I suspect the money is running out at ID on top of other things.

I recall vividly the arrival of Doom 3 and my genuine shock at how terrible that was (as both a game and an engine).

^mortis^ wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 10:23:

Bioware came too late in the RPG genre for me to find them "OMGWOWWTFBBQ".

yeah, except for the entirety of D&D-based games, with the exception of the Gold Boxes, they sure did come too late.

^m^

For me, as I said, they were too late to the game. I no longer had the time to sink hours upon hours in to them as I had with Dungeon Master, The Bard's Tale and, the last RPG I dumped a ridiculous amount of hours in to, Ultima VII.

I guess if you were a tween or in your early teens, they were the in the right time frame for you.

iD deserves respect in the same breath that Microprose did, but those days are gone.

I'll always respect Carmack for what he truly invented. No question.
But his comments and drift toward developing essentially for PHONES? Really? Carmack's Angry Birds? Great....

I heard Rage was completely mediocre, so I didn't buy it. There's too much else worth spending my money on. But I would have bought it just for the engine and editing, but their foray into megatextures means that they cock-blocked everyone who ever enjoyed editing or mapbuilding. To me that was a HUGE mistake - that was the source of their success with Quake - hell, they brought the engine alone (quake itself was pretty mediocre) but everyone else brought the game(s): teamfortress, counterstrike, halflife (iirc that was built on a heavily-modded Q1 engine), etc.

For them to block those people out unless they have some gigantic renderfarm able to parse out 40g HD textures....well that was idiotic and narcissistic. Personally, I think the 'next big thing' for this sort of company is really building to this community - actually make modding easy, make rulesets (gravity, etc.) easy to tinker with, make building levels world-physics-intuitive, ie for a wood floor put planks together that are destructible, frangible, etc. based on energy input.

WaltC wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 09:38:

DanteUK wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 05:10:
Definitely not too young and been in IT for 30 years.
Personally I loved Rage and it worked out the box on my PC, but then I've an old Nvidia card and not a new ATI card where ATI screwed up on their driver releases. I fail to see how id can be blamed so much for a bad PC port when the biggest issues where caused by ATI releasing a driver with the wrong .dll's in it!

The original Rage instructions on how to run the game without texture popping (setting the texture preload to 8192, etc.) were published on the nVidia site, by nVidia, not on the ATi site. Hopefully, I don't have to tell you that nVidia did not place those instructions on its web site for the benefit of ATi users...;) In fact, there were references in the Steam forums for ATi users to follow to the nVidia site for just that reason--to set their game configs to minimize texture popping, along with nVidia owners. There were plenty of nVidia-user complaints in the Steam forums early on. I read them.

Also, how old is your "old nVidia card," anyway? It should not surprise you to learn that people with with, say, GF 8800-level cards are running D3d 8.1 hardware--so even if you are running the latest drivers from nVidia your hardware maxes out at displaying DX8.1 effects, etc. Same is true for older ATi cards. Rage is an OpenGL game, so DX8.1 is roughly analogous to OpenGL 2.x in terms of the hardware effects it supports.
Blah blah blah blah...

Holy shit, I had to stop reading after this last paragraph..

nVidia G80 being DX8.1? What fucking world have you been living in? The G80 (8800 series cards) were the first DX10 GPUs to hit the market. Your memory seems to be incredibly discolored.


On my GTX470 plugged into an ASUS P5Q-Deluxe w/ Q9550 & 2x2GB DDR2-1066 Rage ran like a dream for me. No tweaks enabled. Incredibly minimal texture pop. But then I also realize that others had issues with the game. While it's sad to see that Carmacks usual A.D.D. about polish on the engine just wasn't there this time around, some of it does have to do with the drivers available at launch that has been stated.

InBlack wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 10:36:
You have to realise we are talking about iD software here! iD software still means a shitload to a lot of people, Im including myself here. So is it so very strange that we expect the very best from them???? We arent talking about some run-of-the-mill developers here, these guys are legends in the annals of PC Gaming...

I know, I was around for all that too. I'm just saying id doesn't have the same cachet it used to. The rest of the industry has evolved and id is still largely a tech company. Heck, I'd argue gameplay was never really a big focus for them and that they largely lucked out in that area due to the immaturity of the FPS genre back then.

