RAGE

UPDATE: Doom 4 "Indefinitely Postponed" Following Rage's Disappointing LaunchA source claiming to be close to the publishers of the recently-launched Rage has told Kotaku that, at a recent "company wide" meeting held in Dallas, Bethesda and parent company Zenimax made the decision to "indefinitely postpone" development of Doom 4.


Pete Hines, responding to our request for comment this morning, says no game in development has been postponed.


"We don't comment on unannounced games and DOOM 4 hasn't been announced (though I appreciate that id has previously referenced DOOM 4)," Hines said. "Games are done when they are done and no title under development at id has been postponed – indefinitely or otherwise."


Despite having been first announced back in 2008, Doom 4 has been on the backburner at developers id while work was completed on multiplatform shooter RAGE, which was released earlier this month to decidedly mixed reviews. While Crecente enjoyed it (and I'm digging it as well), the game's repetitive nature and numerous technical issues left it falling well short of many people's expectations.


The apparent source says that Zenimax and Bethesda made the decision based on the "the issues and reviews" surrounding RAGE's launch, which in their eyes has demonstrated "a serious lack of confidence in the project management at id".


Remember that, before you get too invested in this, at the moment the news is entirely unconfirmed. We've contacted Bethesda for comment and clarification, and will update if we hear back.



You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
RAGE

Rage Creators Were Unprepared for Tough Questions, Reporter AssertsYou may recall that a couple of weeks ago, Gamasutra's Brandon Sheffield ran an interview with id Software's CEO Todd Hollenshead about Rage. In the interview, Sheffield expressed some doubts about the game, and wasn't convinced by many of Hollenshead's answers. It was a solid piece of journalism, and as our own Stephen Totilo pointed out, it's the kind of interview we could use more of.


Sheffield has penned an op-ed about the interview and the response it prompted. In the piece, he recounts playing the game at a San Francisco event, and how as he played, time and again he found himself flummoxed by the design decisions that id had made. After playing, he sat down to talk with Hollenshead and Rage artist Andy Chang and asked about the issues he noticed.


The oddest thing was how unprepared Hollenshead and Chang were for my questions. How had nobody broached these subjects before? It felt as though the game had been developed in a bubble, where they were told everything they were doing was great, without question. I can understand that, it's id after all. But Hollenshead seemed to genuinely appreciate that I had taken a laser-focus to the game's systems, and the air in the room was contemplative, not hostile. We spoke for an hour, and smiled and shook hands at the end.


After the interview ran, Sheffield describes receiving an anonymous email from only identified as being from a "AAA creative director" that described his line of questioning as "hostile" and "clearly biased," and claims to have instructed PR to refuse future requests form Gamasutra regarding their game. Sheffield doubts the veracity of this email, but all the same, wonders about the language used.


It's out of respect for id that I called them out on what I saw. I gave them an early chance to defend issues with the game that others were undoubtedly going to have upon release. If treating someone else's work the way you'd treat your own - that is to say with scrutiny and criticism - is disrespectful, then we clearly have different definitions of the word.


Opinion: Journalistic Rage [Gamasutra]



You can contact Kirk Hamilton, the author of this post, at kirk@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
RAGE

There appears to be a number of ways to drop yourself beneath the skin of Rage. This one, by hidden rebel elevator, seems the most convenient.



You can contact Brian Crecente, the author of this post, at brian@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
RAGE

Rage: The Kotaku Review It doesn't really hit me until about half way through the game. I've been spending so much time worrying over the trick of staying alive that I haven't notice just how insignificant I am.


It's not until I'm sent on another armed errand, off to save a general from a federal prison, that I realize that I'm risking my virtual life not to be the hero, but to save the hero.


It's a subtle mindfuck. One that I think some people might not pick up on initially. Who would blame them? Rage is a distracting video game.


***

By far my favorite distractions in Rage are the people of the game's desiccated Earth. The friendly ones, the ones that cluster like tribes in run down gas stations and subways, are a plentiful mix of personalities and attitude. There's the grandmotherly doctor with the steel, two-pronged robotic arm and reading glasses hacked together from bits and pieces of other glasses. The cute girl hanging out in Subway Town who's only purpose seems to be telling me how terrible things are going to get. The mayors, the racers, the shop owners, the survivors.


