Doom 3 modded overshadows iD Software's RAGE - New drooling screenshots

DSOGaming writes: "Let’s be honest here, we are really put off by RAGE’s graphics quality. Even with all the tweaks to avoid the annoying texture pop-in, the game suffers from really low-quality textures. Add to that the pre-baked shadows, old-generation shaders and limited dynamic lighting and you get a game that could be easily released several years ago. In fact, iD Software’s previous game, Doom 3, looks way better than RAGE."

[Orpheus]

Lol this is just funny .... An insult to the deserved injury of Carmack !!!

[Eiffel]

How? Old software, with new resources.

Hurrdurr.

[3GenGames]

Exactly, old software not made to use it but is being used with it to do even better stuff than the same resources they have with new tech. Think about it for a nanosecond and you should realize what's more impressive...the hack.

[deadpoole]

Im not sure what Im suppose to be impressed about ... extreme black crush, very high contrast, light sources with no related algorithms to light/reflect/bounce nearby surfaces ... these mods are hilarious.

Light sources in pic shine like bright sun but have zero to minimal effect on surroundin objects and ppl mock John Carmack ... the real genius behind FPS genre.

[3GenGames]

Before the people started using him as the face of this game, Carmack didn't mean crap to any company or anything. Don't make his work with a team of others only his accomplishment, because it's not CARMACK STUDIOS, it's ID SOFTWARE. Not just him last time I checked. If he was that good he wouldn't need others help. Besides, IMO Doom was the only thing he ever wrote that was great. His first and last, go figure. After that others figured out better ways and now you have video cards built off of the others improvement, not his.

[Perjoss]

Sorry, but it's dumb to compare an indoor corridor shooter with very limited view distance to a game that has large open spaces. I have screenshots that prove Rage can look amazing if you have a half decent gfx card and know how to tweak a simple text file.

edit: no disrespect to the modder that made those amazing textures for doom3, I've used those mods myself and I love them, brilliant work, seriously.

[Perjoss]

it's true that the engine is inconsistent with close up textures, but again we are comparing a fully patched up game that has been heavily modded to a game that has been out for a few days. I'd like to see Rage again in a few months when there is a couple more patches and maybe some community texture packs to help with close-up objects.

***possible minor spoilers ahead:

http://cloud.steampowered.c...

http://cloud.steampowered.c...

http://cloud.steampowered.c...

http://cloud.steampowered.c...

http://cloud.steampowered.c...

[morganfell]

@deadpoole,

I am glad to see someone else realizes this not so sleight of hand.

@3gengames,

Look up some interviews.

It isn't Carmack Studios and he doesn't do it alone but if you listen to other people in the studio speak, Todd Hollenshead and Tim Willits, they discuss very clearly John Carmack locking himself away and writing the code that is the basis for Idtech. They often refer to it as Carmack's engine.

He is one of the few guys who, if removed from his studio then what that for which the studio is known would disappear.

[Marceles]

@Perjoss

I don't know why those screens make me want to play Half-Life 2...I guess they remind me of the first screens I ever saw of the game. Very Source-engine-ish

[Sunhammer]

RAGE doesn't even have real-time lighting, which Doom 3 does have, and when the textures finally do pop up, they don't look that great. They're blurry. Move too quickly and they'll disappear on you, hence 60 frames per second.

For me, after all that hype, RAGE is the most disappointing game of the year. I'm not sure why I had such high hopes in the first place. Maybe it was all the good trailers, which tend to make games look better than they actually are.

Then there's the fact they basically gave a big "screw you" to PC gamers by releasing it as graphically broken as they did. Why even bother? 5 years and this is all you could manage, Carmack? Utterly pathetic.

[RedDragan]

Lol @ deadpoole, you are talking about a game from 2004. When Doom 3 came out it was a graphical masterpiece, it is hard to think of another game that managed to create such a leap forward in terms of atmosphere.

Even today, Doom 3 has better atmosphere than most, if not all games.

The closest thing we have probably come to such a jump forward is the Real Lifesys mod but with so much blur effect it needs a massive amount of work to not be annoying after playing it for 5 minutes.

[limewax]

Well Rage has a patch out now, but I agree it is not what I expect at all. Even with the texture cache on high my 580 can't find anything else in there. at 16k textures, The fridge in the wellsprings bar is so blurry its almost difficult to make out the text.

This is certainly a testament to how useless mega-textures actually is. Even Fallout 3 has more consistency in its textures. In Rage the inconsistencies are so large it's almost impossible to not notice

[Bimkoblerutso]

The advantage of the process is that the textures are more reasonably rendered across long distances. Close up the game is fairly ugly, but from a distance it's easily one of the best looking games around. Pluses and minuses, I suppose.

They REALLY needed to take some extra time to perfect the technique though.

[Heartnet]

Mega Textures are new to developers I suspect :) Gotta let it evolve :)

[bligmerk]

Megatexture isn't useless. When Doom 3 came out, a lot of people noted the idtech 4 engine seemed to not be capable of large outdoor areas. The idtech 5 engine with megatexture now allows for large outdoor areas without any repeating tile maps. But it does seem like id took several steps backwards with the interiors, lack of dynamic lighting, almost no use of bump and specular mapping. Yeah, the stuff in the distance looks fantastic but things up close don't look all that impressive and sometimes just blurry fugly.

