War Never Changes

So... RAGE. The big release this week. I'd originally had it in my Amazon.co.uk basket ready to buy, alongside the HD remake of ICO/Shadow of the Colossus. Oh, and Dead Island. We'll return to this for a sentence later. Anyway, each game in the basket was coming to about £27 each. Bargain!

But then I had 5 days off coming up, and with our Minecraft server burned out and having to be rebuilt, I needed a game to play. And Steam would provide it to me faster than the mail could get it to me from Amazon. And so I caved and threw in my 50 quid. Sure I'd double my costs but id has never let me down.

Undoubtedly, if you've had any interest in the game at all, or even just has the ear to the ground of games at all, you'll have heard it's not gone off without a hitch for us PC-faring folk. My initial moments into the world, where you emerge into a...well, I won't call it a sweeping vista, but it's a view of a sort, and a turn of your head, even slowly, would present to you a blurred up textures which then came into focus a second later. Literally. Not a quick flash where you had thought you'd seen something but then realised you must have been mistaken. This was a full second that the walls, the ground, the water, everything in sight would appear as an indistinguishable smudge before easing - in stages - into focus.

Feelings were, like Penny-Arcade's comprehensibly loquacious Tycho, astounded by id and their premier foray into producing a cross-platform title where they intentionally ported it to the PC (I believe simultaneously as they were to console), rather than develop for PC and then move to consoles afterwards. It felt like a betrayal in a sense. Not over that they had done it this way, of course. No, I could fully respect their id Tech 5 tech and their new bosses at Bethesda and the need to move with the times. It had simply hurt that something had gone wrong and it was the PC that took the beating. Everyone bemoans id and demands a patch for the "broken" title as it's "unplayable" in it's initial stage. Which really brought to mind the recent Dead Island release. Except that was broken, and was barely playable. RAGE, it must be said, ran and was playable. Just as long as you didn't turn around too fast and expect to see what was around you immediately.

Given time for this to diffuse into the media and back to id we find that this comes, in part, to the wide range of graphics hardware and configurations that we have, and how it would appear the id Tech 5 engine was perhaps not prepared for this. Or something. But id did come out and help people with some command parameters here and there which we could use to tweak the settings.

Once my textures were [mostly] behaving, I had a blast.

It had come as something of an unanimous hive-mind phenomenon that we all drew immediate comparisons to Fallout 3. The desert wasteland, the small camps of people pulling together a living, the outlaw factions which terrorise out in the open landscape, the mutants which threaten both, scavenging parts to sell to combine to make contraptions and weapons.

Except, I didn't feel like I cared much about their plight because no sooner had I established myself, I was whisked away to a new town. I could have happily listened to John Goodman's sultry, deep tone all day long. But no, away with me, there's a new corner of the world to go look at and a whole new town to earn the grateful trust of. You could go back and see them after, but there was nothing really there for you. Just a nod. Then you get back on your way. That guy with the double-chins they'd show in the trailers? You see him once. Perhaps we were spoiled by Fallout 3. After all, this is a shooter. id are shooter people. There's a lot of shooting to be done.

And shooting feels good; the guns are nice and solid, and I'm a fervent fan of the shottie and it's magical powers of making whole heads disappear in the blink of an eye. Naturally so, it's of course id doing what they do best, I'd say. Driving is fun also, save perchance for when you inevitably get into situations of forever chasing your tail, turning in a perpetual circle as your sole remaining enemy does the same. But then I was forever forgetting that I had a dozen landmines that I could have dropped in my wake and swiftly ended the cycle. Still, I did have a proud moment of heading to a corner, turn and barrel-roll my car, shoot off a rocket and winning the day. Environments are varied, too, and there has been care placed into it. No invisible walls, no gaps between walls, not even an out-of-place looking rock. I'd say seamless, if I felt it 100% accurate to do so, but I'm sure fault could be found out there by people. And people will go over it with a fine toothed comb. You know what the internet is like. Oh, and it does have it's moments like Doom 3's “monster in a cupboard”, just not as bizarre and out of place as demon coming out of a hidden compartment.

I was just getting into it, too. Then it ended. I'd reached what had felt like it would be the half-way mark, perhaps two-thirds at best, but then the credits rolled.

It was a bitter-sweet conclusion, given the price I paid, the problems encountered and then the end coming too soon for me. More annoying perhaps was that you could not continue after the credits. To let you do so would not have broken anything, the world would have maintained it's narrative, and I could have gone around and finished up the couple sidequests I'd skipped on, explored the card game that is in there, gone into the sewers in the starting area which the NPCs said contains unclaimed goodies. And monsters to shoot up. If I let it sit for a couple days, on reflection I may deem it "worth it". Right now, though, perhaps it's because I have a gaming void at the moment that I've nothing to fill that makes completing RAGE leave a more pronounced emptiness.

Truthfully, however, I have dozens of incomplete games and a handful of ones not even begun. But they're not right for me, just now.

It'll be interesting to see how Doom 4 comes out. One would hope that lessons had been learned, tweaks to be made, drivers to be prepared, and a loyal customer base to appease.