Yeah wtf, I thought I made sure that I explored everything thoroughly but still didn't find all the cards. I found the card minigame strangely addicting and somewhat deep.
I liked the card game a lot, but it did seem a bit random. If there were more cards and some of the randomness was taken out (maybe select your 3 lead cards and have the rest randomized?) it could be a good mp or iphone game.
What was with that last mission? The car ride there was as long as the mission and the enemy spawns on the car ride there were more interesting than the same 2 enemies with mutants popping out of the walls in hallways for 80% of the time inside. The resistance people made it seem like there would be something really hard in there like an authority giant mutant or something but it turned out to just be some authority mutants that you can one shot with a wingstick... On the final little gauntlet before the disappointing cutscene I literally only used up about 5-10 advanced wingsticks. Also there was no real reason to ever use the BFG ammo... The Elite Guards were easily killed since pretty much any weapon stunts their aim and again I was expecting some sort of giant boss or set of enemies to use it on. It was just a pretty dissatisfying ending compared to the rest of the game.
It was kind of annoying that literally every single mission area had another side mission or job board mission later that would make you return to the same area and run through it again with barely anything changed. A few of them completely changed the enemy types and made the layout backwards like Dead City and The Gearhead Vault but most of them were pretty much the same thing. Then after expecting a mission to return to the same area again there wasn't one for Jackal Canyon which was my favorite area!
I wish there were a few more weapons modifications (Crossbow Scope!), especially ones you could unlock by doing side missions or something. It seems like there was a lot of lost potential there.
Other than the ending and a few other small gripes I really enjoyed it though. The shooting and the way the enemies reacted to being hit is a great innovation and the art was of course amazingly well done.
@Cptincognito, an online card game sounds pretty cool. I would revisit the game every now and then to play that online probably. Right now there's not much reason to revisit the game other than to try out the online racing.
People reading on dang page 30 of a game/movie/book/show thread should expect some spoilers... How long are we expected to uphold the spoiler tags! Either way I added them in.
I finished it last night and started over right away. What a gorgeous game! The environment work is phenomenal. There are lots of aspects that stand out like animation, level design and all the variation between the different areas. Some of the gadgets are pretty fun too, especially those sentry bots. I'm looking forward to the DLC.
Texture streaming is visible but works resonably fast on Xbox (with the data coming from hd). Nothing that would spoil the experience for me. As for texel density, I really don't see what the problem is. Sure it's not as crisp as Crysis, but it makes up for that with great art direction. It's a bit like pointing at a Frazetta painting and complaining how it's not high-def enough. Anyhow. Huge congrats to the team at id
As for texel density, I really don't see what the problem is. Sure it's not as crisp as Crysis, but it makes up for that with great art direction. It's a bit like pointing at a Frazetta painting and complaining how it's not high-def enough. Anyhow. Huge congrats to the team at id
So I borrowed Rage from work to give it a shot and I must say. I'm very pleasently surprised. I'm not an ID-fanboy by any means but I really enjoy the little world they crafted in Rage. Sure the driving aspects are a bit eh to me and some of the gameplay is questionable (I get overwhelmed with all hundred different ammo/items) but the artstyle and overall feel of everything is lovely and really solid.
I dunno. I'm rambling. Basically it's a very good title and if you as an artist never play it you should be ashamed. Also, some of the best characters ever is in this game.
Man, I really wanted people to be wrong. Just started playing RAGE. What a dissapointment. The textures are unbelievably bad, despite the fact that I got everything set on Ultra and am running on a 660ti. And the character animation is laughibly bad. And the gameplay is bloody terrible. Go to point A, kill everything, return to quest giver for reward. So mundane, so last decade, just awful awful game design.
What the hell happened id
Is there a way to get the textures looking decent? So mod etc.?
Im always so surprised at how polarized the community is around this title. Anyway it took me a few or so months before i picked myself up a copy of this, and once i turned off that very strange "quality" setting in the video settings had an absolute blast.
