i was gonna post this in whiyl but it got to long so il start a new thread.
i just beat rage. dare i say i was rather disappointed. the textures seem like someone decided to rape em at the last minute so the game would run on some other platform. i could see the telltale marks of dxt* compression everywhere. the texture resolution was so low that a 16 pixel dxt1 block filled up a lot more pixels on the screen. i could understand this being done in the wasteland, you're driving around and dont have time to inspect the textures. but during the corridor missions i would have liked to see fewer artifacts in the textures. model quality hasn't really changed much since normal maps came into existence so at least the modeling was on par. some of the normal maps looked kinda flat though. anywhere where you had a pile of garbage that had a can sticking out, you couldnt help but revel in the lameness of the normal map. its as if the normal map was rendered for a low res model, and then that model got poplychopped and the map was just used anyway. distance shots looked good, but as soon as you got close to anything (which fps games tend to do), the graphics looked like ****. the collection of stock parts were of low quality with poor texture detail.
the missions were kinda the same. go in, destroy thing x, retrieve item y. missions involving vehicles were non existent, except for races of course. at least the cars handle well, most fpses with vehicles have the vehicles made out of styrafoam so that they are hard to keep on the ground. this game they were kinda made out of lead, and just stuck to the ground. the way the game uses the wasteland as kind of a cheap way to get from mission to mission and serves no other purpose. there were no real missions out in it, you didnt have to escort convoys or defend things. it was jsut kinda there, and if you got luckey you would find something to shoot at. mission design has you run a tight gauntlet. any place that kinda looks cool or has intresting stuff, youre not allowed to walk there. you run the maze and youre done. interaction with the world is non existant. you could not destroy doodads, if you found a window you couldnt just shoot it out. there were so many places that looked passable that were just blocked because they didnt want you to explore over there. there werent any shortcuts you just just kinda had to walk a straight line and you were done. i admit maze shooters are like that but they kinda wend out of their way to control where you went. the last mission was way to easy, and no ****ing boss. only a few mutants with armor. i had saved up all my bfg ammo too just to fight a boss that never showed up. what a ****ing waste.
and the thing i despised the most: the controls. specifically the car controls. every idtech engine 4 and lower supported pc joysticks. i admit these features were seldom used, you had to know the console commands, how to write and exec a cfg, but you could use your joystick. oh but the game would recognize an xbox360 game pad. the fact that a game for the pc cannot use a pc controller, but can use an xbox360 controller is absurd. as a result i couldn't drive with my ch stick (this applies to many other games as well, and is entirely microsoft suckdickery to do with their games for windows abomination that aims to bring down our pc gaming master race). code to use joysticks on the system is very simple. i could write it, any cs student halfway through their courses could do it. it might take a half hour for a professional coder. its not beyond the capabilities of any game company. ms wants to sell more gamepads is all. its ironic that ms once made some of the best joysticks ever. they made gamepads, wheels, force feedback sticks, regular sticks you name it. so why are they now force feeding the same old controller to everyone? as if to say: "no! conform! submit! you have no choice! your opinion does not matter!" may ms headquarters go suck a nuke!
i would have expected to see some other cool new features in idtech5. megatexturing wasnt new, idtech4 had it on later games. earlier idtech4 games which didnt use megatexturing actually looked better. there was no revolutionary new feature. not the colored lighting in q2 or the curved surfaces in quake3, or the epic shadowing of doom 3. all of which were cool at the time, if not totally original (for example the achievements of quake 2 and quake 3 were done in frontier back in '93). i could not identify one thing that made it a different engine at all. doom 3 looked better than this, and thats ****ing sad. carmack used to be able to deliver top notch game engines, but no more. carmack has been dethroned. he has been absorbed by the industry. hes just tapping you for money so he can play with his rockets.
**** the games industry! **** them all! they destroy every idea they touch. and your typical gamer is too ****ing stupid to figure it out.
tldr: see title