the PC gaming crowd is the minority in terms of potential sales?

id Software did not leave out options because they were worried people would fuck it up, they left them out because it was sloppily ported and they designed a system that allowed them to easily make the game run on any system, including an iPad for some ridiculous reason. Sure, it's impressive from a tech stand-point, but from an end-user stand-point of someone playing it, it admittedly kind of blows. The ironic part is that for a lot of people to make the thing work properly and get the screen tearing and whatever to go away they need to manually edit their .cfg files, which they're a lot more likely to fuck something up there than in a game menu.

All of this is in addition to them reverting on their lighting and physics advancements simply to make the mega-texture tech work fairly well.

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DaniJ said:

Granted, its far better to afford manual config options when the automatic solution can fail so badly but that doesn't change the fact that a user can still screw up just as badly.

That's why you have a "set defaults" type button for when you inadvertently make a change(s) that the game/system didn't like. You're making a pretty poor argument for a total lack of in-game customization, there.

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You have to give id the benefit of the doubt. A company cannot predict when a third party will fuck up your game. Though, focusing on console hardware probably didn't help either.

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So I'm now seven hours into Rage. Looks to be the halfway point. Updated my drivers again with the recommended ones from ATI. Everything worked fine for a while. Then the weapon HUD models started getting mirrored and stretched around and every character flashed in and out of existence sometimes leaving black silhouettes where they stood. And the blurry textures are still there. And more and more I see shockingly low res textures on some of the models. The top of a fairly large object looked like it was skinned with a 16x16 texture. So to recap:

The newest drivers released specifically to fix Rage make Rage look worse.

Crashing during a loading screen is also very common. There's no loading bar on there, so you have no way to gauge progress. I sat looking at the screen for a minute and finally CTRL-ALT-DEL'd out. "RAGE has stopped working."

During an escort mission where I had to rescue a prisoner, that prisoner decided that he would freeze up against a wall and stay there until I reloaded an autosave and started the entire level over again. It turns out that he was twenty feet from taking an elevator out and telling me to find my own way. I escorted this man for two rooms. It seems like he was only there to provide some support, as he had an assault rifle, except that particular assault rifle is almost useless against the soldiers we were facing because they had thick armor. So that meant that I was the one doing all of the shooting, so arming him was pointless.

I was really trying to like this game, but pointless missions in recycled areas gets old. Fast. Entering a level, then failing to jump to a nearby ledge leading to an interesting looking corridor because invisible barriers prevent you from doing so and then exiting from that corridor, which is nearly adjacent to the room with the thing you needed to get, makes traveling around the level and back all the more infuriating. God damn it.

And as far as I can tell about the multiplayer, there's no deathmatch option. Just "Road Rage," a vehicular combat mode, and some co-op mode with it's own levels. Take a moment to let that sink in: id released a game that had no deathmatch option. Even in Doom 3, in which multiplayer was an afterthought, there was 4-player deathmatch.

Everything wrong with this game is starting to pile up. It's not looking good. Maybe it's a good tech demo on consoles.

And now after installing the new drivers for Rage, Minecraft doesn't work.

Ugh. id made a console shooter and ported it to the pc. What has this world come to?

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DoomUK said:

That's why you have a "set defaults" type button for when you inadvertently make a change(s) that the game/system didn't like. You're making a pretty poor argument for a total lack of in-game customization, there.

Clearly you don't understand the argument. A robust self-configuring system wouldn't require a "set defaults" button.

Why is it that users equate a lack of options to configure every last detail of a game's renderer with the "quality" of a console port? There is a fundamental logical disconnect that users have come to accept and expect as being a part of the deal. They want the quality of the experience to scale inline with the availability of their uber powerful rigs (and so they should). However this is not the same thing as having array of dials and levers to tweak and tinker with.

What I am saying is that games can still provide this scalability without resorting to the cop out solution of simply allowing users to change all the settings manually.

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I realize I'm beating an off-topic horse here, but something's not sitting right with me.

DaniJ said:

Personally I believe that in order for PC gaming to continue to survive we have to be willing to sacrifice a degree of customization.


My thoughts on this: I like the idea of an auto-configuration system. For today's "average user," it definitely streamlines the process of tweaking graphics and makes things easier for most people... when it works. RAGE seems to have proven that id's auto-config technology isn't quite perfect, but even in the case that it is, does that mean that it should be the end-all configuration solution for everyone?

The real question is this: how can you actually argue for removal of common customization options? All it would've taken is for RAGE's graphics menu to have an extra, small tab at the top: "Automatic" (selected by default) and "Manual", the latter of which opens up the usual list of graphics settings. For the users who experience problems with the auto-adjustment or dislike how said auto-adjustment works (i.e. what killer2 mentioned re: shadows vs. texture quality), they use the "Manual" settings mode. Problem solved for everyone.

If an end-user is silly enough to mess up something even as simple as that, then do we really need to hide options just to cater to that? Just add a "reset to defaults" option and be done with it -- keep in mind that these are PC gamers we are talking about here, who are generally a bit more tech-savvy than console users. A sweeping generalization, I'm sure, but PC games have used large, customizable graphics options for over a decade now with little trouble, in my experience.

