Is Rage worth buying?

I've been thinking about buying Rage for a while, and you can get a hard copy of it nowadays for less than 12 bucks around here. Do you think it's worth getting? I've watched all trailers for it, but it's hard getting a feel for it without being able to try it out myself. I really wished they'd released a demo for PC like they were talking about. Also, no Linux support and Steam requirement are two other cons for me. On the other hand the game itself is probably at least a bit to my liking, and all the Doom references is also a pro... I'm having a really hard time deciding so I'm asking you guys for advise now.

I haven't played it yet (though I do own it on Steam), but the general consensus seems to be that it's pretty good, but could have been much better.

My brother got it for PS3, and he thinks its awesome (big CoD fan, not really Rage's target audience). I'm gonna start playing it soon, mostly for the hidden Doom / Quake rooms

I bought it recently for pocket change. Got an hour in and it seems like Borderlands minus anything I liked about Borderlands.

Jayextee said:

Got an hour in and it seems like Borderlands minus anything I liked about Borderlands.

It's funny you say that. Most of the reason Gearbox changed the art style so late in the game was to make it not "A Poor Man's Rage."

The game is OK, not spectacular or anything but the parts you're in a vehicle are pretty boring.

Yeah, I didn't like a lot about Borderlands; but the art style was one of the better things. Didn't really grab me, but was something to play with friends who were into more modern games.

Sounds like it's pretty good so I think I'll buy a hard copy of it for PC soon enough. A little less than 12 bucks including S&H seems cheap enough. I remember reading a while back around the time it was released that it had quite a few technical issues on PC though. Is that all good nowadays?

When RAGE let's you shoot things it's actually really, really good. But the gaps between said shootouts are very long and aren't very interesting.

I would recommend it for its spectacular art direction, but that's about it. I am sure it will wind up on the Steam summer sale and, for ten bucks or less, it's probably worth it. However, if you've played the first Borderlands, you've played a superior game to Rage in almost every way.

The texture quality is also spectacular. Spectacularly crappy.

Depends on what you're talking about though.
The artistic quality of the textures are supreme, the resolution however are far from excellent on the world stuff. But on the character models it's exceptional.

I bought it.... I only tried to run it once. Texture popin was just horrible. I never played it again. Normally I'm not the type of person to let things like that bother me and call it game breaking, but if Rage is all about the graphics and there's horrifying texture popin, there are other games to play out there.

Captain Red said:

When RAGE let's you shoot things it's actually really, really good. But the gaps between said shootouts are very long and aren't very interesting.

This is pretty much why I just gave on the game after having played it for less then 3 hours, and then never once returned to it.

The actual shooting is good, but all of the crap that happens inbetween is so annoying and dull that it completely kills the game for me.

Why could Id not just make the game play through a series of levels like in other Id games? Why did they have to do what they did with Wolfenstein and throw in pointless open world elements that did not actually add anything and just slowed down the pace of the game to a crawl after every single fun mission?

And don't get me started on the racing crap. Who thought it would be a good idea to throw in a mediocre racing element? Its not even an active part of the core game, the racing is pretty much just a series of generic races that take place completley outside of the main FPS portion of the game. They almost feel like mini-games that you are forced to complete.

So yea, I can't really recommend the game unless you are willing to grind through the boring "in-between parts" of the game and the dull racing.

For 12 bucks I personally would pick it up. If it turns out I didn't like it, I wouldn't stress too much about losing 12 dollars over it.

On Steam I got it for $5. So like the previous poster said, if its not that much money its no big loss. Maybe I will install it and give it another shot.

Meh, the reactions here seem lukewarm. They're not even polarized as with Doom 3.

It's pretty good with flashes of brilliance. Like Kristus said, although the textures are low res, you could see that the game does not look as it was originally intended. If you look at stuff from a reasonable distance, it looks amazing. It has fantastic shooting too and the DLC weapon is particularly great and fun to use.

