TurdFergasun wrote on Feb 8, 2012, 08:31:
sure the requirements are a bit steep, but so are the requirements for metro2033 which is a much nicer looking game, so is whitcher2. try to run it w/uber-sampling, or metro with proper AA so they look their best, and try to find a card that can play it at hi resolution at vsync frames, there's still no single card out there that can play it with solid vsync and proper anti aliasing.

two expensive($5-600) video cards that just came out though with 3gb of vram which will soon be the status quo, and just like when doom3 was around and the ati 9800xt came along that could actually play it with solid frames, there was a new yardstick, from the same game, and video card company too. doom3 looked tits out of the box back then, still looks alright today, but sure was a shitty game after the first hour or so. i'm seeing a pattern here. i admit rage as it is, isn't pretty in spots, but as a world to exist in for a time, it's a very compelling place visually, taken in as a whole. sort of steampunk dr seuss to my eyes, and very rich scenes, but just like doom3 rage blew it's wad early and the gameplay became work just to forward the story.

if id ever bother to do the same thing as bethesda with their supposed massive texture pack i'd probably go back for another run, much like how i'll probably risk another arrow to the knee in skyrim, but from the comparison shots, and the peasely 3gb texture pack size i'm not expecting much. perhaps when the new nvidia offerings come out in the next month or two id might find the effort worthwhile.

^Drag0n^ wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 20:22:

And I have a 570 card running on an i7 with 12gigs of RAM, so it's not a "tech" issue. I have more than enough horsepower to run Rage, and it still looks like crap. And that disappoints me somewhat, because I know and get that Carmack was going for the longevity card here, but it comes at the expense of what 99% of gamers are running now. The problem is, Megatexture tech is a bit of a memory whore, and because there are no depth sorting routines that give high-resolution priority to the objects closest to you, more often than not the things in the distance look ok, while those boxes and cans at your feet look like Quake 1 on d_mipcap 0.

John Carmack himself stated that in order to eliminate low resolution textures and texture popping, you need a graphics card that has 3GB of *unified* memory; that's not 2x1.5GB cards in SLI, mind you, but each card MUST have 3GB.

Out of the 314 nVidia Cards available on Newegg, only 4 have this much vRAM, and of those, only 3 use off-the-shelf cooling (the 4th is water cooled). These are ultra high-end 580GTX cards with non-standard vram configs, when compared to nVidia's own reference designs. ATI/AMD do have more options in that arena, but I'm not even sure if they fixed the driver screw-up so many people were struggling with. And for the record, these cards range from $490-$800. So you spend nearly 4x as much for a gaming rig that runs a game almost as nicely as a xBox 360.

That's what people are pissed off about.

I'm not saying that the engine won't look nice. It just doesn't look nearly as good as Skyrim does on your average gaming rig. With today's release of the texture pack, I expect that Skyrim will hold it's own to a decked out Rage-optimized rig as well.

Fundimentally, I get it, and I have no issue with what Carmack was trying to do. But, as a gamer, I do feel a little ripped off by all the hype that said this was going to be their biggest, deepest game yet, and then the story felt like it cut off on Chapter 3 of a 14 chapter novel.

^D^

TurdFergasun wrote on Feb 7, 2012, 04:45:

^Drag0n^ wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 20:22:
Probably because the low res textures that showed up in Rage looked like they were EGA resolution, whereas Skyrim's "High res textures" only fell apart on flora.

Unless you have a 3GB card, there is no way Rage looked better than Skyrim on Ultra.

And that's coming from an admitted disciple of the Church of id Software.

i have a 2gig card on an old ass core 2 system, and it ran beautifully. it clearly wasn't well optimized, but people with video cards with less than 1gig of memory aren't really in the demographic for top releases anymore, so why bother crippling the game for people who don't keep up? clearly pc gaming isn't high on your list for you if you have much less than a 1gig vram gpu, so why should the game dev make you a priority over the entire experience of everyone else who does make it a priority? i know some people like to think their geforce 4's or radeon x850's are still relevant pieces of hardware cause they're still faster than whats in the top consoles, but thats old fart logic, and it only applies to industries that don't evolve as fast as the tech sector and all it's derivatives.

Creston wrote on Feb 7, 2012, 13:10:
Most regular folk don't have a clue how to create/manipulate a custom ini file, so I'm not sure that that's going to help those peeps a whole lot.

Creston

Verno wrote on Feb 7, 2012, 09:12:
Actually IIRC someone at Bethesda mentioned they have a custom ini setting that can be used for load ordering at least. I'm sure Steam Workshop won't be as workable as Wyrebash but it's also intended so that regular folk can use it.

Creston wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 18:13:
It does nothing that Nexus Mod Manager doesn't do, except for auto-updating. On the flipside, the NMM will actually allow you to sort your mods properly, which the workshop will NOT allow you to do.

So using a ton of mods straight out of the workshop is probably a surefire way to get problems...

Creston

^Drag0n^ wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 20:22:
Probably because the low res textures that showed up in Rage looked like they were EGA resolution, whereas Skyrim's "High res textures" only fell apart on flora.

Unless you have a 3GB card, there is no way Rage looked better than Skyrim on Ultra.

And that's coming from an admitted disciple of the Church of id Software.