The unfriendly people, the enemies, are a wild variety of mutant, gearhead, Eastern Bloc militant, high-tech enforcers and hooting, wild-eyed outlanders. These are the guys (I don't think I ever saw a female enemy in the game.) who provide the grist in this mostly-shooter. What separates them isn't just the look of their faction, the flavor of their insanity, but the way they come at you, literally. Early on in the game, you'll come up against people who jump, scramble, roll and swing at you, ping-ponging off the walls and clutter of their dens to attack you. It forces you back, as you try to pick them off along their unpredictable advance. Later the game sends enemies at you who use traps, strategy, flanking tactics, bots and armor to take you out.


These ever-changing enemy types don't just keep you on your toes, they keep the game from feeling old. Ten hours into my 12 hour or so play-through of Rage, I came across a group of enemies that grumbled about how terrible their lot in life was. They seemed the most human of the game's bad guys. When you shoot at them, they turn and run, sometimes tripping over their own feet, scrambling to get back up as they shoot at you or covering their face or body with a waving hand as they seek cover.


And enemies don't all come at you on foot. You'll also have to do a bit of driving getting from the safe zones of those few settlements to the hang-outs of this world's bandits. On the road, in an armed buggy, ATV or car, you can face-off against other drivers, blasting away at them with mini-guns, rockets and pulse canons, or just try to outdrive them to your destination.


The driving is deliberately loose, the physics completely unbelievable, but in a good way.


They turn and run, sometimes tripping over their own feet, scrambling to get back up as they shoot at you or covering their face or body with a waving hand as they seek cover.

Survival in Rage isn't just a matter of skilled aiming and shooting, on foot and in car, it's also about weapon and ammo selection. The first weapon you're handed in the game is the worst, a bulky Settler's Pistol that can hold a variety of ammo, each in cylinders that snap in and out of the gun. While better, more interesting weapons come along as you make your way through the game, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, crossbows, sniper rifles and rocket launchers; the game's real shooting innovation comes with those weapons many ammo types.


Most weapons have a variety of bullet types you can load up in a gun. The pistol, for instance has bullets called Fat Mammas that tear through targets as if they're made of paper. It also has an ammo pack that turns the weapon into a machine pistol.


Other weapons have far more interesting ammo types, though. The shotgun can shoot off grenades or EMP charges. The crossbow can shoot electrified bolts that kill and electrocute, taking out groups of clustered enemies if they happen to be standing in water. The mindcontrol bolt turns your target into a staggering, jittering zombie that you can force to walk toward other enemies for a few seconds before they explode.


While you can buy most of this ammo, it's not cheap. There are two ways to deal with the cost of the game's few general stores. You can earn money through side-quests, or by competing on foot or in car. The game's two big towns have racetracks where you can drive in a variety of races to earn a special cash used only for upgrading your vehicles. You can also head over to Mutant Bash TV, a post-apocalyptic television show that pits you against rooms full of mutants for cash prizes. You can also sell off the bits and pieces of clutter you collect on your wanderings through the world. Empty beer bottles, old Doom coffee mugs, radios, bits of scrap metal, can all be picked up and later sold. You can even gamble, trying your hand at the game's many mini and not so mini-games, like finger fillet, Strum, and that amazing collectible trading card game.


But it won't take long for you to realize the best method for getting the high end ammo is to make it yourself. The game's engineering system is pretty straight forward. First you need to purchase or find schematics for the ammo or item you want to build, then you need to find the required bits and pieces to build them. Some items, like quick healing bandages, only require two items to build. Other items, like games AI-controlled, spider-like sentry bot, requires a half-dozen or so items.


Once you have the ingredients, you can engineer anywhere: Just hop into your inventory screen, choose what you want to build and press a button.


Items, like the weapon selection and ammo types, offer another neat twist on just running and gunning. These buildable objects include grenades, decapitating Wingsticks you can whip at enemies, gun turrets, lockgrinders and those nearly sentient sentry bots. The sentry bots, when set loose, drop down at your feet and then scramble around an area looking for enemies to unloose machine gun spray at. Once they clear an area through gun fire, or the occasional pouncing attack, they scramble back to your side to walk through an area with you until they're blown to bits. It's almost like having a sidekick, though they rarely last very long.



Having someone by your side, even if it's only a dog-like spider bot, helps to give you a bit of companionship in your wanderings across the game's surprisingly broad settings.


