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. 

I think you have to give a game a bit more than less than an hour to judge it. not that i've played rage, yet. 

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!

This is a complete fabrication. 

Games should definitely present in-depth stories and emotional characters, lengthy cutscenes, quicktime events, immersive real world scenarios, plenty of puzzles / combat complexities / RPG elements ....cos all those things are essential for a good shooter. 

Why do you guys even install games anymore? You want Quake, so just play Quake. :) 

I enjoyed playing Rage.

I like lots of modern FPS games, but generally what makes them good are the core mechanics and aesthetics, rather than superficial window-dressing. 

... is that feeling of frustration that comes from seeing something that has the fundamentals down right but falls short of greatness for seemingly silly, trivial reasons. Which is much worse than the frustration that comes from something just being common-or-garden variety crap. 

For an FPS to be great, you need an environment that is properly part of the gameplay, i.e. level design that's not just "shoot blokes". The Half-Life games are the ultimate examples of this, and still by far the best shooters ever made. Quake 1/2 also had it going on, in a more primitive, arcadey way. I long for the golden days of FPS when I felt I was exploring a vast, complex world (e.g. Unreal 1), whilst also having the core mechanics of shooty monstery stuff.

Most modern shooters are just about shooting men with incredibly realistic animations and models, and the only environment elements that enter the gameplay space are cover objects - the rest of the environment may as well be a skybox for all the difference it makes. 

Have you played Bulletstorm by any chance?? 

Worthy? 

ButtStorm is exactly the same (exactly as shit) as, say CoD, the only difference being that the combat arenas are littered with lots of Explo-Barrels (and variations of).

When I'm talking about a meaningful environment in an FPS game, I mean primarily an environment that you can explore, and ideally one that also contains non-combat gameplay.

I think the difference is, with a game like quake or unreal, a level designer typically says "I want to make an interesting (castle/spaceship/magical mushroom cave) with a clever layout and a varied selection of challenges for the player to overcome, and all sorts of things to discover."

With CoD (and most modern shooters, they just say "I want to make a load of guns and a load of men to shoot with those guns. For the levels, we'll just get our artists to make some cool looking shit, and we'll fill the gaps between shooting with cutscenes and QTEs." 

to be more specific, when i was saying 'i just want to shoot stuff' i actually meant 'i just want to do primarily FPS related stuff' (eg: NOT racing game related stuff) which I take to include things like exploration, some small amounts of puzzle solving, admiring awesome looking levels (rage scores 100% on this one). 

I was being sarcastic. Bullshitstorm was exactly the sort of pointlessly pretty environmental cobblers you were on about ;)