Verno wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 10:19:
Lots of extremes in this thread.

Rage wasn't a terrible piece of shit by any stretch of the imagination and if anyone actually believes that then they've made some extremely good choice in buys over the years or have no idea what a bad game is actually like.

That being said Rage was definitely a very mediocre game with no real ambition. The megatexturing work was certainly an achievement but it's one that has little bearing on the gameplay experience. Rage imitated other titles readily but never really hit a stride of its own. The best things I can say about it was that the animations and AI were very good. Contrast that with shallow mechanics everywhere else, a non-existent storyline and little characterization made it fairly boring. The racing felt like a tacked on mini-game and the areas are oddly transitioned between traditional FPS levels and quasi-open maps filled with invisible walls.

Borderlands was more modest in its approach to that stuff and while it suffered from similar problems at least it tried to make its own way with the loot mechanics and humor. Rage was "bad" because it was so long in the making and such a let down, particularly for the money. People don't scoff at $60 in this economy and last year was filled with standout titles that Rage pales in comparison to. I feel bad for id in a way, the rest of the industry "grew up" and they're still making barebones FPS titles with pretty engines. We've got plenty of those as it is unfortunately which doesn't leave much room for them anymore and I think that's reflected in Rages soft sale figures.

You have to realise we are talking about iD software here! iD software still means a shitload to a lot of people, Im including myself here. So is it so very strange that we expect the very best from them???? We arent talking about some run-of-the-mill developers here, these guys are legends in the annals of PC Gaming...

Bioware came too late in the RPG genre for me to find them "OMGWOWWTFBBQ".

yeah, except for the entirety of D&D-based games, with the exception of the Gold Boxes, they sure did come too late.

^m^

Lots of extremes in this thread.

Rage wasn't a terrible piece of shit by any stretch of the imagination and if anyone actually believes that then they've made some extremely good choice in buys over the years or have no idea what a bad game is actually like.

That being said Rage was definitely a very mediocre game with no real ambition. The megatexturing work was certainly an achievement but it's one that has little bearing on the gameplay experience. Rage imitated other titles readily but never really hit a stride of its own. The best things I can say about it was that the animations and AI were very good. Contrast that with shallow mechanics everywhere else, a non-existent storyline and little characterization made it fairly boring. The racing felt like a tacked on mini-game and the areas are oddly transitioned between traditional FPS levels and quasi-open maps filled with invisible walls.

Borderlands was more modest in its approach to that stuff and while it suffered from similar problems at least it tried to make its own way with the loot mechanics and humor. Rage was "bad" because it was so long in the making and such a let down, particularly for the money. People don't scoff at $60 in this economy and last year was filled with standout titles that Rage pales in comparison to. I feel bad for id in a way, the rest of the industry "grew up" and they're still making barebones FPS titles with pretty engines. We've got plenty of those as it is unfortunately which doesn't leave much room for them anymore and I think that's reflected in Rages soft sale figures.

InBlack wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 03:50:
Yes remember Doom3??? Its not like Rage came out of nowhere, this isnt exactly the first horrible piece of shit game to come out from iD!

This. The last decent game they put out was Quake 3 back in 1999 - that wasn't even this century! RAGE wasn't just bad... it was a stinker. It was hugely hyped and massively under-delivered, while having considerably technical problems and suffered terribly on PC from optimisations made for consoles.

DanteUK wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 05:10:
In terms of graphics, I loved Rages views and vista and texture on the NPC's etc was great, some game world objects and surfaces looked crap but then I've never played a game yet where there wasn't some surface or texture that looked low res because it was wrapped around some object strangely. The fact that Rages views had no repeating textures was really noticeable when switching to Skyrim! still I dread to think of the install size of Skyrim if the world was done using a Mega Texture!

RAGE didn't just have the odd duff texture. Most of the textures, except for characters, looked terrible up-close and often just as bad from afar. However, some were outright atrocious. This looks worse than Quake 3 and these are no better. It means absolutely nothing to have "unique" textures if they all look like blurry shit. Overall it did not look like a modern PC game at all, especially Dead City which it looks like they forgot to even bother adding textures for.

id Software has contributed a lot to the genre but that doesn't mean they should be blindly defended when they put out shit games.

