Rage

Since I cannot seem to find a previous dedicated thread, I'm starting one.

I've yet to delve into multiplayer, so I will save that for a follow up post.

Single player, I recommend you play it slowly, and pay attention. I blew through Single player on easy in a little over 2 days. I found easy to be rather challenging with my "Force-my-way-through-it", traditional shooter tactics. Using mostly some mixture of Shotgun (buckshot), pistol (with half binocular...that'll take some explaining), sniper rifle, and, on occassion, rocket launcher; I quickly ran my way through paying little attention to environment, and more attention to working my way through the story. Having started a new game on hard difficulty (and finding the game 10 times more fun and easier than on easy... I'll explain on down), I can plainly say taking a COD or even Quake-like approach to this game is a mistake.

The main missions will remind you of Quake 4's design. There are random corridors and doors that are there, you expect to be able to open or go through, but can't. And given the examples of this story genre we're used to (Fallout 3, Borderlands, etc.), we don't expect to be limited to linear paths. And that is disappointing. Very disappointing. But it is iD, and I'm not sure why this lack of open-ness surprised me. Perhaps it was all the talk they gave of "Open environments" that had me expecting a Fallout 3-like game without the VATS. But this is not Fallout, and while Bethesda owns iD, it's very clear they left them to their own devices.

First playthrough this disappointed me. SECOND PLAYTHROUGH I HALF-RETRACT MY PREVIOUS STATEMENT. It's not as open as I'd like. There's a downpoint. But the ups outnumber the downs.

Towns and wastelands are a lot more open than the individual missions. And you should pay attention to them. They're polished, and put what we saw in Borderlands to shame.

Character design for the towns and non-baddie NPCs (Baddies get a bit repetitive in their looks) are exquisitely done. They're very much characters. And that shows. Even the personalities of the baddies, if you pay attention to them and don't go in guns blazing, are given the attention to detail we saw in the Jedi Knights series. I personally always enjoyed sneaking up on storm troopers and listening to them ramble on about things for a few minutes with some entertaining bather. Taking a cue from Bethesda, that even had raiders fishing and doing other believable, day to day activities such as fishing; If they do not yet know you're there, the actions of the baddies are believable and entertaining.

Vehicle bits and combat should not be overlooked. Controls are a bit simplistic, but no more so than those of Flatout. So much so that these could have been made their own game. But one thing I liked about traveling the wastelands like this was, that you could, if you wanted to, get out of the vehicle and launch rockets at the bandits chasing you from your shoulder fired launcher, throw grenades at them, or shoot them (Pop rocket shotgun ammo... similar to a semi-auto 40mm we've used in other games... most of the other weapons are an exceedingly bad idea in these situations). And if you wreck your car, this can be the only option left to you. You can radio for a tow, but I've never had. I usually just did this for the hell of it when I'd run out of vehicular ammo, and simply to see if it would let me handle it in that manner. Keep in mind, it won't let you bail and be aggressive in the vehicular events (organized competitions) that are hosted in 2 of the game's 3 towns. Which was logical. *shrug*


Second play through, I realized that when iD talked about being open, it was referring more to how you handled the combat than what path you took to get it done. Mission locations may be laid out in a linear fashion, but how you choose to kill the enemy is a plethora of options. And how they behave is believable. It's not just "blam and dead", even if you get a headshot (yay helmets). That's right, if you shoot them in a non-lethal area, they drop and are inhibited in whatever area you shot them. Meaning if it's a leg hit and they decide to run (and they do, sometimes in concert, decide to do that if you're being particularly brutal or lethal) they will limp away due to the injury. They will shoot at you while laying on their side bleeding out, and if you leave them there to it, they will bleed out eventually. And the AI on the bots may be on the the biggest innovations we've seen in this catagory in some time.

But more on the open combat approach. Crafting from scraps and salvage is good. And it adds a lot to the experience. Options include a wide variety of altered ammo types for your existing weapons, stationary turrets, bomb equipped RC cars, and my personal favorite... Assault rifle equipped spider drones. Bomb cars scare the hell out of enemies, and can kill a whole room of them at once if timed and controlled right. Turrets make awesome traps like they do in games like TF2 and Brink, but they perform a good deal better than they do in Brink. Spider Bots.... oooh they're fun fun stuff, and I'd be giving horrible spoilers if I describe their awesomeness.