The Xbox 360 version of the game comes on three discs. The first two contain the campaign, the third the game's multiplayer. The first disc of the two is the half of the world that includes Wellspring, the second includes the world of Subway Town. Both areas feature one major town, a wide mix of hang-outs and enemy dens and plenty of places to drive around and explore. Rage does an amazing job of delivering an eclectic mix of settings that provide gamers a chance to shoot their way through a variety of crumbling set pieces.


You will fight through collapsing hospitals and malls, shoot it out in an old garage, in bunkers, through a future military fort and an old prison. Most of my favorite backdrops, though, are on that second disc. My favorite of the lot is one of the end-game settings, a place that stretches its route through the teetering tin structures of cliff dwellings. It's one of the only places where you'll feel like you're not pushing your way through nearly always claustrophobic settings.


While id typically does a solid job of obscuring the required invisible walls found in these sorts of games, channeling players down set paths filled with enemies and objectives, they never really make use of their expansive world.


The game's biggest missed opportunity is that while there are massive outdoor settings packed with hostile vehicles and intricately detailed interior levels loaded with scrambling enemies, the two rarely meet.


When you're sent on a mission you nearly always find yourself driving to a door, getting out of your car and then entering a level. I would have loved to experience a more seamless transition from outdoor to indoor, one that allowed me to hop in and out of my vehicle, pick off enemies, approach the objective the way I wanted to.


It's one of the few design decisions I'm unhappy about in Rage, though overall I relished the experience of separately shooting and driving my way through this new id world.


The game also does have some technical issues, problems that may or may not bother you depending both on your willingness to put up with visual imperfections and which platform you're playing the game on.


Played on PC, the launch version of Rage was plagued with issues for some. Many of those problems are fixed or are being fixed, but even fully repaired, the computer version of id's latest title will be, at its best, the equal of the console version.


I was hoping for a game that would push my gaming rig to its full potential, but instead found a game that took some odd shortcuts in arriving on the computer.


The game's defibrillator is a the most obvious example of this. In Rage, when you die you get a second chance: A defibrillator hard-wired into your character kicks in, shocking you back to life and killing or stunning nearby enemies. On console the percentage of health restored and the amount of damage inflicted is determined by how well you match up thumbstick movements on your controller with what's on screen and then the timing of twin trigger pulls. On PC you just have to press a single button at the right time. It's a watered down equivalent, one that could be used as a metaphor for id's approach to the PC version of the game. The graphics and settings all seem like echoes of what you experience on the console.


Initially, I would have put the game's multiplayer in that category too. I was surprised and disappointed after wrapping up the game to be reminded that it doesn't include the sort of multiplayer I like to play most: Deathmatch.


It seemed a weird choice for the people who pioneered the mode, who coined the term, to not include it in their latest game. But after talking with some of the id folk about why they decided to bypass the typical multiplayer modes for a different take on multiplayer, I decided to spend a chunk of the day checking it out.


I found a game that took some odd shortcuts in arriving on the computer.

There are two types of multiplayer in Rage. Wasteland Legends is a batch of cooperative missions apart from Rage's single-player campaign that can be played and replayed locally and with folks online for high scores and leaderboard placement. They're solid, challenging shooter fare that have you working your way through a level with a buddy, shooting up everyone in sight.


Road Rage drops players is the game's only competitive multiplayer and, as the name implies, it takes place completely behind the wheel of a vehicle.


Initially, I wasn't a fan of the game's armed races and chases. But then I started playing around with the game's fourth mode, Carnage. Carnage is essentially deathmatch in cars. Once you get used to the peculiarities of the game's physics and odd assortment of gadgets and weapons, I loved it.


I discovered, while leveling up and unlocking new armor, cars, skins and weapons, that you can drastically alter the course of your airborne vehicle with a turbo boost simply by swiveling your car about in midair and hitting the thrusters. Suddenly, I found myself boosting through in-air bootleg turns, bunny-hopping over approaching enemies, blasting away at dune buggies with in-car nailguns. It's a much more nuanced car combat game then I'm used to, and also a much more rewarding one.


The fact that there's just the one weapons-centric mode may start to tax my interest, but Road Rage is no throw-away addition, it's an engaging, different sort of online experience, exactly what id seemed to be aiming for when they decided to skip traditional deathmatch.


***

What I wasn't as happy with was the game's conclusion. Rage's story isn't bad, it's just light. It feels like the prelude to something much bigger, a table-setter for future games set in a world with a rich fiction and eclectic environments. You are, as I mentioned earlier, not the hero of this game.


