Rage 2 leaked?

By the time this game comes out the franchise will be 8 years old, older than Doom 3 was when RAGE came out. It's scary how time passes.

2 hours ago, Pyrolex said:

 

I remember most of the characters being really serious, but the Mutant Bash TV guy was so jolly that he kinda made everything else seem pretty grim to me.

There's a disconnect I think between the lavish detail of the world (places like Wellspring and the character designs) and the subdued and somber performances of the voice actors, who all come off as a bit dead inside. The Wasteland itself, with its dreary music and (at times) silence, also imparts a kind of hollowness to the world. It's actually kind of a weird mix of Pixar and post-apocalyptic nihilism.

The sequel looks kind of boring. I'm getting a very strong Doom 2016 "arena" vibe from the combat scenes shown, except even more repetitive. I can't really get excited about fighting a bunch of guys  standing on randomly placed shipping containers in the desert.

Dredged up my thoughts upon replaying Rage a few years ago:

Quote

• The beginning of the game is better than I remembered, but the end of the game is worse. This is the opposite from when I played Doom 3 recently, where the beginning of the game was worse than I remembered but the end was better.
• The megatextures generally look TERRIBLE. I can see a lot of artistry went into the world but everything looks like a blurry low-resolution overcompressed JPEG. Carmack's reach clearly exceeded his grasp with it. Too bad we'll never get a "high resolution pack" - even a texture pack that just made all the textures less compressed, even without a resolution boost, would probably help a lot.
• The further you play, the more clear it is how desperate they were to reuse content. Basically every "side mission" in the game has you go back to an already-played level that has been repopulated with enemies and you play through it backwards. After a few instances, it gets real obvious what they were up to.
• The car combat stuff is so fucking tacked-on and pointless. I'm glad I could basically ignore it for the most part.
• Several levels are almost exclusively populated with "mutants" which are melee-only and go down with one shotgun blast. Playing through those levels is the worst sort of generic shooting-gallery garbage.
• That said, the actual physical level design is probably the best aspect of the game. It's all 100% linear but it's done very tightly and organically with lots of looping around and seeing areas behind / ahead of you as you go.
• I saved up a bunch of money and bought the materials to craft literally 500 pop rockets, which are explosive grenade rounds for your shotgun that kill every normal endgame enemy in one direct hit, which made the last level hilariously trivial. In general, the ability to purchase 999 rounds for a weapon makes the weapons super unbalanced and many of them largely pointless. Why use weapon XYZ when I have effectively unlimited sniper rifle rounds and can just creep through a level killing everything from a distance?
• The BFG SUCKS.
• I had forgotten just how hilariously sudden the ending of the game is. It's super clear that the game must have originally had a three-act structure, where Wellspring was Act 1, Subway Town was Act 2, and then... something else... was Act 3. But then they realized they were running low on time / resources and so they decided to cut all of Act 3 and just sort of graft the final level onto the Subway Town world map. It's like if you were playing Half-Life 2, and at the end of Nova Prospekt where you and Alyx go through a teleporter, that was just the ending.

• You can drive any vehicle in the game, including gyrocopters
• Weapons can be customized and upgraded
• You get Nanotrite powers (the Bulletstorm-like enemy popup attack you can see in the trailer)
• You play a brand new character and are in a fight to stop the Authority (I guess your character's actions in the first game were in vein?)
• It's not using idTech and instead is using Avalanche's Apex engine (source:twitter) Seems more and more like this is more of an Avalanche game than an id game

I think the first game had some good ideas but they were just executed very poorly. I hope they get it right this time. 

Also in my opinion they should do something with the original quake instead of making a sequel to a very average game that didn't really work well at all. 

But I hope it is good this time around. I didn't even really play much of the original Rage. It was just so boring I couldn't get into it. 

10 hours ago, Touchdown said:

Err, what? I think you must have played a different game because it's exactly the opposite. I don't remember a single character that would be dark and depressed or whatever.

Oh, come on. Except for the Mutant Bash TV guy, most major characters are all 'ooh, I hate the authority, ya gotta watch out fer bandits, and why don't you go grab some shit that I need from this dangerous area.' John Goodman (Dan Hagar) fits that description to a T, so do all of the resistance characters in the garage that's in the eastern wasteland in the second half of the game. There's other characters that are less gloomy, such as the sheriff and mayor in Wellspring, but they're still very serious and expect you to give a shit about their problems when they have no emotional resonance with you.

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the game; quite the opposite. The game world itself isn't dark and gloomy for the most part, but a good chunk of the pivotal characters are deadly serious and expect you to care about issues you've not really been given any reason to care about.

Now that I think of it, RAGE was like a game made by a really talented artist that had bad eye sight.

