GAAAMER

After seven years of development and seemingly unending hype, id Software released Rage last October. Now that I've had time to digest and reflect on the game, I realize that Rage be summed up with one word: Frogurt.

John Carmack: Our game has completely unique textures.

Gamer: That's good!

John Carmack: To make this technology work on consoles, we had to lower the resolution so much every unique texture has about as much visual fidelity as Rebel Assault for the Sega CD.

Gamer: That's bad.

John Carmack: We've bled over the code in this game to make it as efficient as possible.

Gamer: That's good!

John Carmack: The game won't take advantage of highend PCs, and it doesn't work on AMD cards.

Gamer: That's bad.

Tim Willits: We spent seven years developing the game's world.

Gamer: That's good!

Tim Willits: We ran out of time, though, so the game doesn't have an ending.

Gamer: That's bad.

Tim Willits: But we have an open world!

Gamer: That's good!

Tim Willits: If you walk anywhere we don't want you to, an invisible sniper will instantaneously turn your body into pizza toppings.

Gamer: That's bad.

Tim Willits: But John Goodman's one of the voice actors!

Gamer: That's...good?

Tim Willits: Every line we wrote for him is abominable.

Gamer: Can I go now?

Trainwreck ahoy

The game--technologically and artistically--is a complete misfire. This is the game that no one asked for, and that's why it's already selling for $20 while Skyrim continues to top the Steam charts at $60. I'm going to elaborate on the many ways that this game failed:

• Alienated longtime fans with a broken PC version of the game
• Lacked any kind of focus, leaving gamers with a smorgasbord of mediocrity
• Featured boring game mechanics are horribly dated game design
• Used technology with so many tradeoffs that it didn't feel like a solid jump over the previous generation technology
• Depicted the world with bizarre art design that failed to impress most gamers
• Made amateurish, embarrassing mistakes such as a ho-hum finale and no enemy variety

Alienated longtime fans

On release day, PC gamers who bought Rage found it unplayable due to issues with screen tearing, and the game simply didn't run properly on AMD video cards. id Software cut its teeth on PC game development. Historically, they've been masters of PC game development. They nutured a passionately dedicated fanbase for many years. With one disastrous game, id has completely undermined that relationship by releasing not only a buggy PC game, but a buggy console port. Even though Tim Willits repeatedly assured shills in the gaming press that id had mouse input and PC controls down pat, the game shipped with an interface designed from the ground-up for console gamepads. Even worse, it had laughably embarrassing mouse acceleration issues at launch. No one was going into Rage expecting a gripping plot or dialogue, but they were expecting technical competence. As a final insult, Rage didn't take advantage of modern PC hardware at all. id's biggest fans were let down by a game that compromised on both graphics and gameplay in an attempt to get a piece of the console pie.

Valve's Gabe Newell gave some compelling advice to Develop in an interview, and id Software could greatly profit from reading it: "Do not focus on anyone but your customers. Your reputation will follow you forever so always be fair to your customers, and certainly one thing you need to always remember is that your customers are not going to be fooled."

Hardcore PC gamers--id's core fans--are not going to forget about Rage's bungled launch. DOOM 4's release is going to be met with unheard of levels of skepticism--especially from AMD video card owners. People aren't going to forget the sleazy tactics id employed to get people to preorder the game. Unless you preordered it, you didn't get the "Anarchy Edition" and had to pay extra for the game's double-barreled shotgun. They're not going to forget that the game didn't have a solid multiplayer mode. id's official excuse for Rage's lack of a traditional deathmatch mode is that they wanted to try something new. Nobody's complaining about the deathmatch being strictly vehicular combat; they're complaining about the vehicular combat's quality. Multiplayer in Rage was clearly slapped together near the end of development reusing assets from the campaign, and it doesn't live up the standards of id's previous multiplayer modes or the multiplayer modes of contemporary games.

Smorgasbord of mediocrity

The half-hearted multiplayer is consistent with the game's lack of focus. If you go down the bullet list on Rage, it sounds pretty good: it has a plot, you can drive and upgrade dune buggies, there's somewhat of an open-world environment, and there are different ammo types and accessories. That's the problem with Rage, though: it couldn't decide on what it wanted to be, and even though it attempts to cover a lot of ground, it doesn't excel in any single area. It has just enough dialogue to annoy a gamer who's just looking to go around dismembering people, but the dialogue is badly written, shallow, and the plot never goes anywhere interesting or unexpected. It has driving and vehicular combat, but the buggy physics are goofy, and the combat clumsy. There are few dedicated racing tracks, and driving feels like a chore within 15 minutes of gameplay.

The side missions are uneventful and simply reuse levels from the main campaign, so there's little motivation to play them. The game has gadgets and accessories such as spider bots that fight with you, but the game is so easy that you can blow through it without using any of them. Rage has inventory and currency systems, but you can almost entirely ignore them and miss nothing. Playing the game, you can tell that no one at id really had a vision for what Rage was supposed to be. They just threw in every idea they thought was "cool" and hoped that a good game would mysteriously emerge. That type of game design worked in 1993, but you can't get by with "seat of your pants" game design in 2011.

Horribly dated design

Rage plays almost exactly like Quake 2 (1997). The AI isn't AI. You walk around and blow stuff up, or you drive around and blow stuff up. There's absolutely nothing novel here. First person shooters from the 90s had their charm, though. They thrived on pitting gamers against interesting bosses, and they delighted in dreaming up interesting enemies to fight. Sadly, Rage even fails to deliver on this level. There is only one real combat setpiece in the game, and in a world where we've already played Resident Evil 4, God of War, and other games with far more ambition and imagination, Rage looks nearly pitiable.

Ill-conceived technology

The main promise of Rage's technology was that it made completely unique textures possible. Artists were free to make their imaginations come to life, and we wouldn't have to look at repeating tiles anymore. There's a catch, though: every time you move the camera, you're going to see textures pop-in. There's another catch: even though the textures are unique, they had to be compressed so much that they ended up looking like 16 color GIFs. The technology in Rage simply made bad tradeoffs; other games look far better. What value is there in unique textures when every texture looks smudgy and horrible? How do unique textures benefit me when I can't spin the camera around without seeing pop-in? Strangely, Rage's lighting is even a step backward from the lighting model in DOOM 3. Rage doesn't even have dynamic lighting. Torches don't illuminate your gun, and the environments look almost completely static. id Software released a new technology that feels like a step backward.

Bizarre art design

The aesthetic of Rage is quite odd. It's floating in the liminal space between realism and fantasy, but what stands out most is id's preoccupation with stitched up crotches. Wherever you go in Rage, you have a pretty good chance of seeing someone with a stitched up crotch.

It seems like it'd be quite inconvenient to go to the bathroom if you lived in the wasteland. Perhaps id artists have zipper phobia. Maybe someone didn't let them go to the bathroom when they were children, and they traumatically wet their pants. In any case, Rage's art design is doing little besides inspiring laughter.