but calling the ending "awkward" is incorrect. It didn't have an ending. It had a mild arena fight and a button pressing.

When it just put you in a place with targets, it was a solid game. It ran well (for me at least), the shooting felt good, the AI and animation coordination was great. But it was all over the place. I had to drive everywhere, through waves of respawning enemy cars, and when I got back I had to spend money to repair my vehicle and refill my ammo, so I could make it to the next level. I had to compete in races for arbitrary upgrades that were gating content I wanted to play.

I liked the shooting, the looting, the spaces I was fighting in - but the game kept putting me at arm's length away from it.

I would've much preferred 10 hours of the Dead City, the Subway Station, and the Bank Vaults or whatever they were called. Put me in those, put items in front of me (and hidden), and let me enjoy that shooting, and the AI and animation. Oh, and actually end. 

"They were. By id. "

That's very true. The marketing preceding Rage's release was mind blowing to look back on. What they said they were making and what they actually released were so far apart it was staggering. 

I've managed to not recall any of the marketing about Rage before hand. I think my eyes were more focused on the tech, I might have to go digging around for preview articles or such. 

The original topic post has a bunch of links to preview videos and such.

Just watch through the "RAGE Behind the Scenes" series up there and you'll hear all about the deep and meaningful story, etc. 

i liked it at the start, but stopped playing once i needed to race to progress.

i think i wouldn't have minded driving as much as i did except I couldn't figure out how to get my gamepad working just for driving. 

I think I only had to race once or twice to progress ... it's very minimal, IIRC. 

I love that id had the balls to just show uninterrupted gameplay footage in trailers leading up to the release. That is so rare these days :(

If you make your purchase decision based on those gameplay trailers then you knew exactly what you were getting. I enjoyed rage (minus the driving sections) but I was just expecting a good fps rather than some fallout3/fps rpg that some people thought it was going to be? The level design was extremely linear and lacked exploration, but the combat was satisfying and meaty.

I've played it to completion twice, which is more than I can say about 90% of games I play. 

Hah yeah, actually I played through it again myself when they implemented Ultra Nightmare difficulty, and a second playthrough is rare for me. It wasn't that it was a game that blew my mind, but a lot of it was really... comfortable. 

Those previous 2 posts, and Scarecrows.

Rage was a good shooter - you got solid, meaty FPS action in some spectacular environments. The characters were mildly entertaining too, and the optional racing / mini-games were fine. The main problems were having the necessary racing shoe-horned in, and a really weak ending. Fix those and it would have been a great game. Throw in some non-linearity and yeah an extra 10 hours of Dead City, it would have been excellent.

At the end of the day, after playing it, I just wanted more RAGE. Which is a good sign. But I didn't get any....ah well. 

I just can't wrap my head around the ending... at all. What was the logic behind that? Was it an attempt at a 'cliff hanger', thereby galvanizing consumer demand for expansion packs?
Did they finish the game a week before it was released?
What was that? 

There's no way they planned for that ending.

They basically cut it so they could ship in time.

If I had a dollar every time I played a game with a rushed, unfinished ending...

Bit sad to see it from a studio like id though. 

...it's time for a HUGE DLC wrapping up the thing for good.
Ain't it? 

Was one of my fav parts of it, felt really well executed. 

i just wanted to shoot things. played again last night; forced myself to do the mandatory race, then was rewarded with a simple fetch quest that was only driving. stopped playing again.

the racing might be well implemented, but i just don't want to drive a car. i want to shoot things dead. :( 

someone should make a massive mod that fixes all the things people didn't like, ie removing the racing parts completely 

Am I the only one that didn't mind Rage's driving stuff? Honestly, the problem with Rage was its overall lack of ambition in design, and I would direct most of that criticism towards the incredibly samey, simplistic, dungeon crawls where there is nothing to the gameplay beyond travelling down a series of tunnels and shooting a load of blokes with guns. If your only metric for quality is "does it feel meaty and satisfying when I shoot Mohawk Vinnie Jones in the balls?", then Rage scores high, but I dunno, compare its design to Half-Life 2 (nearly a decade older than Rage), and it pales pitifully. 

If the outdoors environment had more gameplay/exploration/scavanging. The 'missions' were good - good shooter action, nice LD (I thought anyway - linear disguised as non-linear). The racing parts were OK, but it would have been better if there was more chaos and exploration in the outdoors areas. More random stashes of loot, NPCs just wondering around doing their own thing would have been nice to talk to.... 

One thing I didn't like was the overworld/dungeon distinction. With this tech I expected everything to be a seamless world. Apart from that, I think a medpack system would have been really nice here, turns a bit pop and stop a lot of times, avoiding crossfire etc.
If the world was seamless things could have been made a bit more of a simulation, so the macro and micro game would be more interconnected etc. 

"Am I the only one that didn't mind Rage's driving stuff?"

I didn't mind it, it was just ... filler. I had to drive places, shoot things, and drive back. The driving parts were peppered with enemy cars that were easily ignored and nothing special happened - ever. It was annoying and clearly only there to eat up gameplay time. 

FFS, they didn't even implement Fast Travel for locations you've already been to. 

The driving to places doesn't bother me much, but it really sucked there wasn't any point exploring since everything is locked anyway, and areas that look like they might have been interesting to explore are clipped to hell.
The races are what I disliked. Being forced to do them and having them be non-trivial (so that I had to expend effort in something I had no interest in) annoyed me the most.
The game seems to promise things but doesn't deliver:
look and feel of an open world game -> no point exploring anything 

All in a matter of minutes(< 60) :(

It was 20 years ago style find keys/items, unlock door ad nauseam. In this decade a game being made should present more than 1996 Quake wrapped in MEGAtexturing!

At least, in.my.mot.so.humble.opinion. 

Hating on Id is the cool new thing right? 

 

but the points people are making completely valid.

This huge world should have been more interesting to explore, but it's barren of any real content (other than looking very pretty).
The levels were really nice too but the gameplay suffered a little because the majority of enemies were very samey.
The lost city should have been so much more.
The big boss fight about half-way through the game was neat but a little simple.
No big boss at the end was a huge huge huge disappointment.
The racing parts, while I enjoyed them, shouldn't have been mandatory.