Jerykk wrote on Feb 7, 2012, 01:00:

The key difference between Skyrim and RAGE is that you can actually interact with what you see in Skyrim. See something interesting off in the distance? You can go there and take a closer look. See a really nice looking fork on a table? You can take it or throw it or sell it. The visuals in RAGE are just that; visuals. You can't interact with any of the details in the environment and you can't explore the pretty scenery you see in the distance. It doesn't matter how nice an environment looks if you can't have any meaningful interactions with it.

However 'niche' pc gaming might have become it is still a competing platform for sales in video games, and to say that the pricing on that platform has no impact on the amount of sales on other platforms is simply short-sighted. Couple that with the fact that you have many more options down the road when you're playing a moddable PC version, and I'd say the PC release was more of a bargain than any console version.

how the hell can complain about the scattered low res textures in rage, but love the entire low res scenes of skyrim? go play gta 4 with how much shit is going on around you, and in the smallest details, the great textures almost everywhere, and it suffered from consolitis worse than either of these two games. same with rage, the scenery looks alive if you have the settings right, and it all helps the big buzzword "immersion".

Jerykk wrote on Feb 5, 2012, 21:53:

Simply charge less on PC for the *exact* same game that is on consoles, with higher resolution settings? That is ridiculous, they would hurt their own sales on their target platform but undercutting it with a cheaper version on PC. Makes no business sense at all.

That's not really true at all. Most PC games already have an MSRP that's $10-20 lower than the console versions. Even when all versions have the same MSRP, PC games go on sale more quickly and more often than console games. For example, I was able to pre-order the PC version of Saints Row 3 for about $30. You couldn't do that with the console versions. I believe I could have pre-ordered The Darkness 2 for around $35 at one point as well.

So no, the price of the PC version of any multiplatform game has no impact whatsoever on sales of the console versions.

nin wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 18:57:

which the workshop will NOT allow you to do.

Have you tried it? I'm looking around and can't find any info on that.

TurdFergasun wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 18:48:
hmm i might actually bother playing more than 3 hours of skyrim if they do this right. rage looked far, far better than skyrim, unless you played both on consoles, or rage didn't run properly like it seems to have for some ppl, but getting things to work right is part of pc gaming. get used to it or get on the console short bus.

how the hell can complain about the scattered low res textures in rage, but love the entire low res scenes of skyrim? go play gta 4 with how much shit is going on around you, and in the smallest details, the great textures almost everywhere, and it suffered from consolitis worse than either of these two games. same with rage, the scenery looks alive if you have the settings right, and it all helps the big buzzword "immersion". try to look at skyrim after without feeling like it's devoid of any detail or life, there's just no atmosphere at all. skyrim reminds me of playing a dx7 game coming from other titles like witcher2, rage, gta4. basically anything from the past 3-4 years, and worse, unlike rage, there is absolutely no redeeming style to the art in skyrim there is no distinct style at all, it just looks like generic mmo art from 4 years ago. skyrim has a tonne of things rage did not, and vice versa. rage looks and feels good with immersive characters, who are actually talking to you with their mouths(what an amazing concept), but a short, n shitty climactic sequence, where skyrim is incredibly fugly, millions of poorly drawn un-interesting characters, but chalk full of stuff, a never ending list of stuff, miles and miles and miles of stuff... boring... boring stuff. quality over quantity for me thanks.

TurdFergasun wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 18:48:
hmm i might actually bother playing more than 3 hours of skyrim if they do this right. rage looked far, far better than skyrim, unless you played both on consoles, or rage didn't run properly like it seems to have for some ppl, but getting things to work right is part of pc gaming. get used to it or get on the console short bus.

how the hell can complain about the scattered low res textures in rage, but love the entire low res scenes of skyrim? go play gta 4 with how much shit is going on around you, and in the smallest details, the great textures almost everywhere, and it suffered from consolitis worse than either of these two games. same with rage, the scenery looks alive if you have the settings right, and it all helps the big buzzword "immersion". try to look at skyrim after without feeling like it's devoid of any detail or life, there's just no atmosphere at all. skyrim reminds me of playing a dx7 game coming from other titles like witcher2, rage, gta4. basically anything from the past 3-4 years, and worse, unlike rage, there is absolutely no redeeming style to the art in skyrim there is no distinct style at all, it just looks like generic mmo art from 4 years ago. skyrim has a tonne of things rage did not, and vice versa. rage looks and feels good with immersive characters, who are actually talking to you with their mouths(what an amazing concept), but a short, n shitty climactic sequence, where skyrim is incredibly fugly, millions of poorly drawn un-interesting characters, but chalk full of stuff, a never ending list of stuff, miles and miles and miles of stuff... boring... boring stuff. quality over quantity for me thanks.

which the workshop will NOT allow you to do.

nin wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 16:47:

I do reccommend getting SkyUI and Better Sorting mods over at Nexus; they certainly make finding items easier in extended inventory.

I'm hoping by march, all the major mods will be uploaded as apart of steam workshop. Was watching a video on that earlier, and it looks awesome, and I hope more games start supporting it.

I think I said it earlier; minimalist UI aside, this game is giganenormous and has very deep gameplay. I have over 250 hours into the game, and I'm STILL finding new locations and major quests.