Rage Gameplay with Willits at E3 '10

Belial said:

...often playing off the fact that one of them isn't too bothered by the influx of casual console gamers and the other blames it for the dumbing-down of games, Bioshock being his favorite example.

Anyone care to elaborate on how Bioshock is dumbed down? Without mentioning the Vita Chambers which can be simply turned off in the options menu...

Bioshock in it's earlier demonstrations were quite a different game compared to the one you finally got.

If you play SS2 you can see what it was largely supposed to be.

Note that even SS2 had the "vita chambers" but in the case of that game. They weren't a guarantee (you actually had to find and activate them first), nor did they come for free.

Had a look at a few videos. Not much difference in content between them, this video http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/30080/bigger shows the ability to use shields in the driving section. I'm not sure the floaty heart and shield fit the theme, unless their trying for lame.

Enjay said:

"Oh my! I still can't believe what we're looking at".
I wonder if these gushing, sycophantic nippleheads have ever actually played a game. I see nothing unbelievable.

Mind you, the gameplay does look more fast paced and interesting than Doom3 IMO.

Since no one addressed this yet I will - they were saying that more because it was being demonstrated on an xbox 360. They're seeing smooth, highly detailed (even if you don't like the area) environment with enemies that are more complex in terms of pathfinding and decision making, lots of polys and such without framerate slowdown. It's not so much the WHAT as the HOW.

Use3D said:

Anyone care to elaborate on how Bioshock is dumbed down? Without mentioning the Vita Chambers which can be simply turned off in the options menu...

I'd just make an extensive comparison to SS and SS2. Removal of most RPG elements, ridiculously simplified inventory compared to SS2 (reminded me of the same thing that happened to the inventory between DX and DX2), using a classic game as a hacking mini-game to disguise the dumbing-down of SS2's excellent skill-based hacking system, etc. etc.

Vita Chambers were never an issue for me. I didn't even know I could turn them off because I never used them anyway. SS and SS2 both had resurrection chambers as well and I never used them either, except for the very first time that I played SS. Did Bioshock have Vita Chambers on every level? I know SS and SS2 didn't have regen chambers on their hardest final few maps.

I don't care if I sound like a nostalgia-fag. All those games aim for the same core gameplay which makes it really easy to name those small details that make or break the experience for me. Especially since most of those details are the exact same things (say, U-Invent vs ValueRep), only differing in design between games. Needless to say, I think Bioshock's interpretation of them is the worst.

Edit: Following the U-Invent vs ValueRep example, I like the universal currency system SS2 had way better than Bioshock's divide between money and junk. Using arbitrary combinations of items you can randomly scrounge up to make stuff like ammo you'll never use because every weapon and ammo combination is pretty much just as effective as any other one is a crap idea. In SS2 I really had to think about spending my 'limited' (yes I'm aware of the exploits and I don't care about them) cash on those few extra grenades that could save my ass later when I no longer have access to that ValueRep machine.

The biggest joke Bioshock played on me was with the weapon upgrades. When the game told me I had to pick them wisely, taught by my previous experience with SS2 where you could pick 4 out of 16 upgrades throughout the game I tried to pick the ones I thought would be useful. Imagine my surprise when I found out there are as many upgrade machines as there are upgrades.

In general the resources in Bioshock felt almost unlimited compared to SS2 and SS. In SS2 you had 3 (4?) Epstein devices in the whole game, greatly limiting your choice of best weapon upgrades if you didn't feel like investing in Modify level 6.

And speaking of resources, the fact that even following the 'good' path lets you have more Adam you'll ever need to buy the most important spells and stat modifiers (I use these names on purpose) is a horrible design decision, considering the freedom you have in switching them around whenever and however you like. If that was supposed to serve as a replacement for SS2's classic RPG stat system then it's a massive failure in my eyes. One of the most important elements of an RPG system for me is the irreversibility of some decisions you make. That's what creates the character that you're playing, doesn't matter if it's choosing nanoaugs in DX or stat advances in SS2. You have to make do with what your earlier choices let you accomplish and you can't just swap stuff around to better fit the problem at hand.