Im not sure if its having grown up playing ID titles, wolfenstein, doom*, Quake*, etc and having completely skipped the vast majority of the recent army shooters (unintentionally skipped) but i find so much about this title completely awesome. The minigames, the crazy stupid but great driving, the crafting system and the ART, i haven't spent this much time back peddling to just check out awesome art in a fucking long time.
Anyway with the very recent DLC release im right back into playing this title, which for me has turned out to be an all time classic. Hats off to anyone who spent time on the dev side of things.
Man, I really wanted people to be wrong. Just started playing RAGE. What a dissapointment. The textures are unbelievably bad, despite the fact that I got everything set on Ultra and am running on a 660ti. And the character animation is laughibly bad. And the gameplay is bloody terrible. Go to point A, kill everything, return to quest giver for reward. So mundane, so last decade, just awful awful game design.
What the hell happened id
Is there a way to get the textures looking decent? So mod etc.?
Did we even play the same game? cuz none of what you just said makes any sense to me.
I have to be honest, I enjoyed Rage, but this DLC... Wow, such a huge step backwards, with some of the worst animation I've seen this gen... At times comical bad Of course it doesn't help that Rage is totally awful with dark areas due to the compression, so an underground, moody, dark cave is clearly not going to win any visual awards And those detail textures... Just lol...
Such a shame...
We need the SDK, badly. I reckon an SDK with our own resolution for our own mega textures will be fantastic.
Man, I really wanted people to be wrong. Just started playing RAGE. What a dissapointment. The textures are unbelievably bad, despite the fact that I got everything set on Ultra and am running on a 660ti. And the character animation is laughibly bad. And the gameplay is bloody terrible. Go to point A, kill everything, return to quest giver for reward. So mundane, so last decade, just awful awful game design.
What the hell happened id
Is there a way to get the textures looking decent? So mod etc.?
Amen, i'm with you. Rage is the feeling that i feel playing this attemp of game. I paid for it 35 euros on its days, and i didn't bother to finish it, it's a dissapointment from start to end. Blah, and the AI... to be more enraged.
At least the game have a great name... ¬¬
I don't understand how the hell they had guts to make a dlc...
I don't understand why they waited so LONG to get the DLC out. I mean, the ideal thing is you let people play the game - give them a beat - and then hit them with DLC while the iron is still hot. They just can't seem to catch a break with this game. And the SDK still isn't out.
You crack me up! Calling one of the best looking games this generation, both art and animation wise, "laughably bad", robs you of any credibility in my book. Why are you here again?
i know im totally bias when i say this...
rage has bad textures, ai, and animations? that's like where rage shines brightest.
I'll try to grab some screens later, but yeah, the textures for me leave a lot to be desired. It's almost as if the low-res distance textures don't load into the scene. I'll boot it up and grab some screen later. Could always be something wrong with my card I guess.
I stick by my opinion on the gameplay and animation. A lot of games have similar gameplay, like Skyrim, but it is disguised better, or there are other things to do in between. In Rage it's 'Go here, get this'. You drive up the road, get the thing, drive back the same road, deliver. I don't find that very entertaining, main reason why I'm not into MMO's. I think maybe what is frustrating is the back and forth. With Quake, Halo, etc, at least there's a sense of moving forward, and you feel less of an errand boy.
Animation wise, yeah. Awful in my opinion. Specifically the character interaction dialogue animations. Very pose to pose, not massaged out at all, and people just don't move like that at all. With some exceptions. Whoever animated the character with the big asian style hat (shopkeeper?) had did a great job and clearly was having a blast in doing so.
I'll finish it for sure, but can't see my opinions changing.
K, I took some screens. Unfortunately, I only had to move forward three inches from were I spawned to find what I'm talking about. First heres my settings. Anything I'm doing wrong? I'm on a 2GB 660ti.
(That's not some kind of DOF effect. Texture is always like that)
^One of the best looking games of this generation? I bloody hope not!
It's not a failure of any of the artists tbh. I highly doubt that the textures looked like that when they were stamping them on. Megatextures as a concept is just too ahead of its time, they had to compress too much.
When I say laughably bad, I am actually talking about the DLC, NOT Rage. The problem with Rage always was that because of the really aggressive compression, dark areas look like total shit. So, what do you think thats going to look like when you stick the player in an underground cave thats dark...?
