RAGE!

No, this isn't a post about how I feel toward mod reviews posted by anonymous critics; it's a post about how I feel about the continuing trend of video game publishers expecting us to buy their products despite the fact that all they've shown us of the game is a batch of staged and polished "screenshots" (see previous post) and some snippets from some of the game's animated cutscenes. (Remember the television ads for Fallout New Vegas? That was all taken directly from the game's intro movie; they didn't give us a single glimpse of the actual gameplay!) Thus I've decided to share this modest glimpse into the first few hours of my experience playing Rage.

Normally I don't get new games until they're no longer new, but I jumped on this one because it's the first major product from my favorite game publishers after they joined forces earlier this year: Bethesda and id. With that in mind, I fully expected Rage to play like an amalgamation of Doom 3 and Fallout 3; so far it seems like I was right... to a certain extent.

Here's the short version of the story as I understand it thus far:

A humongous asteroid speeds toward Earth, spelling the planet's impending doom (pun intended). In an attempt to save humanity from extinction, a bunch of folks clad in cyborg nano-suits (think Crysis) are put into stasis in these orbiting space pods called Arks. A century later you wake from your little nap to find that everyone but you in your particular Ark is a shriveled corpse and that the Ark is now back on Earth. Without much delay (there's no character generation; you're stuck as a nameless dude) you step out into a desert wasteland. You almost immediately get attacked by a bandit; apparently mankind isn't extinct after all. Then you get picked up by a character who I believe is voiced by John Goodman and he takes you in his dune buggy (with a DoomGuy UAC Marine bobblehead on the dashboard) to his settlement. Of course there are people there who need a total stranger in a nano-suit to run errands for them, including protecting them from in-bred bandit factions.

Though you're given the option to accept or decline the jobs these folks offer you, the jobs don't seem to be as diverse or complex as quests in a full-fledged RPG. However, most shooters that I've played don't contain vendor characters and this one does.

I'm getting the impression that the game world is huge (3 DVDs worth of data, two of which are double-layered), but I wouldn't call it a "sandbox" world. So far the gameplay is fairly linear and you can't go certain places until somebody tells you to go there. And despite the apparent hugeness of the landscape, I've already run into a few inviso-walls (think Fallout New Vegas).

The game also has some armed vehicle combat (think Halo meets Mad Max). Your first ride is an ATV, but as you progress you can work on getting your own dune buggy.

Fans of Doom 3 will undoubtedly recognize the name of the Mixom corporation, as well as a few sound effects that seem to have been copied directly from one game to the other.

Fans of Fallout 3 will also likely feel deja-vu while crossing some of the landscape...

This is the part where I wanted to post some really cool combat screenshots, but they've blessed us with a blurry hit-shader that made it kinda difficult. Still, I did manage to get a few shots of dudes running at me with sharp objects.

While we're looking at some of the enemies, did I mention the ghou-- er, the mutants that inhabit the sewers? I'm not sure yet exactly why they're mutants, though I've heard mention of some valuable alien ore that came down with the asteroid.

So the brief recap is that Rage indeed feels like a cross between Doom 3 and Fallout 3, but mostly Doom 3 with guys to shoot at and linear objectives that are set up to look like RPG quests.

And now for a brief word about performance and stability...

The game offers no graphics settings options to adjust the appearance beyond the screen resolution. At first this made me wince because, while my system can run most of the current games, I still need to scale back some effects like high-def lighting and shadows in games like Oblivion or Fallout 3 in order to get a smooth framerate. But it's not as bad as I initially thought; this game engine seems to render things a bit differently. It's my understanding that in the Gamebryo games (and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here) when I emerge from an interior cell into an exterior worldspace that everything in that particular cell gets rendered whether I'm looking at it or not. In Rage, however, it appears that textures are only fully-rendered if they're in my field of vision and everything else gets dumped from the memory. This is noticeable if I'm turning quickly, as I've attempted to capture in the following screenshot:

While quickly turning to my left here, everything that was outside my field of vision was a blur until I turned to actually look at it and then it became fully rendered. Players with high-end rigs will likely be annoyed by this and complain about it since there's no apparent way to turn it on or off. But if you ask me, anything that makes a game run more smoothly for a broader player base is okay in my book and I can live with a few blurry peripheral textures. It's really not so bad once you get used to it.

(This was one of the reasons that I stated in the comments of my previous post that I thought Rage might be able to run okay on some older systems. Since saying that I've installed the game on my old Dell Dimension E310 with an older ATI Radeon HIS video card and thus far I've been unable to get it running. If I do manage to get it to work I'll let you all know.)

Stability? Well, we'll just have to wait for the updates and patches, it seems. While playing today I experienced multiple consecutive CTDs while trying to enter the sewers to take a pic of a mutant. But then, we're all used to this sort of thing by now, aren't we?

EDIT: 11-03-2011

Apparently there's still work being done to make the game more stable. After downloading and installing the latest recommended AMD Catalyst video driver I've been able to go through repeated area transitions without the game crashing. That's really great news, because it was getting to the point where the game was annoyingly unplayable. I recommend owners of the game keep an eye on the AMD support site as well as the Bethesda Forums for new developments.

Oh, and one last thing: while going through those CTDs today I also noticed that the number of times you can save your game is limited to about two dozen slots and that after those are all full the auto-save will start overwriting whichever one is most recent, so just a little heads-up on that.

Well, I guess that's really all I have for now. Hopefully this info will be useful to anyone interested in this new game. So until next time, I'll likely be trying to keep myself from ending up like this guy: