rage – Page 2 – Fearless Gamer

I don’t know how much time you guys spend on the forums, but I’m there pretty much every day just to keep up with what’s going on in the game, even when I’m out of town or otherwise engaged throughout the day. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed over the past week or so, though, it’s that things seem to have stabilized.

I’ll be the first to admit that Season One brought enough frustrations to warrant a lot of the grief that happened on the forums, on this blog, and even in-game to an extent. Some of those things have been reverted or changed – the level requirement for ranked, some of the matchmaking algorithms – but for the most part it seems people are settling in to the new mechanics around the game. If the biggest thing the community complains about is the price of a rune page (which is expensive, but not totally unreasonable), I think things are definitely calming down.

What has your experience in game been like? Most of my recent games have been pretty tame. There are the random idiots that seem to make the world explode, either by their own rage or encouraging it from others, but even the typical “we lose because of x” has slowed back to what I consider normal levels.

As an avid gamer, nothing peeves me more than a mechanic that makes me stop thinking about outplaying the game and start thinking about outplaying the game code. There’s a big difference.

The first requires total immersion, like when you’re jumping from box to box on a Halo 3 map trying to lay down some BR love. You’re thinking about the environment, exactly as it exists in most cases, and how to navigate that environment for success.

In the second scenario the game world is more like a transparent film, like an image of the matrix sitting translucent over the scrolling green code, making real the ideas of the developers without totally masking the developer’s tricks. They want to scare you? Make a monster appear out of thin air. When does it appear? When you walk past that one crack on the floor. That was actually the exact scenario with Doom 3 and what players came to call the “monster closets.” You’d be walking along a space corridor, checking empty corners which have no apparent entry or exit, only to get ravaged seconds later by a monster that appeared in the area because of something you triggered by an event like your placement on the map. It was infuriating to play, in large part because it produced such a predictable gaming experience.

Well id says they’re done with that type of development, and they’ll be adding (gasp!) actual AI to the baddies in their up and comer, Rage. As id’s Matt Hooper put it (with some adjustments for clarity):

[In Rage] when you’re going to the RC-Bomb base [from the demo] to deal with the Shrouded clan they’re doing whatever they’re supposed to be doing. If they’re supposed to be defending against you coming there, they’ll be doing that. If they’re just tinkering or having a conversation they’ll do that. You will never see [a monster closet.]

To which I say, “Thank the sweet baby Jesus.”

Tag: rage (Page 2 of 2)

I think we’ve hit post Season One stability

id Software Closes The Door On ‘Monster Closets’

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