I'm a fan of Rage, I think its one of the best looking games this gen. It has flaws, a lot actually, but its a great game. But to say it doesn't at times look terrible is just silly. It can go from looking like a real next gen title to a PS2 classic in the space of a few seconds.
Again with the anims... Rage has very over the top, animated characters. They look, sound and animate really well. The DLC? Not even close... Nowhere near the polish the main game has.
If you don't like the above opinion, then fair enough. To each his own. This ones mine.
EDIT: I have and always will stand by the fact that the game was damned due to restrictions. It was a next gen game, forcing itself into a current gen shell. Rage on next gen consoles with far less compression? YES PLEASE.
When I say laughably bad, I am actually talking about the DLC, NOT Rage. The problem with Rage always was that because of the really aggressive compression, dark areas look like total shit. So, what do you think thats going to look like when you stick the player in an underground cave thats dark...?
I'm a fan of Rage, I think its one of the best looking games this gen. It has flaws, a lot actually, but its a great game. But to say it doesn't at times look terrible is just silly. It can go from looking like a real next gen title to a PS2 classic in the space of a few seconds.
Again with the anims... Rage has very over the top, animated characters. They look, sound and animate really well. The DLC? Not even close... Nowhere near the polish the main game has.
If you don't like the above opinion, then fair enough. To each his own. This ones mine.
EDIT: I have and always will stand by the fact that the game was damned due to restrictions. It was a next gen game, forcing itself into a current gen shell. Rage on next gen consoles with far less compression? YES PLEASE.
Yeah the DLC isn't that good, fairly short and still no improvement on the original in it's fed-ex quests. TBH I don't know why this game is open world, there's no exploring or anything else really to do outside of the quest missions/hubs. Would have been much better as a linear shooter.
Like Odium says there's some really dark areas in the game that are pitch black. Textures again are so blurry I feel they ruin all the great art.
I love the artstyle and colour grading, but most stuff again breaks down because of the textures.
Rage has always been, for me, a game that excels at the mid-field visuals. Up close and far away it breaks down, but in the mid-field the scenes really gel and come together well.
Hah! im always blown away by the reaction to RAGE, but you know i whole wholeheartedly believe your doing things right if your polarizing the community, if not your more than likely offering up watered down mediocre middleground.
As for the art, another game of this generation that blew me away was Skyrim. Sure a little different in some areas but all in all what an incredible, engaging and awe inspiring adventure.
I did however notice some of the very same complaints i see about Rages art as i do for Skyrims. Giant vista with northern lights, massive city walls and mountains, only to see a tiny vase in the corner of the screen singled out, or how the texel density doesn't quite match on a piece of wood in the background.
All of which just sounds like the consumers personal taste really, not a right or wrong way of doing things, just a different focus and flavor.
I did however notice some of the very same complaints i see about Rages art as i do for Skyrims. Giant vista with northern lights, massive city walls and mountains, only to see a tiny vase in the corner of the screen singled out, or how the texel density doesn't quite match on a piece of wood in the background.
Yeah I don't think there's any comparison with obsessiveness like that and the reality of what the screens I posted show. There's a difference between zooming in on a jar in a corner to find fault, and having 60% of your screen filled with ridiculously blurry textures most of the time. Again, it's just a shortcoming of megatextures. Hope they're not using it on Doom 4.
Skyrim is gorgeous in my opinion, with the HD pack anyways. And even better with mods.
Skyrim is gorgeous in my opinion, with the HD pack anyways. And even better with mods.
And that shows how much you crave for those pixels, even when the most beautiful games that came out on consoles never did sport anything near that density.
There's way more to art in games than amount of texels, and in that sense rage looks beautiful, all the artwork is unique in it.
Well I said that, as I had no experience with Skyrim without the pack. Only bought it recently, only ever played it with the pack installed. So I couldn't speak on it without really, as I never experienced it. So that's an incorrect assumption I'm afraid I'm not one of those 'OMG SHIT CONSOLE PORT COMPRESSED TEXTURES' Master Race people. I just want my games to look 'ok'. What I posted on the page before is faaaaaaar from ok.