The bottom line is that there's only so far you can idiot-proof a system, and when you start taking away options in an effort to do so, all you're doing is robbing legitimate customization features from users who do know what they're doing. Let the idiots be idiots -- they'll find a way to mess up their game anyway. No need to treat the rest of the userbase like idiots too. :P


On a more 'intimate' note,

DaniJ said:

Gamers should realize that they don't have a clue what they are doing when it comes to video system configuration.

How arrogant of you. I understand that as the lead programmer for a high-profile GL port, you know far more about what these graphics settings mean than the average user (myself, for instance) does, but why on Earth should that translate to "I should not be allowed to tweak graphics settings"?

Do I know exactly what the GPU is doing when I toggle Anisotropic Filtering on and off? No. Do I notice the effect on my system's performance? Yes. Yes, I do. And as a gamer, this performance/quality tradeoff is all that matters.

I've always enjoyed the freedom of being able to choose what settings to adjust if the situation requires it. Can an auto-adjusting game engine effectively determine which setting is the most optimal to tone down in order to increase performance? Sure. Is it the setting I'd prefer to decrease? There's no guarantee of that.

Now, if changing one of said options is actually prone to damaging my system, then that leads me to believe that there's something broken either in the game engine or the graphics drivers that should be taken care of. Pardon my naive view on this -- I only mention it because it seems that you're trying to argue that certain graphics options should be hidden because "we don't know what they're doing" -- unless it's going to fuck something serious up that we're not aware of, then what's the big deal?

Forgive me for wanting to exercise control over the way my own machine behaves. Perhaps I'm a bit of a control freak in this way, spoiled by years of customizable video options, but I don't like the idea of having said customization taken away entirely for the sake of catering to another group when it doesn't need to be taken away at all. Implement an auto-adjusting system if you want -- that's great and awesome technology. But give me an option to circumvent it if necessary, please. Doing anything less is an unnecessary insult. ;)


tl;dr version & Final Thoughts: RAGE should've had manual graphic settings adjustment. Its absence is probably due to console-port-itis (which is usually a "meh, whatever" issue in this case), but the real scare here is that future systems will continue this trend and take away customization options entirely. Don't -- allow for both methods. There's no reason not to.

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Xaser said:

Its absence is probably due to console-port-itis

Incorrect. It was designed like this because of the nature of how the mega-texturing worked. If you are going to stream textures to a graphics card, your going to have to make sure it dosn't choke the thing.
Besides, why would you wan't to comprmise 60FPS to make it so your shadows look a tiny bit less jaggered?

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Xaser said:

How arrogant of you. I understand that as the lead programmer for a high-profile GL port, you know far more about what these graphics settings mean than the average user (myself, for instance) does, but why on Earth should that translate to "I should not be allowed to tweak graphics settings"?

I'm not being arrogant at all. I freely admit that even I have little idea what most games are doing behind the scenes. So if I don't, as someone who knows a fair bit more about this stuff - then what hope does the average user have?

In the very next sentence in my original argument I even agree with you - i.e., that if the automatic solution is not robust enough then a manual configuration system is a much better one.


Now, if changing one of said options is actually prone to damaging my system, then that leads me to believe that there's something broken either in the game engine or the graphics drivers that should be taken care of. Pardon my naive view on this -- I only mention it because it seems that you're trying to argue that certain graphics options should be hidden because "we don't know what they're doing" -- unless it's going to fuck something serious up that we're not aware of, then what's the big deal?

Do you trust your own ability to tweak the myriad settings to achieve acceptable performance while maximizing the quality of the experience in any given situation? A robust automatic solution integrated into the game itself would be able to provide that - thereby removing the need for any user configuration beyond things like resolution.

Now I notice you mentioned the "removal" of settings. In the case of console ports we aren't dealing with systems that are being "dumbed down" for console users. We are instead talking about systems which are having to be generalised up from their console origins, in order to provide the PC gaming community with all the options they think they require. The more options we want, the harder it becomes to port any console developed game to our platform.

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Awesome stuff! I don't think that's the only Doom egg though. I saw Todd Hollenshead say in an interview that if you let the rocket launcher idle for long enough, you get a Doom easter egg. I can't really see how that would work though.

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This frickin' game...I've got 4 hours played according to steam, but maybe 30 minutes of that is actual shooting gameplay. That might be not a huge deal, but the graphics are still pretty effed up here so I can't enjoy the scenery much. I can't get my framerate to stay at 60 while I turn the screen, it just can't be done. I set AA off, turn down the resolution to 1024x768, it has no effect basically.

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Sorry in advance...I'm getting into this thread a little late. I skimmed through a few pages of the thread, but haven't read it all yet. So if anyone has already said this I apologize.

Is it possible that IDs decision to make RAGE a console port might have more to do with their parent company, Zenimax? Just wondering because I read that PC games don't make near as much money as console titles due to piracy etc.

EDIT: Just read some interviews with Todd Hollenshead and John Carmack where they say that consoles are now IDs primary focus, because they believe that over two-thirds of their consumers are console gamers. While I can't begrudge them, since the object of a business is to turn a profit, it still sucks that it has to be this way.

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It's not due to piracy. If people want to play online they are going to buy the game to get a CD key. It's due to publishers wanting more ca$h faster and because the demographic who will buy stupid shit like DLCs (13 yr old boys) all own Xboxes

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