This game coulda' been something but any game with more than 6 years of dev time (oh my god!) is bound to have problems.

IMO, the shooting is a lot better than Doom3. The open world stuff is turning out to be essentially pointless and the menus are marred by a really shoddy mouse response.

The game is beautiful, but there's no use rubbing your nose against walls since it will not show you anything more than low res textures.

While Id did say that the game is not as open world as one might think from the presentation. They really didn't prepare us for just HOW shallow the world is. Your car is not your avatar, in spite of anything they said. It's just a linear progression with modifications available. And you keep getting new cars instead of upgrading your first so it's not like you ever build a relationship with said car. Also, they sound like lawnmowers.

But I had fun with Rage for the most part. I accepted that it wasn't the game I expected or wanted and just enjoyed the parts that I did like with it. None of the other parts are all that intrusive to be a dealbreaker for me. But yeah, shooting stuff is fun in Rage.

EDIT: It's interesting btw, How they would trump up all these other things that everyone felt was meh when they were selling the game, and just shoved the shooting aside with a comment, We're id we know how to make shooters, even though Doom3 had been very questionable on that front. Instead they hyped all of this other crap that they didn't seem to have put in much effort at all into developing (outside of artwork of course).

If you like FPS, particularly the older ones, you should enjoy this.

I would not say its worth full price, maybe half or less. It feels a little like a ID tech demo, yes its a full game, but you cant help but feel the engine needs built on more.

Combat is fun, weapons are cool, lots of gore and if you love headshots....this is a good game for that!

Graphics are very good if you look out as far distances....almost like a painting. Up close the details are blurry and shadows are not dynamic and look greenish. In fact the game environment is very static! Cant even push object to the floor.....feels like a huge step back. I blame this on fitting its mega-texture stuff into a console, no room for anything else.

The story is crap and actually doesn't even end. It feels like a base game that is awaiting DLC....which never came. Well actually there is a new DLC not that long ago, but not played it yet. Dont think it added too much though.

Some people say it tries to be like Borderlands, but they are totally different. In fact I found Borderlands one of the worst games around....its so incredibiliy boring, its just a fetch quest game. Think the fun is when played on-line, but I dont do that.

Anyway, Rage is a good game, but nothing to Rage about (haha..see what I did there..see...see lol)

bcwood16 said:

Up close the details are blurry and shadows are not dynamic and look greenish. In fact the game environment is very static! Cant even push object to the floor.....feels like a huge step back.

*Facepalm*. After Doom 3, I expected things to evolve, not roll back. I even read some rumours about gradient shadows (penumbras), not going back to Quake 3 engine (which is how you're describing it there).

The shadows are not just static, they're baked into the world textures. This has a silver lining: the lighting is soft, natural (for the most part), and cheap (performance-wise).

Oh lord. Baked on and not dynamic? Yeah that's a huge step back and so how are megatextures supposed to be a giant leap forward?

Hmmmm imagine if Bethesda told iD that Rage can't be set on an Earth futuristic post apocalyptic wasteland, because Fallout 3 is set in a 1950s post apocalyptic wasteland. What if they said it had to be on Mars? Make everything red and everyone should have space suits except the mutants, because its lack of O2 that made them mutants. Or the mutants could just have Oxygen in their evil lairs. Just my mind wandering.

geo said:

Oh lord. Baked on and not dynamic? Yeah that's a huge step back and so how are megatextures supposed to be a giant leap forward?

Hmmmm imagine if Bethesda told iD that Rage can't be set on an Earth futuristic post apocalyptic wasteland, because Fallout 3 is set in a 1950s post apocalyptic wasteland. What if they said it had to be on Mars? Make everything red and everyone should have space suits except the mutants, because its lack of O2 that made them mutants. Or the mutants could just have Oxygen in their evil lairs. Just my mind wandering.

Lighting is completely unrelated to megatextures. What megatextures do is essentially let you paint a wall exactly how you want and then paint another in a different way. The bad news is that this is a VRAM hog.