And again, it's just down to the tech being too far ahead of the hardware we have atm. Not a shortcoming of any artists.
I have played skyrim with and without the hi-res pack, and Rage imho is an offense for any pc gamer. There's no color comparing Skyrim (without its hi-res pack) with rage.
Rage has texels as big as in quake 2 or bigger i'd say... The art may be good (what they posted in the forums with those higher res textures), but the megatextures thing is a huge fail. Furthermore, is a very short game, and with more than 20 gb of hard disk, is a shame to see such small textures. Come on... are you blind to argue about it?
Anyways, we must remember that the game for pc is a cutre port from console, very bad ported and with several patches in order to run, and you know... playing at 1280x720 the thing is not so horrible.
Crysis 1 is very old compared to Rage, and it has HUGE textures and it does not ask you to have 20gb+ of free hard drive space. You could say it asks a better machine, but who doesn't have a radeon 5xxx or something similar?.
If they use the megatextures for doom4 (there are leaked screens with the same texel issue, very very bad btw), the game will be "doomed", seriously. That tech is a total fiasco, and not very good as they wanted to sold us.
for the sheer number of objects and textures and materials displayed in one scene I think rage did a great job, yeah it doesnt look great close up but the overall scene has so much variety that I think it was worth forgiving. I took so many screenshots on steam while playing rage because it was so beautiful! this is the kind of screenshot where rage looks good, imagine how many textures and materials it would take to make that scene work in udk.
5 years is a long time to develop a game like RAGE though and given it was pretty heavily marketed as far as I recall I wonder if it turned a profit in the end.
At the end of the day, the engine isn't better or worse than any others; it's just different, and has different tradeoffs. The man-hours invested in building something different-but-not-better-or-worse might have been better spent building a stronger game, but from what I've played of it, it wasn't bad.
I took more screenshots of awesome graphics in Rage, than every one of my other 116 Steam games combined. The game looks awesome, despite some texture resolution issues.
The game does look good at mid-range, as that shot attests. Might try and grab some mid-shots today meself. But SO much time is spent indoors with unforgivable textures that I just can't enjoy it.
Most studios would have delayed this game instead of ship it in that condition. Not sure why id didn't. I certainly hope that's why Doom 4 got cancelled, to rip out the megatextures pipeline. And again like Blaizer said, what exactly are we getting for 25GB? I'm pretty sure I could boot up MW2 and screengrab a much better close range image. Why? Because it's all down to frequency of noise. Rage ended up using the same texel density of very old games, but, they hadn't planned to, so there is much more going on; dozens of tiny cracks on everything that just ends up as a blurry pixelated mess.
Like Blaizer said. The characters look great, from their HP's to their finished in-game state. But that's cause they all got their own sheets.
And I don't agree [HP], a game art forum is the place to discuss a game in a critical fashion, cause at least we know what we are talking about. No use posting this on Kotaku, no one would know what you were on about.
EDIT: MW2 is about the same (for environments; Rage obviously beats them hands down on characters.
Rage comes out a little better. But not 'two years later and about 17GB larger' better. More than 4X AA might help MW2's case
Once again I'll raise the point... Rage looks like a fucking painting when you watch it. Its stunning. But when you get near anything, it just falls apart. Its clear they made this game for the lowest power house (360) and then ported it up. Thats totally an arse backwards way of doing things, because they were forced to use awful compression with lower res assets.
I FIRMLY believe that Mega Texture is the way to go in the future, it just needs bigger media. As I said a long time ago, its quire hard. Lets round up my Rage install to 24gig. In order to get an increase in texel density, we are looking at FOUR times that install size, so 96gig, just for a little extra density... It doesn't make sense to release such a thing. TWO blurays for a simple shooter with the gameplay of a 1995 FPS title?
