By Nathan Grayson on December 15th, 2012 at 10:00 am.
For a while there, I thought we were going to find RAGE on some trashy “What ever happened to… ?” television special. It’d have been huddled in the back of a barely lit trailer, clad in a grease-and-sweat-stained bathrobe and wolfing down an entire carton of metropolitan ice cream. “I coulda been somethin’,” it’d have said between chunky mouthfuls. “I coulda gone places. But then id got all distant, and everyone forgot about me.” Then: warm salty tears, pitter-pattering into the sticky sugar soup below. That depressing reality, however, is no longer our own. After leaving RAGE untouched for a year, id’s finally returned to its not-so-deserted deserts. The result? A brand new, six-area DLC tale called “Scorchers.” Sweet, sweet deets after the break.
As it turns out, there’s quite a lot to this relatively inexpensive ($4.99) expansion. Here are the main beats:
“In this brand-new adventure spanning six all-new areas, you will fight alongside new allies to defend the Hager Settlment from a maniacal bandit clan known as The Scorchers. Along the way, you’ll participate in a new season of Mutant Bash TV, encounter new mini-games, and wield the overpowering and brutal Nailgun.”
On top of all that, there’s also a new Ultra-Nightmare difficulty mode – for when normal nightmares just won’t do the job. A new Extended Play mode, meanwhile, allows you to keep playing after RAGE’s credits role, ensuring that yours will be the most impressive collection of optional doodads in all the land.
It’ll be out next week, so you won’t have to wait long at all to get in the way of the Scorchers’ “deadly plot to destroy the Wasteland.” Which is a bit silly, because the Wasteland’s already pretty well destroyed by my estimate. I mean, isn’t that just overkill? At what point will crazy, thematically united bandits’ destruction lust be sated? How far must they go?
15/12/2012 at 10:10 Text_Fish says:
Sounds like it’s not going to advance the main storyline. That’s a shame, seeing as I thought I was only about a third of the way in to it when the credits smacked me round the head at the end of the proper game.
I’ll probly still buy it though — I’m a sucker for a nailgun.
15/12/2012 at 10:42 Slinkyboy says:
Paying for DLC that contains the ending? That would be wicked!
15/12/2012 at 12:28 xGxMxKx says:
Mass Effect 3 anyone?
15/12/2012 at 13:17 Triplanetary says:
You mean the game whose ending DLC was free?
16/12/2012 at 21:07 TsunamiWombat says:
you mean the game whose ending was ill conceived, terribly written, and continues to be non existent despite a free dlc which fixed nothing
17/12/2012 at 07:14 maonwvs says:
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15/12/2012 at 13:06 Raiyan 1.0 says:
Well, the double-barreled shotgun – the double-barreled shotgun – was a DLC exclusive. In an id game. So an ending tied to a DLC pack is nothing.
15/12/2012 at 18:28 Baines says:
Supposedly was a possibility with Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon. CEO mentioned wanting to release the alien mothership bossfight as DLC.
15/12/2012 at 20:50 Dominic White says:
Instead, the game just ended abruptly once you saw the final boss, somehow creating a situation even worse than making the end of the game DLC.
17/12/2012 at 07:27 dvzlrnzb says:
You probably won’t see the source code for at least 6 more years. Think of how recent the Doom 3 SDK came out. And how long ago that game was released.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JuZTxlM0ek
15/12/2012 at 10:50 EPICTHEFAIL says:
Yep, that is THE benchmark, as far as I am concerned, for stupid and anticlimactic endings. Sequel hook much?
15/12/2012 at 15:33 suibhne says:
I enjoyed RAGE okay, but I honestly remember next to nothing about the plot – whereas I clearly remember the plots from other, better games I played, you know, ten years ago. I guess that says something.
15/12/2012 at 10:11 The First Door says:
I’m really excited to go back to the Hagar Settlement. I always felt a bit sad after you’d finished that storyline and Dan Hagar wasn’t there when you went back. Hopefully you get the chance to have a little virtual catch-up!
15/12/2012 at 10:14 Text_Fish says:
I wonder if they can still afford John Goodman! He’ll probably die right at the beginning and you’ll just hear Carmack doing a hammy “Aaaarrrggghhh”.
15/12/2012 at 10:26 The First Door says:
Don’t say that! How are you going to have a nice cup of Wasteland tea and perhaps a little biscuit with him if they kill him off?
15/12/2012 at 10:28 The Dark One says:
I don’t think Goodman has ever been the type to say no to video games.
15/12/2012 at 10:34 dee says:
why did I laugh so hard
15/12/2012 at 15:42 Henke says:
JOHN GOODMAN is THAT who that was? Ok. He sounded familiar but I guessed it was Rip Thorn.
16/12/2012 at 13:20 Slurpy says:
Rip Thorn is John Goodman’s soundstage name, so he doesn’t get charged by the RIAA for violating his record contracts.
17/12/2012 at 00:18 thecat17 says:
Personally, I wanted to see more Loosum.
15/12/2012 at 10:35 f1x says:
I dont want to put salt on the wounds but…. does this expansion come with fixes for all the technical problems that are still out there haunting us?
15/12/2012 at 21:17 allen says:
I played it at release and it functioned terribly on my ATI card. But last month I decided to give it another shot, and it ran smooth and beautifully. No hiccups or slow downs, no glaring visual glitches, and no gameplay glitches. So they must have patched all the bad things out, as I didn’t experience any of the failures I did when I had first played it on release.
15/12/2012 at 23:54 Numerical says:
Yeah they eventually got arsed enough to fix most of the issues. Still had some weird black textures in certain areas.