No, it's not a VRam hog, that's precisely what it is aimed to deal with. It's amazing that people still after all these years doesn't know what Megatextures actually are and do. They are textures that allow the computer to only load the necessary textures for a specific scene into the VRAM. IE; if you are far away from a texture, it only loads a fraction of this texture's full resolution. It's this that allows every surface in Rage to be unique. It's also what allows Rage to have these insanely high resolution character textures without it taking a toll on the VRAM. It only loads as much or as little as the VRAM allows it to.

NOW, the drawback is that there's a metric fuckton of texture data to save on disc for a game that got unique textures for each and every surface. THAT is why Rage's world textures are so low resolution. It's also most likely the reason they decided to bake the lighting into the diffuse, since if they had not done that, you would have had to have at least twice the texture data for the world (not counting specular texture that would also be required, though not necessarily at the same resolution as diffuse and normal).

Rage's technology isn't exactly a step back, it's more a side step. An exploration of an alternate way to deal with textures. Most likely it will become more commonly used in the future, though probably not quite the same way as seen in Rage.

DooM_RO said:

Lighting is completely unrelated to megatextures. What megatextures do is essentially let you paint a wall exactly how you want and then paint another in a different way. The bad news is that this is a VRAM hog.

Yea, it sure seems that way, I know it was supposed to make every wall and every brick unique looking so you dont get any repetitive texture patters, but to be honest games are pretty clever how they hide this now and the resolution is much higher. For instance I personally played Skyrim alot recently and I hardly noticed much repeating stuff...if at all. Im sure if I looked for it its there. This is why I think Mega texture reads well on paper, but in real practise, its not worth it.

I would rather have real physics, dynamic shadows, night/day cycles and a smaller HDD requirement which all leads to a fun gaming experience rather then avoid seeing the odd pattern repeat. Its not like im going to puke over the keyboard, spay my monitor and throw my computer box out the window in pure Rage because it destroyed my realism (see what I did there...again...with the word 'Rage' and the fact we are talking about 'Rage...see...hehe lol)

kristus said:

It's this that allows every surface in Rage to be unique.

Chicken or the egg?

Unique textures cause enough drawbacks to consider that they weren't added just for lulz.

I think part of the problem with Rage was simply poor planning, and not anticipating all of the major cuts that would have to be made. Carmack talked a lot about this, especially during the last year of development, how they were systematically going through the game and trimming all the assets way down, particularly textures, because they simply couldn't afford the disc space for it all, even when using numerous fancy compression methods. If you look at some of Rage's early previews, they're more graphically impressive than the final product turned out to be, and I think that's primarily the reason why. In the early development cycle, artists were going hog wild with artistic assets simply because they could; id Tech 5 can render an unlimited amount of texture data at any given time. Unfortunately, physical storage limitations came back in the end to bite them in the ass.

Caffeine Freak said:

I think part of the problem with Rage was simply poor planning, and not anticipating all of the major cuts that would have to be made. Carmack talked a lot about this, especially during the last year of development, how they were systematically going through the game and trimming all the assets way down, particularly textures, because they simply couldn't afford the disc space for it all, even when using numerous fancy compression methods. If you look at some of Rage's early previews, they're more graphically impressive than the final product turned out to be, and I think that's primarily the reason why. In the early development cycle, artists were going hog wild with artistic assets simply because they could; id Tech 5 can render an unlimited amount of texture data at any given time. Unfortunately, physical storage limitations came back in the end to bite them in the ass.

I bet Carmack got a lot of bad rep for it behind the scenes because of it. Before being hired by Bethesda, he basically had everyone by the balls "If we don't do this I quit". This happened in Doom 3 as well but to a lesser extent. I think Id sold the company to Bethesda to solve these kind of issues. NO one should have this much power even if you are J Carmack.

Da Werecat said:

Chicken or the egg?

Unique textures cause enough drawbacks to consider that they weren't added just for lulz.

Please explain what you're talking about and how that relates to my post.