I've been messing with Mega Texture myself, but rather than using it in a silly setting with no dynamic lights and objects, I've used it with shadow mapping and cascaded shadow maps, SSAO and the like, and holy SHIT does it shine when its done on a fully 1:1 world level, where the entire world is shadowed Doom 3 style. The problem id software has is they thought BACKWARDS during this game on a lot of things, and the game suffered, thats why you get ZERO physics objects. Could they be done? Of course... But they used the BS excuse of 60FPS and "mega texture" to not do it. Thats... Well, rubbish, as I've used MT on physics objects myself, and its fine.
But regardless of all the talk on the art (of which I LOVE, I just think itsa total cluster fuck that its so low res), the problem with Rage was always that it didn't know what the hell it was...
Was it a shooter?
Was it an RPG?
Was it open world?
What WAS it...?
It was almost like they took a huge open world game and just added a bare bones shooter to it... It wasn't OPEN enough, there wasn't enough to do. It really needed a "go anywhere, do anything, any time" style single player, but it didn't... It just seems wrong to me?
I have to hand it to id Software for going out of their comfort zone and making it something different, but it wasn't THAT different. It was still a shooter (and a VERY good one, some solid gun play). But... It just cried out for more than fetch missions...
Also, the MP? lol... Played it twice, and that was just for the chevos... Never touched it again, was awful. No DM/TP? Jesus guys, would have been stunning, as the coop shows...
Ahh well... Doom 4 has me worried as well. Its using Mega Texture, its targeting current gen consoles, and from the leaked shots, looks bloody terrible and is all modern day style... Thats NOT Doom...
I took more screenshots of awesome graphics in Rage, than every one of my other 116 Steam games combined. The game looks awesome, despite some texture resolution issues.
Does your list include Dishonored? Because that game looks AMAZING and it's not the highest res stuff either...
Once again I'll raise the point... Rage looks like a fucking painting when you watch it. Its stunning. But when you get near anything, it just falls apart. Its clear they made this game for the lowest power house (360) and then ported it up. Thats totally an arse backwards way of doing things, because they were forced to use awful compression with lower res assets.
I FIRMLY believe that Mega Texture is the way to go in the future, it just needs bigger media. As I said a long time ago, its quire hard. Lets round up my Rage install to 24gig. In order to get an increase in texel density, we are looking at FOUR times that install size, so 96gig, just for a little extra density... It doesn't make sense to release such a thing. TWO blurays for a simple shooter with the gameplay of a 1995 FPS title?
I've been messing with Mega Texture myself, but rather than using it in a silly setting with no dynamic lights and objects, I've used it with shadow mapping and cascaded shadow maps, SSAO and the like, and holy SHIT does it shine when its done on a fully 1:1 world level, where the entire world is shadowed Doom 3 style. The problem id software has is they thought BACKWARDS during this game on a lot of things, and the game suffered, thats why you get ZERO physics objects. Could they be done? Of course... But they used the BS excuse of 60FPS and "mega texture" to not do it. Thats... Well, rubbish, as I've used MT on physics objects myself, and its fine.
.
The only problem I have with Mega Texture is baking. Apparently you wouldn't ever want to bake any but the simplest scenes on a personal computer, and they needed a render farm just to do test bakes. I hope the future of video games means less baking more realtime.
In terms of aesthetics, Rage is a masterpiece IMO. You could spin the mouse and wherever it fell would usually be a beautifully composed piece of art. I personally didnt care that the textures got blurry when you got real close. The overall was so nice that for me it far outweighed the sum of its parts.
The only problem I have with Mega Texture is baking. Apparently you wouldn't ever want to bake any but the simplest scenes on a personal computer, and they needed a render farm just to do test bakes. I hope the future of video games means less baking more realtime.
Know something, that has me worried. But in our own custom tests with a 64kx64k texture, it compiled quite fast on my own PC. Dunno what that would mean for the entire level on the scale they do, mind you. Thats not even close to what they use... But yeah, its a bit worrying. Imagine it taking a full day to compile and then boom, you see a cock up...
Then again, I used to wait for my Quake 2 maps to compile, and they took all night haha...
Once again I'll raise the point... Rage looks like a fucking painting when you watch it. Its stunning. But when you get near anything, it just falls apart. Its clear they made this game for the lowest power house (360) and then ported it up. Thats totally an arse backwards way of doing things, because they were forced to use awful compression with lower res assets.