There are a ton of different ammo types, and every one of them has their quirks and advantages. The really fun one's cannot be bought and must be crafted. You can, however, buy the ingredients. And there's plenty of ways to make money to get these. The missions alone don't give you nearly enough cash to really indulge the habits you'll acquire for these... but there are no shortage of ways to earn money on the side in the game. I've never been a fan of the gambling mini-games, but they are there. Other options include racing, scavenging the wastes, and local job boards for additional missions. My two favorite options are definitely Pop Rockets (Shotgun) and Dynamite Bolts (Crossbow)... especially with how the Baddies react to being hit by the dynamite bolts. It's not only effective, it can be twistedly hilarious.

As I said earlier, I don't have multiplayer impressions yet. But if you want a good single player experience, take your time with it, experiment with different ways of accomplishing your carnage, and you won't be disappointed.

I think it's more than a tech demonstration, but it does make me look forward to the next Fallout game being done using this tech. There should be a lot less of the glitchy nonsense like we saw with the previous titles.
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Advocating the end of the world since July 1995.

Nice!
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K-SWISS Power cologne. Who knew you could bottle the scent of boner?

Here is some useful information. I was trying to map my controls to use the keypad as I always do and the Keypad 5 wouldn't map. Here are the instructions on how.

You can do it manually in game by opening the game console and type manually
bind "kp_5" "_moveforward" (if you want to move forward,you can place any action keys... like moveback, moveleft,use"ect


How to open game console

Quote:
+set com_allowConsole 1 in Launch Commands for RAGE in Steam


You can also set a shortcut of rage.exe to your desktop and type
"+set com_allowConsole 1" in Target AFTER the adress.

"D:\Id\Rage\rage\Rage.exe +set com_allowConsole 1"

The path should look like this.

The minus and plus havent been tested but they should go something like "kp_minus"

Heres a list of commands:
"_moveforward"
"_moveback"
"_moveLeft"
"_moveRight"
"_jump"
"_sprint"
"_CHANGEWEAPON"
"_crouch"
"_use"
"_weapnext"
"_weapprev"
"_ammoprev"
"_ammonext"


UPDATE:

You will need to drive a vehicle forward in the homeland boi.

To do so, open console and type bindset 1
bindset 1 change it to bind vehicle movements.

so in console:
bindset 1
then type
bind "kp_5" "_moveforward"

then you can switch back to bindset 0 or stay bindset 1,it doesnt matter.
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I just remap crouch, dash, prone, and melee with most games. *shrug*
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Advocating the end of the world since July 1995.

Game didn't take very long to beat. Definitely not a fraction of the content that Borderlands had even at release. Still need to try the co-op maps.
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Intel i5 3570 Quad 3.4ghz Cores
eVga GTX 680
16GB PC2400 DDR3
Max Detail
1920x1080p

So it sounds more like this game was more of a tech demo for potential clients than anything else? Not that iD has EVER made a deep story driven, long playing game.
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K-SWISS Power cologne. Who knew you could bottle the scent of boner?

People keep saying that about it. What most people don't realize is that ever since id was bought by bethseda, the do not license their engines any more. So what's the point of doing a tech demo if you're not marketing the engine to anybody. I just think id has fallen off their game. They've gone on record as abandoning pc gamers. I just think their time has past....

Drix wrote: ...but it does make me look forward to the next Fallout game being done using this tech. There should be a lot less of the glitchy nonsense like we saw with the previous titles.

I agree with that......let iD make a great engine, and then let REAL game makers make well done games with good story lines with it.
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K-SWISS Power cologne. Who knew you could bottle the scent of boner?

I still want to try the co-op missions....
_________________
Intel i5 3570 Quad 3.4ghz Cores
eVga GTX 680
16GB PC2400 DDR3
Max Detail
1920x1080p

PlaceboC6 wrote: I still want to try the co-op missions....

Have a steam ID?

I believe mine is silver350inok

PlaceboC6 wrote: Have a steam ID?

I believe mine is silver350inok

Invite sent

SO you all do any hawt co-op yet?
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K-SWISS Power cologne. Who knew you could bottle the scent of boner?

Never got the friend request on Steam.
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Advocating the end of the world since July 1995.