Shadowhide on 9/10/2011 at 17:32
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
Patch released. Game works flawlessly now.
and ?
game still suck
sNeaksieGarrett on 9/10/2011 at 17:34
Looks like Shadowhide is another Koki, except with worse language skills.
Ulukai on 9/10/2011 at 17:50
Game works pretty damn well now I've frigged around with the config file a little. Which we shouldn't have to do, but hey.
It's a gorgeous looking FPS with satisfying combat but (so far at least) a lackluster storyline. It's a joy just to explore some of the environments, there's little touches here and there which really make it shine. I was dubious about the driving at first, but it feels so much more satisfying than say, the floaty cars in Borderlands.
Wellspring has a Firefly-frontier-town feel to it, although I can't help but feel they've overdone the abundance of twangy guitar radio which everyone seems to be rocking out to. The enemy AI impresses and the way in which they respond to being hit in different locations and by different weapons all contribute to the feel-good combat factor.
It's an id game, so I never had high expectations for the story - going to take my time playing through and enjoy the visual feast of shiny at which it excels.
The OP (
forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2164246) here helped enormously with problems, btw.
Matthew on 9/10/2011 at 19:23
Quote Posted by sNeaksieGarrett
Looks like Shadowhide is another Koki, except with worse language skills.
Underneath a huge amount of troll Koki usually has a point. I've yet to see Shadowhide make one.
wonderfield on 9/10/2011 at 20:31
Quote Posted by Ulukai
It's a gorgeous looking FPS with satisfying combat but (so far at least) a lackluster storyline. It's a joy just to explore some of the environments, there's little touches here and there which really make it shine.
If there's one thing that truly impresses me about the game is the astounding level of attention to detail. It's very easy to dismiss the game's visuals when you jam your face up against a particularly bad texture and see how horrendous it looks (and there are many such examples), but when taking in a broader view of the world, it's almost obscene how much detail is presented. It's unfortunate that the obstacles preventing the game from being consistently jaw-dropping are mostly logistical, rather than technical, as the platform itself is capable of delivering so much more visual information if the resources (virtual textures) are there to back it. GPUs can address larger pages and render more compelling visuals for a negligible performance hit
if there's a good backing from the virtual textures, but that level of resource quality isn't what shipped with the game. With the backing of the uncompressed, 150 GB textures, the game would look quite a lot better than it does now (and page generation would be faster, too), but it would also have to ship on multiple Blu-rays (or even on hard disk).
id has a history of hitting media storage walls. Doom 3 shipped with grossly over-compressed audio due to media constraints. Like Doom, Rage is an example of the experience being hampered by storage, media and distribution obstacles as opposed to more general technical ones. They keep finding themselves in a situation where major sacrifices have to be made due to media constraints. Whether that's a result of purely bad technical decisions is up to debate.
lost_soul on 10/10/2011 at 01:38
They could have shipped Doom 3 on a single DVD with better audio quality, rather than 3 CDs. Game publishers had this misconceived notion that players enjoyed shoving disk after disk into their drives to install a game, when in reality anyone who had a graphics card remotely capable of playing that game would have had a DVD drive too. This kept up until at least 2006. I remember installing games that came on 6 CDs from 2006.
I had a DVD drive in 2002 and it was only $50. The store-bought PCs from late 2001/early 2002 all came with DVD readers too.
june gloom on 10/10/2011 at 02:17
What the fuck are you on about? It's not about a "misconceived notion" you unbelievable ninny. Developers knew full well their games were outgrowing CD. Like everything else, it was about MONEY.
Look, the big changeover in video games from CD to DVD didn't really start happening until around 2005. Why? Despite what you may think, most people didn't have a DVD drive in their PCs as a standard component until the mid-00's. And a big part of that was price- it was not economically practical to buy a PC with a shiny DVD drive when all you wanted to do is make photo CDs of grandma's birthday.
How common the latest and greatest in computer parts is driven largely by how many average people buy it.
Jason Moyer on 10/10/2011 at 02:33
You can get a Blu-Ray drive for your PC for $60 now, and a 2.5TB hard drive for $100. I can imagine the shitstorm if Rage had come out on 3 Blu-Ray discs and required a 200 gig install.
wonderfield on 10/10/2011 at 04:01
Quote Posted by lost_soul
They could have shipped Doom 3 on a single DVD with better audio quality, rather than 3 CDs. Game publishers had this misconceived notion that players enjoyed shoving disk after disk into their drives to install a game, when in reality anyone who had a graphics card remotely capable of playing that game would have had a DVD drive too.
I didn't have a DVD drive at the time. I did, however, have a 6800 Ultra — the most expensive card available at the time of Doom 3's release. I probably would have bought a DVD drive if Doom 3 had shipped as a DVD-only SKU, though.
From what I can recall, at that time there simply was no 'killer app' to justify the investment in a DVD drive (unless you consider DVD movie playback to be a 'killer app', which I didn't until at least 2000), and id apparently had no intention of making Doom 3 the first killer app for DVD.
Volitions Advocate on 10/10/2011 at 05:43
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
You can get a Blu-Ray drive for your PC for $60 now, and a 2.5TB hard drive for $100. I can imagine the shitstorm if Rage had come out on 3 Blu-Ray discs and required a 200 gig install.
This hits the nail on the head. If there is anything I've noticed about the majority of posts on the steam forums and comments on the news sites, its that a hell of a lot of PC gamers these days (at least the ones that troll around on forums and websites) have huge entitlement problems. How DARE they release the game in a format I can't easily chew up and spit out with my machine. Also, a PC dev has to account for all the computers that have older tech, not everyone has an i7 and a 700 dollar videocard. I personally do not have a Blu Ray drive in my computer, and I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon. Another aspect to think of is how much thought they (id) put into this issue. It may seem petty, but microsoft charges for EVERYTHING. A 3rd DVD on xbox would have put their royalty payments through the roof, so they had to compress the textures even more to get it to fit. Otherwise there would be so little profit for them, why make the game? I suppose that's not an issue on the PC, but really this game is a gem, It really is something different than what has been coming out lately, Sure its not the best story so far, but when has it been with this company? I find that when I stop looking at the game through a lens coloured by another game, I really start to enjoy it for what it is. Much like bioshock.
What worries me, is all of this bellyaching, and people cancelling their pre-orders, and the slough of " i will never support this developer again" comments that are flooding the internet right now... I see no reason for id, or bethsoft, or epic, or eidos (etc. etc.) to give a crap about the PC platform. It's no wonder they focus on consoles now a days, Console owners don't bitch like we do, and they gladly fork out more money, its our fault the devs have nearly all stopped caring about us, so few people who are hardcore PC gamers have had anything good to say about a PC title that has been relased recently. Consolitis is a term that is used so profusely, and nobody seems to want to give the devs any breathing room. We're lucky to have guys like Carmack and Hollenshed who still care about the platform and have a passion for it, and if all we do is alienate them over a few crappy glitches on a release, then I dont see why they should continue caring. They put their heart and soul into making these products, and accusing them of not giving a shit is just going to put them off, and eventually, they really WILL stop caring, and I don't see how its anybodies fault but our own.
It's been 4 days since the games release, and a patch was made to fix the graphical problems. That's a decent feat to admire. And now I'm enjoying the game even more. All that's left is the low quality textures that we were informed we were getting months and months ago, with a tentative promise that they would release a high res texture pack down the road when they were able to. They could use a little breathing room and a little more faith from the community.
my $0.02