That doesn't bother me that much, just like the sometimes rough finish of the game's technical presentation doesn't bother me. Sure there are issues, but there is so much to fall into and examine that the fact that the game isn't constantly stroking my ego isn't a big deal.


In Rage you are a guy, one of many people, buried in the ground in preparation for a world-ending comet strike. When you pop free of the stasis you've been placed in for years, you're not the only one to make it out alive, just the only one who survived in your particular pod.


Early on, the survivors of Rage's world make it clear that you have special powers, but they also almost immediately get busy taking advantage of you and those powers.


It's a vastly different experience than what you'll normally find in a shooter. There are several times in Rage when you show up to play the role of the hero only to discover your just the latest hero, sent in to fix a problem. More than once, I found myself searching through the pockets of the last hero, hoping to find a little extra cash or ammo.


The game's first mission makes it clear you're just the new guy, not "the guy." If you die, things don't end, they just find a new person to send. And that message never wavers. When it finally sinks in that I'm just an armed messenger, it didn't really bother me.


But the developers could have done so much more with that decision. While it frees them from the need to build up a story around you as world saver, it shouldn't preclude any sort of character development. Not being a hero doesn't also mean not having a backstory or motivation to do anything other than be a messenger boy.


The ending, while a perfect fit for the notion of player as useful tool, misses a wonderful opportunity to highlight id's interesting narrative decision. They could have used the ending to shock a player into the realization that they're a nobody in a dying world, ultimately expendable now that things are nicely in motion.


It's not a terrible misstep, just a missed opportunity that could have nicely strengthened the game's final moments.


That said, I loved Rage. It's rare when I set aside a bit of time in my hectic schedule to relish the final moments of a game I've spent a dozen hours playing through.



You can contact Brian Crecente, the author of this post, at brian@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
RAGE

Why The Deathmatch Kings Left Deathmatch out of Rage They invented the term, so why isn't deathmatch available in Rage?


The notion of players fighting against each other in a first-person shooter is so tied to the genre that it's surprising when it isn't included as a feature. More surprising though, is the idea that the people who may have coined the the term deathmatch would decide to not include it in their first major new shooter in decades.


"Deathmatch" was likely coined by John Romero back when he was helping to build a local area network version of the mode for proto-shooter Doom, or so the story goes.


"Sure, it was fun to shoot monsters, but ultimately these were soulless creatures controlled by a computer," Romero said in an interview for book Masters of Doom. "Now gamers could play against spontaneous human beings-opponents who could think and strategize and scream. We can kill each other!"


While players can join each other to play through a set of cooperative, stand-alone missions, or they can fight each other in a series of online race combat matches, Rage has no classic competitive shooter play. So why did id Software decide to exclude deathmatch from Rage?


What's With the Defibrillator
When you die in Rage the game drops players into a defibrillator mini-game. The better you do at it, the more damage you inflict on nearby enemies and the more health you regain. But the PC and console version are drastically different.
The console version has players manipulating both thumbsticks to match patterns and then pulling both triggers to hit a target. The PC version has players pressing a single button. Willits tells Kotaku that they went through four versions of the defibrillator. "On the PC the defibrillator turned into a series of button smashes that wasn't fun, or was too hard, or way too easy." In the end they decided to go with a timing based system that "allowed for players to quickly get back into the action."


"We have always said we wanted to do something different with Rage," Tim Willits, id Software creative director, told Kotaku. "We didn't want Rage to follow the same pattern of our other titles; we wanted it to be unique amongst our IPs."


In Rage, id Software wanted to create a single-player-centric shooter that was more about the campaign than it was about the multiplayer, Willits said. The multiplayer of Rage, he said, was meant to be an add-on, not a focal point.


id decided to stray from the norm because they wanted to try something different, he said, to take some chances and attempt to design something they've never done before.


"The easy path would have been to create a classic deathmatch game but if no one takes risks anymore the entire industry will begin to get stagnate," Willits said. "I think gamers are quite shrewd these days and appreciate developers trying to explore new game types that aren't done in every other title they release. The response to our multiplayer offering has been quite positive and I'm happy we did something different."


See Also

Why The Deathmatch Kings Left Deathmatch out of Rage


Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?

The idea from the start was a game that blurred the lines between how games looked on console and PC.
id Software's most famous games, actually all of its major games, were titles built on the computer first, then brought to consoles later.