[Ducky]

Looks good... but doesn't really overshadow Rage.
Doesn't quite have the artistic touch.

[zslash]

Looks very dated compared to RAGE

http://cloud.steampowered.c...

http://cloud.steampowered.c...

[dirthurts]

I agree. They are overlooking the incredibly simple geometry of Doom vs the highly complex geometry of Rage. Not to mention the animation, and AI running in the background.
Flashy textures only get you so far.

[3GenGames]

Looks like a cartoon to me...probably because good textures wouldn't have allowed that draw distance because it's actually use most of the GPU power.

[xtreampro]

I think you mean dusty not cartoony. Borderlands is what you call cartoony.

[Mrmagnumman357]

thats pretty insane for a 2004 game, its not crysis with immersive mod, but it still looks pretty good

[Plagasx]

I don't understand how anyone could say that it LOOKS better than Rage...

Sure, Doom 3 has Dynamic Lighting, higher res textures but it just doesn't have the artistic design that Rage has. The detail in the world is incredible. Sure, It has blurry textures but we all know Id is aware of that and it's something a higher res texture pack can easily fix, which we will get.

[evrfighter]

rage kinda looks like what I thought borderlands would look like before they announced they were switching to cell shading

[Autodidactdystopia]

Wouldnt they like double the size of the game of they had higher res textures, the things already 12GB how much difference do you think a 1gb top patch could do?

they already screwed themselves. they should have released this for pc on Blu ray a first for the industry.

then there wouldnt be as much compression and at 50GB you could afford every texture in the game 16k textures and as little compression as possible.

didnt carmack say that the assets database for uncompresssed textures was like 50 TB?

[Mrmagnumman357]

I can't wait for doom 4!

[DungBeetle]

I can't see the point of this and I think Rage looks pretty good.

[Raider69]

Well the fact is that Rage haves superior engine than Doom3,but after all this years Doom 3 is still an impressive looking game.I have to say that Doom 3 engine overshadows many new generation engines.

[Zyrusticae]

I feel compelled to point out that the primary graphics mod in use, Sikkmod, allows you to customize absolutely every single graphics-related variable and tune the image to your exacting tastes.

So if you find these screenshots to have too much contrast, you can increase the white point to flatten the curve. If you find the blackness too bleak, you can add ambient lighting. Hell, if you don't like the color scheme, you can tweak the color grading until you see something you like.

And every single variable changed updates in real time.

I absolutely love this sort of customizability. This is the sort of thing I wish all developers would allow me to do; give me some kind of super-advanced technical options menu so I can tweak everything manually, by hand, one by one, until everything is exactly as I want it to be.

(And let it be said that the screenshots really do not do it justice; modded DooM 3 looks PHENOMENAL in motion!)

That aside, while Rage certainly has its issues (not the least of which being the complete lack of ANY sort of graphics options menu at launch), the megatexture technology really makes for very impressive open vistas, and it's something I'd like to see used in other games such as the Elder Scrolls series - provided they work out the terrible kinks, provide a high-res texture option, and give us the ability to tweak things to our liking.

[ChrisGTR1]

lol, doom 3 sucked ass. i remember i got tricked into all the hype then it finnaly came out and i was so effing bored after 3 hours in. i literally dragged myself from room to room not wanting to play it till i finnaly just gave up and stopped playing this horrible piece of shit of a game. this game was such a dissapointment.

[humbleopinion]

Images look but ugly. Nice texture work in some instances but we've seen better on tons of mods (crysis, oblivion, GTA etc).
the images really show how it's a last generation game with an overly shiny coat of paint: lighting is really off and everything looks too metally, tiny environments with just a few light sources, ugly character models, flat shadows and DOF effect that just looks wrong and blurs half of the image.

Lets face it, Doom was one of the best looking games in 2003 but a lot of time has passed since and it shows - even with very talented modding the engine still shows its age. If someone actually thinks this can even be compared to rage they are seriously out of their mind.

[AO1JMM]

Looks the same. Low res textures and crappy character models. Rage looks much better in everyway.

People are blind in here.

[BattleTorn]

Rage is also a completely different game. It's not strictly a cooridor shooter. There much more to it, compared to Doom3.

Doom 4, now that's going...... wait!

*focuses on rage!**

I mustn't get ahead of myself.

[leogets]

might look better textured but a shit game still lol.. also the chucky design is so cbm amiga gen

[EditorAtGNG]

Woah... who turned on the motion blur and bloom to the max? Looks great though it doesn't do justice to the overall dark and pitch black ambiance Doom 3 was famous about.

[Zephol]

Rage is a poor "console port". This is unfortunate, given the enormous history of id software. I think that Doom 3 looks better than RAGE.

[Zephol]

Doom 3 looks more beautifull and best than rage!!

[Zephol]

Doom 3 is a pc game, Rage is a console game!!