DanteUK wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 05:10:
Definitely not too young and been in IT for 30 years.
Personally I loved Rage and it worked out the box on my PC, but then I've an old Nvidia card and not a new ATI card where ATI screwed up on their driver releases. I fail to see how id can be blamed so much for a bad PC port when the biggest issues where caused by ATI releasing a driver with the wrong .dll's in it!

The original Rage instructions on how to run the game without texture popping (setting the texture preload to 8192, etc.) were published on the nVidia site, by nVidia, not on the ATi site. Hopefully, I don't have to tell you that nVidia did not place those instructions on its web site for the benefit of ATi users...;) In fact, there were references in the Steam forums for ATi users to follow to the nVidia site for just that reason--to set their game configs to minimize texture popping, along with nVidia owners. There were plenty of nVidia-user complaints in the Steam forums early on. I read them.

Also, how old is your "old nVidia card," anyway? It should not surprise you to learn that people with with, say, GF 8800-level cards are running D3d 8.1 hardware--so even if you are running the latest drivers from nVidia your hardware maxes out at displaying DX8.1 effects, etc. Same is true for older ATi cards. Rage is an OpenGL game, so DX8.1 is roughly analogous to OpenGL 2.x in terms of the hardware effects it supports.

From what I gathered, people with older nVidia and ATi hardware, running older API hardware, had less problems running the game from the start than did people with newer hardware--especially newer ATi hardware. But then, people with "old cards" wouldn't be expecting to see state of the art graphics in Rage anyway--so right from the start their expectations for Rage display would be much lower. Obviously, for people to be running 8800-level, DX8.1 hardware in today's DX9/10/11 gaming software universe, it goes without saying that the quality of their rendered graphics is of relatively low concern for them...;) The first versions of D3d 9.x shipped in ~2001, which should provide some idea of how old Dx8.1/OpenGL2.x hardware really is.

I'll repeat, the game was very playable and looked great on my PC from day of install - my rig is NOT a top of the range, in fact my Nvidia card I think is THE min spec card listed on the box! A couple of tweaks to the config file and unless I span 180 really fast I never saw any texture popping.

OK, there you go--the texture popping "fix" you obviously saw on the nVidia site, too, since you used it. Later patches to the game from id eliminated the need for this fix--it shouldn't have been needed in the first place. How *old* is you card, anyway? I'm always amused when people running 3d cards that first shipped ten years ago tell me how gorgeous their new games look on the older hardware--because I know that's only because they haven't checked out the current 3d hardware which is *much* better...;)

Let me guess--you are also a megatexture fan in that you either like, or at least don't mind, blurry, low-res textures? I agree that's a matter of opinion and a value judgment, but to be truthful about it, few people have any difficulty at all discerning the blurry texture from the crystal clear texture when you place them side by side.

Yes Rage wasn't great, but it was very playable and I completed it 3 times before moving on to Skyrim for 100s of hours.

Good for you...;)

I will say this. Skyrim is a 100 times bigger in scope etc than Rage, but during all my play time with Rage it NEVER crashed to desktop once!! Skyrim has crashed to desktop so many times I've lost count, it's also produced a bluescreen of death 3 times - actually the first time I've seen that on Windows 7!

Uh-oh--I'd start looking at that "old nVidia card" if I was you. Seriously. Come on--is your nVidia card really *that* old? Now you've got me curious...;) I've yet to get a CTD or a BSD with Skyrim, but then I'm running a hardware DX11 3d card--ATi, no less, w/o mods and w/o overclocking of any kind!

In terms of graphics, I loved Rages views and vista and texture on the NPC's etc was great, some game world objects and surfaces looked crap but then I've never played a game yet where there wasn't some surface or texture that looked low res because it was wrapped around some object strangely. The fact that Rages views had no repeating textures was really noticeable when switching to Skyrim! still I dread to think of the install size of Skyrim if the world was done using a Mega Texture!

Yea, I'm sure megatextures bloated Rage beyond belief...;) I really, really think you need a new 3d card, sir! Good time to invest in one, I'd say.

I know it's fashionable now to bash id, but Rage ( at least on most Nvidia setups ) didn't suck - was fun - looked great.