I FIRMLY believe that Mega Texture is the way to go in the future, it just needs bigger media. As I said a long time ago, its quire hard. Lets round up my Rage install to 24gig. In order to get an increase in texel density, we are looking at FOUR times that install size, so 96gig, just for a little extra density... It doesn't make sense to release such a thing. TWO blurays for a simple shooter with the gameplay of a 1995 FPS title?
Yeah I watched a comparison vid last night... PC has sharper larger character textures but overall the 360 is the best looking version when you look at it all together.
And no odium, I will NOT be downloading a 96gig game thank you very much :P
Replies
It was kind of annoying that literally every single mission area had another side mission or job board mission later that would make you return to the same area and run through it again with barely anything changed. A few of them completely changed the enemy types and made the layout backwards like Dead City and The Gearhead Vault but most of them were pretty much the same thing. Then after expecting a mission to return to the same area again there wasn't one for Jackal Canyon which was my favorite area!
I wish there were a few more weapons modifications (Crossbow Scope!), especially ones you could unlock by doing side missions or something. It seems like there was a lot of lost potential there.
Other than the ending and a few other small gripes I really enjoyed it though. The shooting and the way the enemies reacted to being hit is a great innovation and the art was of course amazingly well done.
@Cptincognito, an online card game sounds pretty cool. I would revisit the game every now and then to play that online probably. Right now there's not much reason to revisit the game other than to try out the online racing.
People reading on dang page 30 of a game/movie/book/show thread should expect some spoilers... How long are we expected to uphold the spoiler tags! Either way I added them in.
Texture streaming is visible but works resonably fast on Xbox (with the data coming from hd). Nothing that would spoil the experience for me. As for texel density, I really don't see what the problem is. Sure it's not as crisp as Crysis, but it makes up for that with great art direction. It's a bit like pointing at a Frazetta painting and complaining how it's not high-def enough. Anyhow. Huge congrats to the team at id
WORD!
LOL THAT PIC ON THE LEFT LOOKS LIKE AN XBOX GAME SO MUDDY!
... ^^
http://twitter.com/#!/id_Hooper/status/124289647105937408
I dunno. I'm rambling. Basically it's a very good title and if you as an artist never play it you should be ashamed. Also, some of the best characters ever is in this game.
EDIT: Restructured my post a little.
What the hell happened id
Is there a way to get the textures looking decent? So mod etc.?
They did add a detail option to the GFX menu to try and improve the textures, but just makes them look noisy and worse off imo.
You can try the graphics tweak shown here: http://segmentnext.com/2011/10/07/rage-tweak-guide-graphics-and-performance/
Im not sure if its having grown up playing ID titles, wolfenstein, doom*, Quake*, etc and having completely skipped the vast majority of the recent army shooters (unintentionally skipped) but i find so much about this title completely awesome. The minigames, the crazy stupid but great driving, the crafting system and the ART, i haven't spent this much time back peddling to just check out awesome art in a fucking long time.
Anyway with the very recent DLC release im right back into playing this title, which for me has turned out to be an all time classic. Hats off to anyone who spent time on the dev side of things.
Did we even play the same game? cuz none of what you just said makes any sense to me.
Amen. Rage is an amazing game.
Such a shame...
We need the SDK, badly. I reckon an SDK with our own resolution for our own mega textures will be fantastic.
Amen, i'm with you. Rage is the feeling that i feel playing this attemp of game. I paid for it 35 euros on its days, and i didn't bother to finish it, it's a dissapointment from start to end. Blah, and the AI... to be more enraged.
At least the game have a great name... ¬¬
I don't understand how the hell they had guts to make a dlc...
rage has bad textures, ai, and animations? that's like where rage shines brightest.
also, id like to add, id be careful who's work you call "laughably bad." you may end up working with them some day... just a thought.
I myself just played the dlc for the first time. I liked it. The bone mutants are a real challenge, but the final boss left a lot to desire.
Overall, for $5, quite a bit of fun.
I'll try to grab some screens later, but yeah, the textures for me leave a lot to be desired. It's almost as if the low-res distance textures don't load into the scene. I'll boot it up and grab some screen later. Could always be something wrong with my card I guess.
