Rage

[Kusy]

(click image to enlarge)
Thank you John Carmack…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLuOtGwLnzQ&feature=player_embedded
…thank you so much

[Anna Comnena]

Because graphics are the entire progress of the gaming industry, right?

But yeah that video is bad. There is no excuse to unload graphics by turning around like that. How does the game play? Any more interactivity than the usual FPS game?

My whole thing about graphics, is increased graphics are useless if you cannot interact with the environment. Because then all it is, is a pretty backdrop. Once you've played games long enough, and especially if you've ever mapped games, the spectacle of graphics lose some of their potency because you can easily recognize that it's a backdrop, and that chips away at your immersion.

GTA: San Andreas is much better than GTAIV in my opinion because of that. GTAIV looks a lot better, but you can barely interact with anything (except for HAY COOZAN WANNA SEE SOHM BEEG AMERICAN TEETEES?!).

I've never heard of Rage, but I stopped caring about FPS games after FarCry, which looked like it was gonna be something different, turned into generic FPS crap.

[Kusy]

I removed the game after launching, all of it's 20something gigabytes. It's unplayable with the textures not being loaded properly and slide-shows… and I can imagine that anyone who bought it knows the word rage all too well. I'll wait until a properly made game is released.

And no, I don't think that graphics are the progress of the entire industry but they improve for a reason and low-res textures is one thing that incredibly annoys me considering why they are there. Apart from that there is no progress in the industry. There are milestones in each genre, for FPS it's Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Portal 1-2, and that's where the FPS genre is at the moment. Right now there are no games that actually add anything to the pool and I'm not expecting too see anything that will add anything... anytime soon.

As for GTA4 vs. San Andreas - map is not the only thing important about a game for me. SA was inconsistent pretty much in every way possible, it was like a theme park where you step out of the Wonderland zone and suddenly find yourself in the Pirates of the Caribbean.
GTA4 was definitely a breakthrough for GTA games when it comes to mood, characters and story, and most importantly it didn't feel like they were adding something that doesn't fit. GTA4 was more immersive than most of the so called RPG games made around that time. GTA:SA was wacky, but a story about poor person of african american descent coming home, fighting gangs, then working for the triad, then for the government, owning a casino and finally closing the story by killing some random low-tier police officer didn't really add up... was funny... but didn't add up.

But that's a matter of what you like in your GTA, my friend still says that Vice City is THE best GTA in existence, and I'm close to admitting he's right. SA is nowhere near my favorite.

[Robin]

Stop paying for games on launch. Companies are just using the people who pre-order as unpaid alpha testers.

Also, stop buying games in the first place. Commercial gaming is dying.

[Kusy]

Who said anyone itt bought the game? Last game I bought on launch was Dragon Age II and I feel like being sodomized by BioWare… of course I most likely will fall for it with Mass Effect 3 and The Old Republic just to prove to myself that the company is dead.

[renzo]

lol apparently it's our video drivers fault that the game doesn't work.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/113479-Graphics-Card-Drivers-To-Blame-For-Rages-PC-Issues

[Kusy]

I read that, installing them doesn't help for everyone.

[Anna Comnena]

@Robin:

> Stop paying for games on launch. Companies are just using the people who pre-order as unpaid alpha testers.

Oh god, this too. I remember back in ye olden days where you didn't buy beta products off the shelves, the development companies (or publishers) had Quality Assurance departments.

[Kusy]

@Anna:

> Oh god, this too. I remember back in ye olden days where you didn't buy beta products off the shelves, the development companies (or publishers) had Quality Assurance departments.

Pardon me but that's bullshit.
There were games that couldn't be finished from start to the end without patches. Games always were buggy and needed fixes.

Sure, if we go back to 2D graphics, simple arcade mechanics and taking up 400 mb of hard drive space - we might get games that are less bugged at release… because there's less to duck up there.
Fact is that Bathesda always had bad QA.

Stop being retrogamers.

[Robin]

Yeah, there's a difference between missing a few gameplay issues and missing the fact that the game doesn't work on 90% of the population's computers.

Besides, there were only a handful of releases which actually had game-breaking bugs and all of these were very high-profile. Don't go around pretending that it was common to be unable to finish a game just to make a point. :P

[Gwen]

sure retrogames had some issues, and patches came out for them nothing is flawless… but before internet and "modern gaming" companies had to put out a higher quality product. If they didnt then those games were not purchased. Since the dawn of the internet, programming companies have had this attitude of buy now fix later, and in general release lower quality work because they know they can patch things as people complain. Saying there is less to fuck up is ignorant. Most games back then were just as technical as games are now if not more so.... programmers had a small amount of space to fit as much cool stuff as they could. Now programmers are allowed to have major bloatware, and not have to optimize anything because space is reletivly a non issue anymore.  its all reletive to the tools that are available at the time.

I actually installed this last night to see what all the fuss was about. I got 4 bandits in, in their base and i couldnt take it anymore. The loading of the images was really annoying.

As for the graphics i didn't think they were that bad. To me it looked like they were going for a cell shaded/cartoony look. I was dissapointed, because the small amount of time i spent in the world i thought it looked pretty neat.

[Anna Comnena]

@Kusy:

> Pardon me but that's bullshit.
> There were games that couldn't be finished from start to the end without patches. Games always were buggy and needed fixes.