7 hours ago, wheresthebeef said:

• It's not using idTech and instead is using Avalanche's Apex engine (source:twitter) Seems more and more like this is more of an Avalanche game than an id game

Also, WHAAAT?!

EDIT:
 

Actually, it makes sense. Id Tech 5/6 is probably not very good for open world games. Those MegaTextures eat up a LOT of space so unless you are into super blurry textures another engine is probably a better choice.

Here is my theory:

RAGE was abandoned but was picked up by Avalanche because Mad Max didn't do as well as WB'd hoped but the really wanted to make another Mad Max. Machine Games basically did something similar with Wolfenstein. It was abandoned until they picked it up.

On 5/15/2018 at 1:47 PM, wheresthebeef said:

• It's not using idTech and instead is using Avalanche's Apex engine (source:twitter) Seems more and more like this is more of an Avalanche game than an id game

This makes me sad... I'm sure they have their reasons, but seeing an id property not utilize idTech just feels wrong to me. I have an absurd (and probably unjustifiable) amount of love for idTech, so I'd love to see more Bethesda games use it. The squealing sound I made when I booted up Dishonored 2 for the first time and saw that it runs on an idTech derivative probably would have rendered a hamster deaf.

Regardless, I'm optimistic about this game based on the little snippets seen at this point. I liked RAGE despite it's shortcomings, and so far I approve of the tone they've chosen.

On 5/11/2018 at 9:57 AM, Caffeine Freak said:

 

RAGE was roughly 6 years in development, and during that time as I recall, they made some mistakes with the tech that they had to correct later---most notably, trimming down the massive file size for the game that resulted from all the gigantic textures. In the last year or so of development, they had to go through and investigate all the art assets, and do a bunch of down-sizing that resulted in some fairly cringe-worthy textures in the final product. The problems you see with the megatextures in RAGE had less to do with the tech itself, and more to do with how artists were given liberty early on to go crazy with texture sizes, only to later be forced to scale everything back.

Thanks to Steam I still have some screenshots of Rage. Like this:

It is/was a disgrace.

I se...a book, some ovally-things and a can? I think...?

I thought the concept was amazing, and I bought the game on pre-order... only to discover that I needed an internet connection to download the "real game", and I fought long and hard to get a refund. And got it. Sure, I should have known better, but *nowhere* in the pre-order advertisement did it say that I would need an internet connection - in fact, it gave all of the technical requirements, and internet connection was not one of them. I just won't pay for "download required" stuff that cannot be put on a disk. If I buy it, I want a copy of it in my hands. I want something that I can install 5 years after the parent company goes belly up.

Anyway, I would have liked the version before they had to compress it to death to get it to work on the consoles. Seems to me that they should have offered 2 versions: Standard, and Hi-Def, like the movie industry does.

The big problem with the game, at release, was the crappy video drivers that couldn't handle the bizarre data swapping requirements of the megatexture tech. See, that's one of the areas where apps like Steam could actually benefit the player: The app could check your hardware and drivers against your games, and check an online database to make sure your drivers can handle the game.

Everyone got a bad taste in their mouth when the bad drivers couldn't handle the game, and it never really recovered from that. Also, when you're 6 years in the hole, you end up releasing anything that halfway runs. I didn't play the game, but I watched some play-throughs. It looked like "go do this fight, and I'll give you something that will help you go do this fight, so you can get things that will help you go do this fight..." Kinda repetitive.

7 hours ago, kb1 said:

I thought the concept was amazing, and I bought the game on pre-order... only to discover that I needed an internet connection to download the "real game", and I fought long and hard to get a refund. And got it. Sure, I should have known better, but *nowhere* in the pre-order advertisement did it say that I would need an internet connection - in fact, it gave all of the technical requirements, and internet connection was not one of them. I just won't pay for "download required" stuff that cannot be put on a disk.

RAGE actually has the complete launch game on the disc for PC. Well, 3 discs. Anything that's download required is patch updates, which Steam requires and has nothing to do with RAGE.

An internet connection is required for every single Steam platform game installation from disc, and has always been the case. In fact, one final note: https://puu.sh/AoVvc/fe7b152811.jpg

The box does in fact tell you that you required an internet connection.

17 hours ago, boris said:

Thanks to Steam I still have some screenshots of Rage. Like this:

 

 

It is/was a disgrace.

I have more of an issue with how the normals of that surface are distorted because nobody took the time to properly distribute the vertex points.

id tech 5 was more about the big picture. I've been re-playing RAGE and took some pics:

I think it's a shame that they didn't get to keep developing the unique stamping feature of megatextures. Id tech 6 essentially did away with it.

23 minutes ago, TheGamePhilosophe said:

I think it's a shame that they didn't get to keep developing the unique stamping feature of megatextures. Id tech 6 essentially did away with it.