I stick by my opinion on the gameplay and animation. A lot of games have similar gameplay, like Skyrim, but it is disguised better, or there are other things to do in between. In Rage it's 'Go here, get this'. You drive up the road, get the thing, drive back the same road, deliver. I don't find that very entertaining, main reason why I'm not into MMO's. I think maybe what is frustrating is the back and forth. With Quake, Halo, etc, at least there's a sense of moving forward, and you feel less of an errand boy.
Animation wise, yeah. Awful in my opinion. Specifically the character interaction dialogue animations. Very pose to pose, not massaged out at all, and people just don't move like that at all. With some exceptions. Whoever animated the character with the big asian style hat (shopkeeper?) had did a great job and clearly was having a blast in doing so.
I'll finish it for sure, but can't see my opinions changing.
(That's not some kind of DOF effect. Texture is always like that)
^One of the best looking games of this generation? I bloody hope not!
It's not a failure of any of the artists tbh. I highly doubt that the textures looked like that when they were stamping them on. Megatextures as a concept is just too ahead of its time, they had to compress too much.
I'm a fan of Rage, I think its one of the best looking games this gen. It has flaws, a lot actually, but its a great game. But to say it doesn't at times look terrible is just silly. It can go from looking like a real next gen title to a PS2 classic in the space of a few seconds.
Again with the anims... Rage has very over the top, animated characters. They look, sound and animate really well. The DLC? Not even close... Nowhere near the polish the main game has.
If you don't like the above opinion, then fair enough. To each his own. This ones mine.
EDIT: I have and always will stand by the fact that the game was damned due to restrictions. It was a next gen game, forcing itself into a current gen shell. Rage on next gen consoles with far less compression? YES PLEASE.
Okay, that cleared up some things
Like Odium says there's some really dark areas in the game that are pitch black. Textures again are so blurry I feel they ruin all the great art.
I love the artstyle and colour grading, but most stuff again breaks down because of the textures.
As for the art, another game of this generation that blew me away was Skyrim. Sure a little different in some areas but all in all what an incredible, engaging and awe inspiring adventure.
I did however notice some of the very same complaints i see about Rages art as i do for Skyrims. Giant vista with northern lights, massive city walls and mountains, only to see a tiny vase in the corner of the screen singled out, or how the texel density doesn't quite match on a piece of wood in the background.
All of which just sounds like the consumers personal taste really, not a right or wrong way of doing things, just a different focus and flavor.
Yeah I don't think there's any comparison with obsessiveness like that and the reality of what the screens I posted show. There's a difference between zooming in on a jar in a corner to find fault, and having 60% of your screen filled with ridiculously blurry textures most of the time. Again, it's just a shortcoming of megatextures. Hope they're not using it on Doom 4.
Skyrim is gorgeous in my opinion, with the HD pack anyways. And even better with mods.
And that shows how much you crave for those pixels, even when the most beautiful games that came out on consoles never did sport anything near that density.
There's way more to art in games than amount of texels, and in that sense rage looks beautiful, all the artwork is unique in it.
And again, it's just down to the tech being too far ahead of the hardware we have atm. Not a shortcoming of any artists.
Rage has texels as big as in quake 2 or bigger i'd say... The art may be good (what they posted in the forums with those higher res textures), but the megatextures thing is a huge fail. Furthermore, is a very short game, and with more than 20 gb of hard disk, is a shame to see such small textures. Come on... are you blind to argue about it?
Anyways, we must remember that the game for pc is a cutre port from console, very bad ported and with several patches in order to run, and you know... playing at 1280x720 the thing is not so horrible.
Crysis 1 is very old compared to Rage, and it has HUGE textures and it does not ask you to have 20gb+ of free hard drive space. You could say it asks a better machine, but who doesn't have a radeon 5xxx or something similar?.
If they use the megatextures for doom4 (there are leaked screens with the same texel issue, very very bad btw), the game will be "doomed", seriously. That tech is a total fiasco, and not very good as they wanted to sold us.