I't not just fashionable--it's fun. The day I see an original, thought-provoking game out of id software free of mutants, pentagrams and demons--free of Hell, even--will be the day that I will gladly agree that id has turned the corner. Old 3d cards are like B movies and id software games, I think--it's easy to get comfortable with them until you realize the rest of the world has passed you by.

Also--has id finished with the Rage "hi-res" megatexture patch--or are they still trying to figure out how to do that? I liked Carmack and pals much better when the PC was the company's focus--but still, even then, id's utter lack of originality was astounding.

RAGE just proves that a game dev can hand out shite for 59 bucks, and peeps will keep coming back for more. DOOM III failed for me in 4 ways.

The stupid flashlight regen.
Monsters always in a dark corner jumping out scare tactic, got tired REAL fast
small out door areas
mp sucked ball, 4 player?? Comon.

Otherwise, I got way more sp game/immersion in DOOM III, and I got my moneys worth.

RAGE tho? Everyone who suckered into RAGE should get a 29 buck refund imo. Awesome tech demo, but a budget title at best. If someone wants to buy DOOM IV unseen, have at her. But I`d hope most gamers who bought RAGE will send a clear message back to iD, that they are gonna wait for a sp demo 1st, before even considering anymore iD products.

I didn't hate Doom 3.... it wasn't totally awful (standing on it's own)... it actually reminded me more of Aliens than Doom. That said... it wasn't all that great either. It was poor enough that I took a wait and see approach to Rage... and it looks like I'll pass on it.

Cutter wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 05:57:
All the old companies you know and loved, id, Bethsoft, Bioware, et al. are all over and done and have been for some time now.

I don't really care about id as they haven't been relevant to me since Doom 2 and Bioware came too late in the RPG genre for me to find them "OMGWOWWTFBBQ".

However, Bethesda has been around for a very long time and, if anything, I think they're better and stronger today than they ever were. Skyrim is, by far, the greatest game they've ever released.


Did any of you ever play The Terminator, Terminator 2029, Delta V or any of their games that weren't TES based? They were either horrible or bitch-and-a-half's to even get working in the first place. Being purchased by Zenimax and being held accountable for making good games has given Bethesda the direction they needed to harness what is obviously a large pool of very real talent.

I've yet to play Rage, but can't imagine it's worse than Doom 3 was.

creatorswhim wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 07:33:

DanteUK wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 05:10:
Definitely not too young and been in IT for 30 years.
Personally I loved Rage and it worked out the box on my PC, but then I've an old Nvidia card and not a new ATI card where ATI screwed up on their driver releases. I fail to see how id can be blamed so much for a bad PC port when the biggest issues where caused by ATI releasing a driver with the wrong .dll's in it!
I'll repeat, the game was very playable and looked great on my PC from day of install - my rig is NOT a top of the range, in fact my Nvidia card I think is THE min spec card listed on the box! A couple of tweaks to the config file and unless I span 180 really fast I never saw any texture popping.

I have to second this. Obviously, the console ports came first this time and megatexturing is not as impressive as it will someday be, but the ATI driver thing was ATI's dog, not id's. Before release, Carmack complained a lot about the difficulty of wringing any kind of performance out of the (superior) hardware of a PC due to crappy software drivers. When Rage came out it was a perfect shitstorm of all the technical issues he'd been pointing out. It's ATI that doesn't care about PC gaming, not id.

I'm looking forward to the time when Bethesda uses the Rage engine for their next Fallout game instead of the "claymation engine" they use now.

Todd Howard has stated on numerous occasions that the RAGE engine is unsuitable for open-world games such as Skyrim or Fallout. In any case I dont think the main issue with Rage is the graphics or the engine. Its simply not a really good or very enjoyable game. You know, fun, enjoyment? The thing that Doom2 or Quake3 had shitloads of?

Anyone can follow up a mediocre game with a good game, or vice-versa

Sure, but when's the last time id put out a good game? Discounting re-releases, that'd be Quake 3, way back in 1999. So they haven't released a good game in almost 13 years now.

That doesn't mean they're incapable of releasing something decent, but it sure doesn't give much evidence that it's likely to happen.