If all of this sounds like SS2 fanboyism, so be it. BTW SS2 did have one major flaw, it lacked one of SS's coolest features - the time limit :)

Only place you didn't have vita chambers was in the final boss fight.

@Belial. Unfotunately. I don't have the same level of discipline as you do. If the game don't care if I die. I end up not caring as well. :/ I played through Bioshock with the wrench just because it didn't matter what I did.

@Use3d. People told me afterwards about the possibility to turn off vita chambers in the options. I never spotted it when I played the game. Though I did spot that I couldn't set up the controls exactly as I wanted them to. Anyway. Why they didn't make something about the vita chambers etc with the skill levels is beyond me.

Not to put the topic back on topic, but wasn't that aiming stuff in the game the same aiming stuff as in that new Wolfenstein game?

Bastet Furry said:

As someone said before, it just boils down to the laziness of the programmers who just cant implement a bunch of #IFDEFs against __WIN__ and __LINUX__ versus __PS3__, __WII__ and __XBOX360__.

It's better to use the following macros since they are used for every (conforming) compiler for these systems:

Windows: _WIN32, _WIN64, _WIN32_WCE
Linux: linux, __linux, __linux__

http://predef.sourceforge.net/preos.html

GhostlyDeath said:

It's better to use the following macros since they are used for every (conforming) compiler for these systems:

Ah, thanks, gona save that to my notefile. :)

Thanks for that Belial, I wasn't aware it was part of Bioshock's design to improve on SS2 in every way. I guess putting '-shock' in the name led people to have expectations like that.

Use3D said:

Thanks for that Belial, I wasn't aware it was part of Bioshock's design to improve on SS2 in every way. I guess putting '-shock' in the name led people to have expectations like that.

They could've used any other name and I think it still would've been widely considered to be the spiritual successor to the SS series.

Even if it were on par with SS2 or slightly worse in some aspects it would've lived up to my expectations. It did the job with the atmosphere and art design (which surprised me, because the Aliens setting was always my favorite), but sadly it fell drastically short on too many gameplay elements.

My lord. People are just "Raging about Rage" in this thread.

Chrono_T said:

My lord. People are just "Raging about Rage" in this thread.

Thank you for your input.

Belial said:

They could've used any other name and I think it still would've been widely considered to be the spiritual successor to the SS series.

Maybe, honestly although I do own SS2 and purchased it when it was released I was still heavily into my Quake2-3 phase and didn't give the game the time it deserved. Had I played more of it I'm sure I'd have a different opinion of Bioshock.

Regardless of the E3 stuff I'm still really geeked about Rage, I'm willing to give id the benefit of the doubt here, going on the fact that I've never played a downright BAD id software game, and I'm not talking about the Raven schlock that's been coming out recently.

Man, that game looks boring as hell.

It's a shame how the progress of games has just been standing still for years and years.

On the plus side, at least I don't have to upgrade my PC every one or two years anymore. This is the same as the games I was playing in 2004.

Looks great.
But, come on, what a bore.
Will def. play it, so let's wait and see.

Pretty generic shooting, however, straightforward FPSs it's the style ID masters, i'm sure there is more below the surface than what we have saw here, the death fall animation doesn't convince me though...

Then, after seeing that video, i got to this other RAGE demo, and what worries me more about it is the evident lack of good facial animation... it almost looks the same as the cold gestureless faces of DOOM3... half life 2 is years behind this and still Id can't craft believable facial animation... check it by yourself at 1:33 :
http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=mAw9MrIW7JM&feature=related
It's supposed to be a mad man, crazy people do a lot of faces!! hope they'll fix that.

Half Life 2 did NOT have better facial animations than Doom3. That's just absurd to claim that. At thetime of it's making, Doom3 had some of the best facial animations around.

As for the shooting. It's not generic shooting that id is famous for. It's great weapon balance in FPS that they are famous for. Look at Doom, and Quake and you got a variety of situational weapons that makes for great game play.