5 years is a long time to develop a game like RAGE though and given it was pretty heavily marketed as far as I recall I wonder if it turned a profit in the end.
At the end of the day, the engine isn't better or worse than any others; it's just different, and has different tradeoffs. The man-hours invested in building something different-but-not-better-or-worse might have been better spent building a stronger game, but from what I've played of it, it wasn't bad.
Most studios would have delayed this game instead of ship it in that condition. Not sure why id didn't. I certainly hope that's why Doom 4 got cancelled, to rip out the megatextures pipeline. And again like Blaizer said, what exactly are we getting for 25GB? I'm pretty sure I could boot up MW2 and screengrab a much better close range image. Why? Because it's all down to frequency of noise. Rage ended up using the same texel density of very old games, but, they hadn't planned to, so there is much more going on; dozens of tiny cracks on everything that just ends up as a blurry pixelated mess.
Like Blaizer said. The characters look great, from their HP's to their finished in-game state. But that's cause they all got their own sheets.
And I don't agree [HP], a game art forum is the place to discuss a game in a critical fashion, cause at least we know what we are talking about. No use posting this on Kotaku, no one would know what you were on about.
EDIT: MW2 is about the same (for environments; Rage obviously beats them hands down on characters.
Rage comes out a little better. But not 'two years later and about 17GB larger' better. More than 4X AA might help MW2's case
I FIRMLY believe that Mega Texture is the way to go in the future, it just needs bigger media. As I said a long time ago, its quire hard. Lets round up my Rage install to 24gig. In order to get an increase in texel density, we are looking at FOUR times that install size, so 96gig, just for a little extra density... It doesn't make sense to release such a thing. TWO blurays for a simple shooter with the gameplay of a 1995 FPS title?
I've been messing with Mega Texture myself, but rather than using it in a silly setting with no dynamic lights and objects, I've used it with shadow mapping and cascaded shadow maps, SSAO and the like, and holy SHIT does it shine when its done on a fully 1:1 world level, where the entire world is shadowed Doom 3 style. The problem id software has is they thought BACKWARDS during this game on a lot of things, and the game suffered, thats why you get ZERO physics objects. Could they be done? Of course... But they used the BS excuse of 60FPS and "mega texture" to not do it. Thats... Well, rubbish, as I've used MT on physics objects myself, and its fine.
But regardless of all the talk on the art (of which I LOVE, I just think itsa total cluster fuck that its so low res), the problem with Rage was always that it didn't know what the hell it was...
Was it a shooter?
Was it an RPG?
Was it open world?
What WAS it...?
It was almost like they took a huge open world game and just added a bare bones shooter to it... It wasn't OPEN enough, there wasn't enough to do. It really needed a "go anywhere, do anything, any time" style single player, but it didn't... It just seems wrong to me?
I have to hand it to id Software for going out of their comfort zone and making it something different, but it wasn't THAT different. It was still a shooter (and a VERY good one, some solid gun play). But... It just cried out for more than fetch missions...
Also, the MP? lol... Played it twice, and that was just for the chevos... Never touched it again, was awful. No DM/TP? Jesus guys, would have been stunning, as the coop shows...
Ahh well... Doom 4 has me worried as well. Its using Mega Texture, its targeting current gen consoles, and from the leaked shots, looks bloody terrible and is all modern day style... Thats NOT Doom...
Meh... I need a poo...
The only problem I have with Mega Texture is baking. Apparently you wouldn't ever want to bake any but the simplest scenes on a personal computer, and they needed a render farm just to do test bakes. I hope the future of video games means less baking more realtime.
Know something, that has me worried. But in our own custom tests with a 64kx64k texture, it compiled quite fast on my own PC. Dunno what that would mean for the entire level on the scale they do, mind you. Thats not even close to what they use... But yeah, its a bit worrying. Imagine it taking a full day to compile and then boom, you see a cock up...
Then again, I used to wait for my Quake 2 maps to compile, and they took all night haha...
Yeah I watched a comparison vid last night... PC has sharper larger character textures but overall the 360 is the best looking version when you look at it all together.
And no odium, I will NOT be downloading a 96gig game thank you very much :P