RAGE Diary: The Block World and a Question of Respect

I had seen RAGE twice before launch, once in 2010 at Gamescom, when the game was played for me by one of the developers, and again this year at E3, when I was able to get my hands on a controller and spend about half an hour killing mutants in the drab world of this first person shooter.

Both times I liked what I saw and played and I was really keen on playing the new shooter from id Software, especially because it was a new intellectual property and because the enemies I faced seemed to really deliver a challenge that was missing from modern first person shooters.

Last week when we got the game at Softpedia I was eager to give it a try and then write about the experience in a series of Game Diaries, as we did for other titles.

After the unskippable intro and after a slight disappointment that I could not mess around with actual video settings I went for a new campaign and waited for RAGE to impress me.

I got as far as trying to spin my character around his axis to look at the game world.

That's when the world fractured into a broken space, something half post apocalypse video game and something else like a tweaking Matrix, with textures failing to actually load as fast as I could look and move around.

My colleague Andrei Dobra, who eventually wrote the Quick Look for RAGE, told me that I should first upgrade my drivers (I have a Nvidia card) and I felt some relief when I saw that the company had created new ones specifically for the id Software game.

Unfortunately issues remained even after a quick update and a restart and only after the developers put out a patch the game feels solid and good looking enough for a longer look.

I felt a little betrayed that a company like id Software, well known for impressing and innovating with Doom and Quake, has treated the PC, once their main platform, with such disrespect, when a little more testing and some coordination with the video card manufacturers could have prevented all issues.

My RAGE now looks good but something like in the attached screenshots sometimes still happens.