So far in Rage it looks like that AK is pretty much every situation spray and pray.

kristus said:

Half Life 2 did NOT have better facial animations than Doom3. That's just absurd to claim that. At thetime of it's making, Doom3 had some of the best facial animations around

lol?

Facial animation in HL2 worked correctly even for localizations IIRC

That's because they used a lipsync system. The animations in Doom3 were animated by the animators at Id.

kristus said:

That's because they used a lipsync system. The animations in Doom3 were animated by the animators at Id.

What does it matter? The point is that facial expressions looked more real in HL 2 then they did in Doom 3.

Gonna have to jump in here and agree that even now, HL2's facial movements are way better than those seen in Doom3/Rage videos.

With that said, a good friend of mine personally attended E3 and said that Rage was arguably the game of the show (and he has no allegiance to pc gaming, id software, or their products like some people here feel sometimes)

A part of a walkthrough from the 2006 FPS "You are EMPTY".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUTWeWUbmco&

4.10 has some of the best lip synching and appropriate voice ever seen in an FPS game. Also, 2.20 shows one of the most amusing bad guys seen in an FPS...

The game itself is pretty cool though, allot better than the reviews claimed. It also takes it'self seriously beyond the above two points.

<after doing a quick search to see if it had already been brought up>

You know, there's a lot of comparisons here to other games, but nobody has yet to touch on the one game I hope to find some common thread with in RAGE:

STALKER.

STALKER really had little to do but to depict in fine detail a large-ish world inhabited by NPC's, with discrete locations to explore, each with their own dangers, population, and surprises. No leveling, no stats (other than rough comparisons between weapons), no rpg-ish mechanics. Just you, your gun, and a lot of other people with guns with varied dispositions towards you that could change pretty rapidly.

In fact, it's the lack of rpg mechanics that really sucked me into the game. It strikes me that we've used rpg conventions to simulate real-time events in a non-real-time environment (read tabletop). Now that we have real-time environments to simulate, holding on to those mechanics seems to be a bit redundant in most cases. No, I don't need a stat to tell me how accurate I am when I'm the one moving the mouse.

So, if RAGE is largely just a world filled of places to explore and things to shoot, and it's depicted with a relative lack of macro-game mechanics, then I'll be in for a real treat.

Willits did mention at Quakecon, much to my chagrin, that if you wrecked your car out in the middle of nowhere, a taxi could be called to take you back to town.
Fuck that.
If you wreck your car, you should have to hoof it back to town across dangerous terrain, inhabited by tusken-raiders-oh-I-mean-mutants. If your car breaks and you can't get it back to the shop before the mutants wreck it like a H.G. Wells time machine, tough balls. Buy a new one.

That another thing that STALKER did very well: your equipment will wear out, much like in the SS-alikes mentioned already. STALKER did have a very good scavenge-to-survive mentality, and I can only hope RAGE has some of the same.

If not. Hey, it's an iD game. Mod it.

People-who-looked-bored-and-unimpressed: How is this any different from Doom?

Sure, Doom has the benefit of a massive userbase that makes levels, so they clearly suck less.

But the gameplay is essentially the same. Take garR4G3 as a bonus Doom-game rather than as a failed novelty it could be.

I myself have no trust on the innovation of the gameplay. It will be gimmicks.

But how does it matter as long as you shoot and bomb infected people?

To be fair, all the scenery IS Quake. Kinda like Claustrophobopolis but singleplayer (or like Episode 3), and the monsters DO look like the Quake-2 grunt avatar. But they're just like the Doom imps, man. And by the way, isn't it certain that the whip guy is a complete copy of that NAZI DoOm 3 monster? Lazy bastards.

But seriously, there exist linear Doom maps on the web that may very well have hellknights and demons instead of possessed and diformed thugs. I can understand the bitching about Doom 3's low body count and bad screamo music all around. But this is QUAKE and nothing else (I bet Quake had quite a bit of C modding to have all those cars and crap).