No it didn't.

7 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

No it didn't.

Yes, they did. Specifically, they altered the rendering pipeline in such a way that artists could not simply go in and draw whatever all over the geometry. This was coupled with a move away from having a large number of artists working on unique stamping that they had for RAGE. This is revealed by Tiago Sousa in a presentation on id tech 6 and an interview with Digital Foundry.

But without even going into those technical details, one can just look at the level of unique stamping detail in RAGE and see it far exceeds anything made with id tech 6.

@TheGamePhilosophe

Well it seems to me like they picked exactly the wrong kind of game for this tech.

First, it was supposed to be open world, or at least larger than it was. Because of the humongous size of the game, you can tell a lot of content was cut, possibly even half.

Second, it is an FPS, where the camera is far closer to the textures than in a TPS. Perhaps the problem would have been solved it it was a TPS. Id would have had to break their tradition and we all know they would never do that. Or perhaps it would have worked better as a linear FPS with larger levels, like The New Order.

No, probably not the best engine for open-world games. But keep in mind that the low res, compressed images in RAGE are in part a product of the fact that the game had to run on PS3 and Xbox (PS3 had like 256MB dedicated VRAM). So they had to design around those limitations.

Also, something else that doesn't get appreciated I think is the fact that id tech allowed for more than just lots of unique detail. The fact that each screen was just one large texture meant that artists didn't have to assemble a bunch of rectangles and line them up but could just draws seamlessly into a single texture. That's why RAGE looks so "organic," for lack of a better word.

A lot of the game was cut. I found an interview where it was revealed that there was going to be a whole other stage set near the ocean where heaps of washed up ocean liners and such formed the canyons.

Rage was simply too large a product for such a small team.

They wanted to handcraft absolutely everything down to every fine detail being unique, add a crafting and quick use item mechanic on top of their shooting fundamentals, have extremely impressive animations on enemies, make a big open world section while also having all these linear levels that are all unique to eachother, and also make vehicles which they never did before, release on PC and both big consoles at the same time, and on a brand new engine, all while having around 50-60 people working on it I believe. That's a very tiny team for such a big task.

They would've needed another 4 years to get everything they wanted complete and in a polished state. I wish they would've, too, because the original game is brimming with potential and it has a level of polish and detail you don't see in games like Fallout

10 hours ago, TheGamePhilosophe said:

No, probably not the best engine for open-world games. But keep in mind that the low res, compressed images in RAGE are in part a product of the fact that the game had to run on PS3 and Xbox (PS3 had like 256MB dedicated VRAM). So they had to design around those limitations.

 

Also, something else that doesn't get appreciated I think is the fact that id tech allowed for more than just lots of unique detail. The fact that each screen was just one large texture meant that artists didn't have to assemble a bunch of rectangles and line them up but could just draws seamlessly into a single texture. That's why RAGE looks so "organic," for lack of a better word.

 

A lot of the game was cut. I found an interview where it was revealed that there was going to be a whole other stage set near the ocean where heaps of washed up ocean liners and such formed the canyons.

 

 

I wish they released all of that stuff as late DLC. I would buy it. 50 GB was a lot back then but now is the norm. 200 GB wouldn't be so bad nowadays.

I'm very happy about this. I followed nearly all 6 years of the development of the original RAGE and played it when it came out. It was definitely more than I expected from an Id game (you could buy stuff, craft stuff), but sadly it was too late and it was definitely a smaller game than it had the potential to be. 

Also, the much publicized engine features ended up pretty lame, with blurry textures, one guy making fun at 2d sprite plants in youtube, at least 1 too few giant mutant fight in the game, an amazingly rushed up final level and ending, etc

Anyway, the latest Mad Max film stole shamelessly from that game, I have pictures to prove it and I'll post them

3 minutes ago, jupiter_ex said:

Anyway, the latest Mad Max film stole shamelessly from that game, I have pictures to prove it and I'll post them

I'd like to see them!

On 5/19/2018 at 1:37 AM, Edward850 said:

RAGE actually has the complete launch game on the disc for PC. Well, 3 discs. Anything that's download required is patch updates, which Steam requires and has nothing to do with RAGE.

 

An internet connection is required for every single Steam platform game installation from disc, and has always been the case. In fact, one final note: https://puu.sh/AoVvc/fe7b152811.jpg

The box does in fact tell you that you required an internet connection.