But not with Rage. More »



Why The Deathmatch Kings Left Deathmatch out of Rage


id Explains How to Tweak the Most Out of PC Rage, More Official Settings Coming Soon

The PC version of Rage will soon have a bevy of new ways for gamers to tweak the way the game behaves and looks on their system, id Software tells Kotaku.
"Rage has fewer tunable settings than games we've released in the past," Robert Duffy, Rage programming director, told Kotaku. More »




You can contact Brian Crecente, the author of this post, at brian@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
Quake

Among amateur rocket-launching circles, there's a bounty called "The Carmack Prize". It's named for id boss, Doom co-creator and budding rocket scientist John Carmack, and will reward anyone who can get a home-made rocket 100,000 feet into space and capture some GPS data from it.


The first people to claim the prize will pick up $10,000 from Carmack. Nobody has managed the feat yet, but late last month a team got awful close.


On September 30, Derek Deville made a rocket, named it Qu8k (pronounced "Quake", and using the classic id shooter's logo), stuck a camera and some GPS gear to it and shot it off a launch pad in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.


Sadly, he wasn't able to get a GPS reading from the rocket, but as you'll see from the footage above, he at least got the 100,000 feet part under his belt. While the beginning of the clip focuses on Qu8k's launch, eventually you'll get to some amazing scenes from a camera attached to the rocket's casing, which shows...well, what the Earth looks like to a home-made rocket that's just been shot 121,000 feet into space.


If you're wondering why Carmack has his name attached to the prize, he's a budding rocketeer himself, with one of the leading entries in a NASA competition to build a home-made lunar lander.


Glorious 121,000′ Amateur Rocket Flight [MAKE]



You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
RAGE

RAGE's PC Version has Been Updated, Might be Better nowThe PC launch of id's anticipated shooter RAGE has been, well, a "Cluster!@#$". And that's in the developer's words. Does a massive update released over the weekend help things?


It certainly helps help things. The update, which is out now, adds many of the hardware configuration options people were mystified weren't there in the first place, like in-game settings for VSync and anisotropic filtering, along with the option to adjust the game's use of a texture cache, which might alleviate the PC version's biggest problem of textures popping in all the time.


I say might because even with this adjusted, I still got some pop-in, especially in the towns. The anisotropic options are nice though, since the game (like it has for just about everybody) underestimated my PC's grunt and slid everything too low.


Sadly, my biggest technical problem with the game - the strange gulf in mouse sensitivity between the main game and the menu screens - hasn't been fixed.


Rage Updated [Steam]



You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
RAGE

Appropriately enough, the season four finale of Breaking Bad is on AMC tomorrow night. You may recall that, in late August, Rage made a strange cameo in the meth-slinging drama, in which someone plays the game with a light gun. Well, Rage has returned the favor with a Breaking Bad prop cameo of its own.


No real spoilers that I can see here, although the item in question is not impossible to find and you may stumble across it yourself. The instructions are in that video above, which also shows the light gun outtake in question.


Easter Eggs—Rage Wiki [WikiGameGuides via Joystiq. h/t Commenter]


RAGE

Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"? The idea from the start was a game that blurred the lines between how games looked on console and PC.


id Software's most famous games, actually all of its major games, were titles built on the computer first, then brought to consoles later.



But not with Rage. id Software's big genre-blending shooter was created using the company's new id Tech 5 technology, an engine designed to run across all platforms, console or PC, with the same assets.


But somehow the end result wasn't just a game that looked worse on one platform, it was a game that, at least for some, looked worse on the one platform id had for so long embraced: The computer.


***

The chief issue with the current state of Rage on the computer, id says, is mostly one caused by the drivers that help the game interface with graphics cards made by Nvidia and ATI, something very frustrating for the perfectionists at id.


While Rage was built on technology meant to make the game the same on all platforms, it was still built using computer. Specifically, Rage creative director Tim Willits, told me the studio's internal development tools run on 64-bit PC systems, but when the game is submitted to the "build system," all platforms are created.


That's when the game is tested, rigorously.


"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version." - John Carmack

"This system has led to incredibly solid and bug-free 360 and PS3 versions," Willits said. "Unfortunately, we have had video driver issues that have caused problems and frustrations with our PC fans. Everyone at id Software is very upset by these issues which are mostly out of our control. We are working with both AMD/ATI and Nvidia to help them identify and fix the issues with their drivers. We've had assurances that these problems are being addressed and new drivers will be available soon."