I never said there weren't broken games. Nowadays it is more acceptible for it to be in released games because with the online distribution it's not a logistical issue to release patches and fixes. Most games these days have several patches, some major, within a few months after release. Back in the old days developers didn't have that luxury so they needed good QA departments.

This isn't really a bad thing though, since the market gives them a much better testing pool than a QA department, being a controlled environment, can. The downside is that gamers, the end-user consumers, are now not merely purchasing a game, but they are paying for permission to be a tester.

[Robin]

Three words: Release day patches.

Dead Island had a bloody XBox360 Developer's Version released on PC for crying out loud.

:shakes fist at gaming industry:

[Dark Crusade]

It's kind of funny that the only games I buy anymore are on GOG. Sure, I could download them quickly on piratebay, but I love the old games, and I actually support that website, it's very affordable, the games actually have amazing gameplay, and it works everytime, without a problem. I was surprised to see witcher 2 on there, but I bought it when version 2.0 came out, and so far I'm incredibly happy with it.

All these new games coming out, with the exception of skyrim and skyward sword, I'll wait a couple of years until they are all $5 and patched.

[Anna Comnena]

@Kreator:

> All these new games coming out, with the exception of skyrim and skyward sword, I'll wait a couple of years until they are all $5 and patched.

:azn:
That's definitely the best way to go.

[Kusy]

Skyrim will not reach your expectations bro. Buy Battlefield 3 instead. At least you can play a free beta on that.

What I really miss in this industry are free demos released before the game or at the same time it launches.

[Robin]

That would mean that people would see just how bad the game was and not buy it.

The gaming industry is now about tricking people in to handing over cash before they realise just how bad the bloody product is.

[saadhamza]

I'm pretty sure that Skyrim will be as good as most people hope. The people that i know that have played it think that it's definitely really awesome. I dunno, i'm hoping it'll be a bit easier to get into then Oblivion. Though, oblivion IS really awesome, it was uber-confuzzling.

[Kusy]

@Zonova:

> Though, oblivion IS really awesome, it was uber-confuzzling.

It's a good game in some aspects but incredibly flat in most. And compared to Morrowind, Oblivion is one big tutorial that leads you by hand.

[saadhamza]

Well shit >.>'

I'm curious as to whether there will be like… huge frame drops in Skyrim with the dragons.

Raged is being pissed on by a lot of critics, i had been hoping for something good.

[Kusy]

What I'm sure of is that Skyrim will prove incredibly funny, and surely not in the way Bathesda wanted it to. Oblivion was hilarious enough with things that should not have happened going on…

For example, if you saved more than two or three cities from Oblivion gates, your reputation with the citizens is pretty high, they will attack whatever attacks you if they see it. Now Bathesda forgot to exclude city guards from that list... if you oppose the guards when they try to arrest you for a crime, they attack you, and the the whole city attacks them... and since most citizens are pretty weak - city guard can kill the whole population if you get chased by them around the whole city... or the citizens will lynch the whole city guard.

Or that famous idiocy that made game nearly impossible to finish if you were above level 20 and following the main plot. City guards and friendly NPCs didn't had level scaling while oblivion monsters did - bam - battle of Bruma suddenly becomes ultra hard as everyone is getting wiped out by overpowered (to them) mobs and you can't use area of effect spells or even swinging your weapon freely (to the extent when doing so might cause city guards to attack you instead of the daedra).

Now this happened in Oblivion... all the time. Skyrim is supposed to have most encounters "un-scripted", the AI might decide to take revenge against the player if he kills their kin, animals are supposed to hunt and attack other animals, dragons are said to randomly attack random villages...

**WHAT CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG HERE?**
…considering that Bathesda is known to have horrible quality assurance and spending minimal time on testing (as Rage, Fallout 3 / Fallout New Vegas, Oblivion, Morrowind and Daggerfall tell us). Not to mention they're cheerful attitude of "not fixing bugs if they're funny" (reference: [1](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-Sometimes-Doesnt-Fix-Entertaining-Bugs), [2](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/113510-Skyrim-Bug-Turned-Chickens-Into-Informants))

This game is going to be more lolz than Fifa 2012 Demo and it's Impact Engine (reference for arch-laughs: [1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtPJVuWExNo), [2](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRCLhvV9Ltg)) and I'm 100% positive on that.

[Murdoc]

@Kusy:

> This game is going to be more lolz than Fifa 2012 Demo and it's Impact Engine (reference for arch-laughs: [1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtPJVuWExNo), [2](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRCLhvV9Ltg)) and I'm 100% positive on that.

lol thats some brown nosing fo sho

the thing i disliked most about Oblivion is that it felt too linear. if they would take it up a notch and aim for a more flexible roleplaying experience than I would love the series that much more. i enjoyed morrowind more than oblivion, but maybe its because i was expecting more out of oblivion and felt a bit let down. hopefully, skyrim is not the same.

[Kusy]

[Carmack confirmed positive for being an unwashed, full of himself cunt.](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/113564-John-Carmack-PC-Is-Not-the-Leading-Platform-for-Games)

[Yxxe]

@Kusy:

> [Carmack confirmed positive for being an unwashed, full of himself cunt.](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/113564-John-Carmack-PC-Is-Not-the-Leading-Platform-for-Games)

rofl. "PC is inferior because most PC systems are 10 times more powerful than consoles." XD

[Kusy]