There was no box image on the pre-order page (there probably was not a box yet) from Best Buy, where I pre-ordered it, and I assure you that the page said nothing about an internet connection, though they did list a bunch of hardware requirements. When I got the game, my discs wouldn't begin to install, past a simple "Connect to the internet to download the game" prompt, which popped up within 10 seconds of trying to run the install. Maybe the 1.0 version was on the discs, but it wouldn't begin to install without phoning home with my CPU ID + MAC address + HDD serial + whatever else they can think of. There was *something* big on the discs...a whole lot of something, but it refused to try.

I know the industry practically requires something like Steam, to prevent mass piracy. But *I* pay for my games, yet they still want me to do the "guilty till proven being forced to be innocent" thing, which ruffles my feathers, to the point where I just end up suffering.

The other thing is that I still use some very old software. But, if Steam goes away some day, so do those modern games. So I end up buying a lot of GOG stuff. Maybe they'll put them up there one day. Otherwise, I'll just play my GOG games and Doom.

Now if they were cool about it, they'd get the bulk of their cash a release time, and then release a non-DRM version, say, a year later, with a patch for the early purchasers. But, at that point, I guess there's no financial incentive.

1 hour ago, TheGamePhilosophe said:

I'd like to see them!

I actually meant I took screenshots that prove it :P

I held RAGE close to my heart despite it's low success. The game sadly took so long to release that the wasteland aesthetics and the underground postapocalyptic vaults had been overtaken by Borderlands and Fallout respectively (as a matter of fact, RAGE even had the duty to pay homage to Fallout with a booblehead) so I was pissed when I noticed that a huge hit like Mad Max F.R. stole blatantly from what you could consider a pretty unpopular game.

here are the screenshots. To me, the Mad Max team borrowed heavily for inspiration. Not to mention that some character designs look identical

My most desired feature for the sequel is the ability to remember it.

@jupiter_ex

Wow. That's pretty compelling evidence. My question now though is how much of this is already in the earlier Mad Max films, which is obviously a common source for both? If not too much, then I think this is pretty good evidence that MM:FR was directly influenced by RAGE. Which would be quite a tribute to the skill of the artists who made RAGE.

I'm currently replaying RAGE, and I've got to say--and I know this won't be a popular opinion--but I find the gunplay in it infinitely more satisfying than that of Doom 4, which I also tried again recently and I found myself bored, once again, by the glory kills (which they push on you) and disappointed that they didn't make the enemies react as much to being shot as they did in RAGE.

things like the rat-rod are absolutely generic and nobody can trademark having a rat-rod in their story, but I had the strong feeling the makers of the movie took inspiration from the game. I don't think the clans in the movie were in the previous MadMaxes

10 hours ago, Jaxxoon R said:

 

hahaha, this won me over. 

I saw some pictures and I'm surprised they kept Dr Kvasir. I expected Bethesda to not to look back and basically bring none of the characters back and just go for their "suicide squad" color revamping of settings and themes

Anybody got the July issue of Official Playstation Magazine? There's a RAGE 2 article in it and it'd be great to get a summary. Scans would be even better!

I found an article that quotes it. Is that good enough?

https://wccftech.com/id-rage-2-much-more-straight-up-sequel/

Quote

It’s definitely much more than a straight up sequel, because the gameplay and the partnership with Avalanche has really shaped it into something unique and special. It really has been a buddy movie of love working with the Avalanche team and sharing ideas and knowledge.

 

The first game was the post-apocalyptic world. But now we have areas that are more than just a brown, dusty wasteland. This is more of a post-post-apocalyptic world where society is trying to rebuild and we have different environments, different landscapes, there’s vegetation and swamps, and rivers, and lakes, so the world has really evolved from that dry, dusty wasteland and we really wanted to showcase that.

 

We spent a lot of time working on some really cool environments and even had some long debates about the color of water. Players want these rich environments as it’s easier for them to understand where they’re going, it’s easier to get a context for what you’re doing.

 

There’s more personality in some of the enviroments, there’s much more dialogue, there’s much more going on, there’s sub-stories, so yes, story is very important.

There are Factions that don’t like other Factions. There’s AI that don’t like other AI, there’s independent AI that’s in the vehicles, there’s friendly vehicles, there’s bad guy vehicles, so the world is really dynamic.

 

You really find yourself engaged in this world because stuff isn’t really staged. In other games, you go to a checkpoint and now this guy’s going to run over that guy but in this world, you’re in the wasteland, you’re driving around, you see a bunch of mutants, then some other guys jump out…

 

For us what we really wanted to do is create ‘events’ that you can do or you can’t do, it’s totally up to you, and that affects the big picture. We try to give players a lot of choice and we encourage them to do the really important things but they don’t necessarily have to do them. There are things that change based on what you accomplish. That’s always been an important aspect of the game and the storytelling. It’s not a formulaic world that just kind of repeats itself and you engage in it. You will see things that you do affect the world, and we think that is definitely part of the storytelling.