***

The issues were so severe that it drove the normally soft-spoken Carmack to cuss. Well, nearly cuss. In a response to Kotaku about the launch problems, Carmack censored himself, but the anger was still there.


"The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$," he wrote. "We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch; we had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions."


"We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn't work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn't help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms."


A question of prime platforms elicited another surprising response from Carmack, one he says he knows won't make people happy.


I've noticed that among those people who aren't enjoying the PC experience, I wrote to the developers, the underlying issue seems to be one driven by expectations. People seemed to have been hoping that this would be a game that proved the value of owning a PC over a console. But instead they got a game that they feel cut some corners to level the experience between console and PC. Do you think that is a fair assessment? Does id still see the PC as the leading platform to make games for?


"You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," Carmack replied. "We chose the latter."


Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?


The fact that id had already decided that they wanted Rage to run at 60 frames per second already removed one of the major things PC gamers look for in a title, he continued. That only left resolution, anti-aliasing, and texture streaming as things that a computer gamer might want to see look better than on a console.


"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."


[Pic via Reddit]



You can contact Brian Crecente, the author of this post, at brian@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.

See Also

Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?


Your Cable Box Is Dying. Long Live the Game Console!

Your cable box is headed for obsolescence.
It may not be within the next year, but it could be within the next three that having a box dedicated to TV programming sitting under or next to your television will no longer be the norm. More »



Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?


Taking the Taboo Out of Mature Gaming

It's like clockwork; Moments after popping open any game that has a mature rating, my 10-year-old son seems to appear at my elbow to ask if he can play it with me.
It's a mix of things that draws Tristan to these games that he knows I don't let him play. More »



RAGE

id Explains How to Tweak the Most Out of PC Rage, More Official Settings Coming Soon The PC version of Rage will soon have a bevy of new ways for gamers to tweak the way the game behaves and looks on their system, id Software tells Kotaku.


"Rage has fewer tunable settings than games we've released in the past," Robert Duffy, Rage programming director, told Kotaku. "We've added a few more video options in the update that will be available soon and these will provide gamers more flexibility in tuning the game for performance and quality. Additionally we've defaulted several things differently based on CPU/GPU combinations, so that will also help with the overall experience."


"We are still evaluating which options to surface in the update but currently we've added:"
1. Texture Cache [ Small | Large ] which alternates between 4k and 8k pages
2. Texture Anisotropy [ Low | High ]
3. VSYNC [ Off | On | Smart ] "Smart" will only be available once future drivers come out that supports the extension so Off and On are the only options when the patch initially hits.


John Carmack, Rage's technical director, said he was a "bit surprised at the intensity of the reaction" to the low number of video options.


"We are providing a few more options in an update, and we will probably document some of the more obscure tuning options that can be done manually," he said.


We asked Duffy for a quick run down of what gamers can do now, if they want to much about in the game's console or Steam settings. Here's what he told us:


Here are several ways to change settings but the easiest is through the Steam launch options for the game which are accessible by right clicking on RAGE in the Steam Library, choose Properties, and then Set Launch Options. Depending on your setup the following can boost performance and/or quality.


If you have a high end GPU with at least 1GB+ of dedicated video ram you can use what we refer to as 8K Pages. These pages are effectively the GPU-based texture cache and if the video ram is available can greatly reduce texture page-in. Please note that if enough video ram is not available, setting this can drastically reduce performance and this does not always play nice on a 32bit OS. The following command line can be used to enable 8K textures. (Current valid settings are 4096 or 8192.)


+vt_pageImageSizeUnique 8192 +vt_pageImageSizeUniqueDiffuseOnly8192 +vt_pageImageSizeUniqueDiffuseOnly2 8192


Another setting that will prove beneficial to gamers with 4 or less cores is to try different values for vt_maxppf. This particular setting changes how many texture pages are transcoded per frame. On systems with fewer cores reducing it from the default of 128 can greatly enhance performance and limit texture page-in artifacts. A value of 16 appears to be the best option in cases where the CPU is getting hammered because of fewer cores. The patch defaults this value based on the number of cores present but in the meantime gamers can use the following command line to see if it helps with any issues they may be seeing. (Valid settings for vt_maxppf are 8, 16, 32, 64, 128)


+vt_maxppf 16


Let us know in comments what you find works best for your system. Also, what other settings you'd like to seen built into the options menu for the PC.


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You can contact Brian Crecente, the author of this post, at brian@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
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