DanteUK wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 05:10:
Definitely not too young and been in IT for 30 years.
Personally I loved Rage and it worked out the box on my PC, but then I've an old Nvidia card and not a new ATI card where ATI screwed up on their driver releases. I fail to see how id can be blamed so much for a bad PC port when the biggest issues where caused by ATI releasing a driver with the wrong .dll's in it!
I'll repeat, the game was very playable and looked great on my PC from day of install - my rig is NOT a top of the range, in fact my Nvidia card I think is THE min spec card listed on the box! A couple of tweaks to the config file and unless I span 180 really fast I never saw any texture popping.

I have to second this. Obviously, the console ports came first this time and megatexturing is not as impressive as it will someday be, but the ATI driver thing was ATI's dog, not id's. Before release, Carmack complained a lot about the difficulty of wringing any kind of performance out of the (superior) hardware of a PC due to crappy software drivers. When Rage came out it was a perfect shitstorm of all the technical issues he'd been pointing out. It's ATI that doesn't care about PC gaming, not id.

I'm looking forward to the time when Bethesda uses the Rage engine for their next Fallout game instead of the "claymation engine" they use now.

DanteUK wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 05:24:

InBlack wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 03:50:
Sure Doom3 had purty graphwhorix but last I checked id's games were famed for their multiplayer and gameplay.

If Doom4 doesnt have pentagrams, halucinogenic levels, serious disembowlment and hundreds of monsters trying to eat your brains at the same time then Im not interested....

Still amazes me that people criticize id for not copying themselves and releasing 'another Doom clone' but with a shiny new engine. Doom3 worked for me as a game because the game was designed around the engine, the engine did 100% realtime lighting and shadows, this meant it was perfect for a suspense and scare type game. If you just want 'hundreds of monsters trying to eat your brains' then play Serious Sam or one of the other games that stayed on that path. Imagine the scene: you're walking into a creeping dark space station, there are flickering lights, moving shadows, strange subtle noises, suddenly out of no where comes 100 cartoony demons charging at you! - Doesn't work for me, all tension is gone and it's back to run-shoot-run ignore the environment and shoot anything that moves ( including the shadows! ) a waste of a game engine. Graphics are the only thing that define a good game for me, oh and monsters jumping out of closets are always scary!

There fixed that for you. Seriously though, why NOT copy themselves? Why fix something if it aint broke???

Let me draw a parallel to another huge and (mostly) independent studio who have perfected the formula. Blizzard. Doesnt seem to hurt their pockets that much and their fans seem to be pretty happy with them....

DanteUK wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 05:24:

InBlack wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 03:50:
Sure Doom3 had purty graphwhorix but last I checked id's games were famed for their multiplayer and gameplay.

If Doom4 doesnt have pentagrams, halucinogenic levels, serious disembowlment and hundreds of monsters trying to eat your brains at the same time then Im not interested....

Still amazes me that people criticize id for not copying themselves and releasing 'another Doom clone' but with a shiny new engine. Doom3 worked for me as a game because the game was designed around the engine, the engine did 100% realtime lighting and shadows, this meant it was perfect for a suspense and scare type game. If you just want 'hundreds of monsters trying to eat your brains' then play Serious Sam or one of the other games that stayed on that path. Imagine the scene: you're walking into a creeping dark space station, there are flickering lights, moving shadows, strange subtle noises, suddenly out of no where comes 100 cartoony demons charging at you! - Doesn't work for me, all tension is gone and it's back to run-shoot-run ignore the environment and shoot anything that moves ( including the shadows! ) a waste of a game engine.

They're criticizng them for releasing a console game and screwing over the PC gamers that made them what they are. And yes, Tim has obviously left because of the new corporate direction. All the old companies you know and loved, id, Bethsoft, Bioware, et al. are all over and done and have been for some time now.

panbient wrote on Feb 1, 2012, 05:13:
I remember getting Q3 back in the day then turning around and immediately going back to the original Unreal Tournament.

Very much a matter of taste, I remember well the real battle, Q3 vs UT.
Personally I preferred Q3, just felt better. I've not followed what happened to UT, do people still play it online ?
I know a couple of years ago I played Q3 online and was surprised to see how many people and servers there still were. These days I still play Quake3Live about once a week, never any problems finding server with a people on to play with.

Actually a quick look at a US server tracker in the middle of the morning (UK) I'm guessing it's night still most of the US:
Q3 players active: 100(aprox couldn't be bothered it add them up)
UT3 players active: 4

I guess that answers my question on Q3 vs UT