16/12/2012 at 14:25 f1x says:
Thats cool, yesterday I tried it and still had stupid texture poping, but guess that must be my hardware setup now or something
too bad, I think the game is actually quite decent
15/12/2012 at 10:38 MeestaNob says:
An add-on to a lackluster shooter a year after it’s spluttering release seems optimistic of iD, you’d almost assume this was only made because the studio had some downtime to fill. That they have done absolutely nothing to correct the technological misfire of megatexturing, which resulted in just under half the worlds ‘gaming-spec’ PC’s being utterly unable to run it acceptably is disappointing to say the least.
To assume that we would a) pay for more Rage, or b) want to play more Rage, is an interesting read of the market.
15/12/2012 at 11:16 mlaskus says:
To be fair, the game runs great and looks stunning even on older hardware if you spend a bit of time to configure it properly. Shame about the ridiculous defaults and lacking configuration options in-game.
17/12/2012 at 11:00 fredc says:
With respect, you’re only saying that presumably because by serendipity you were able to make this work. RAGE simply couldn’t beat 0.3 frames a second on my PC no matter what I did or what ridiculous workaround I tried.
A vast number of people were/are in the same position, and iD’s attitude, once it became obvious that their fixes weren’t working, was basically “well we can’t afford to fix it, so fuck y’all”. Basically I paid ~£30 for a completely non-functional game.
22/12/2012 at 02:39 GeneralTso92 says:
It really wasn’t that bad.
Sure, the story blew, but the actual shooting and action was fine.
15/12/2012 at 10:42 Branthog says:
Nope.
Fool me once, shame on . . . shame on you. Fool me . . . — you can’t get fooled again.
15/12/2012 at 11:13 ludicrous_pedagogy says:
Loving the W reference. Bravo! That should be the actual saying from now on.
15/12/2012 at 10:43 Fazer says:
It’s funny how I asked yesterday (December 14) on their blog if the DLC will be in Poland, because Rage (and Skyrim) is still not available on Steam, and the comment is still awaiting moderation, while there are more comments posted after mine.
15/12/2012 at 11:18 mlaskus says:
Visit our trusty smugglers den in the forum to find someone to hook you up with a copy.
15/12/2012 at 13:33 Kradziej says:
I’m not sure if Bethesda has much to say when it comes to Rage’s and Skyrim’s availibility for Polish Steam users. I think it’s Cenega’s call.
Though it definitely sucks. I hope they release Dragonborn in a box when it hits PCs in January, not a month later.
15/12/2012 at 10:52 Col Sanders says:
Whilst I am sort of tempted, I am still a little hacked off with the ending or lack there of. In my opinion Rage was an awesome game I enjoyed every minute of right up until it just abruptly ended. It was something I had been hankering for an old school shooter that was pretty and fun. But the fact that the ending seemed to be building up pace building up to those final moment to what I thought might be a boss fight or something else happening to just abruptly ending.
15/12/2012 at 11:15 Blackcompany says:
To be fair, I feel the same. Loved the game, hated the…stop…at the “end.” I think they intended this DLC much sooner, and Beth/Zenimax decided Doom BFG would make more money, and Id needed to work on it. Something with which Carmack has openly stated his disagreement. Kudos to him for that.
Eager to get back to this version of the Wasteland. This is what Fallout should look like, going forward.
17/12/2012 at 00:20 thecat17 says:
I have to agree. It just… ended. That final fight through the base was pretty fucking awesome. Wish there would’ve been more of that.
I’d say the game needed at least 4 more hours. Something I hope this DLC can give me. I loves me some more Rage!
15/12/2012 at 11:13 Blackcompany says:
Day one purchase for me. Been waiting a while for more of this game, and I am eager to go back.
Yes, the ending was lackluster. To say the very least. The scripted boss fight with the rocket launcher was shyte, and there were some low res textures in corners and on walls. Also, the early graphical glitches, now fixed. The game was trying to be all inclusive while also pushing tech and graphics along – something we all mostly want, right?
But on the whole the game was very good. Guns felt meaty, for the most part. Actors react to injury and impact in mostly believable ways. Vehicle handling was excellent – far better than Borderlands 2. And while you can enjoy this as an expert FPS player with the kb/m, it is not mandatory. The game features tons of cool gadgets – love the wingstick – and overall is a fun and solid, if slightly flawed, experience.
I cannot wait for more of it and I hope the SDK follows soon.
15/12/2012 at 11:31 SuperNashwanPower says:
The amount of qualifiers added to that post makes me unsure whether you actually believe it yourself.
Personally I “mostly” (read completely) stopped playing it by the second act. An empty, sterile experience.
15/12/2012 at 15:16 Zogtee says:
The character design was excellent and the animation was stellar. Downsides (for me) was the static and empty world and bullet-sponge enemies. I hate shooting someone smack in the face with a meaty brutal gun and hearing him yelp “Oooh, he hit me!”.
17/12/2012 at 00:44 thecat17 says:
You probably won’t see the source code for at least 6 more years. Think of how recent the Doom 3 SDK came out. And how long ago that game was released.
I would love to see mods for this, like, right now. More single player maps would be a blessing.
I thought the boss fight was spectacular, even if it did sort of remind me of Duke Nukem Forever, but done the way it was meant to. That boss was a total badass, and it felt so good to shoot rockets at its face and take down such a large foe.
18/12/2012 at 18:48 reggiep says:
None of the positives you mentioned for this game are actual fun *game* features. They’re just tech features. RAGE, like Doom 3 before it, is yet another id tech demo passing for a game. All the elements are there for a great game, but the glue that holds it all together is really just a bunch of masking tape covered in dog hair. Great games are more than the sum of their parts. RAGE is actually less.
15/12/2012 at 11:19 Iskariot says:
I was very disappointed with Rage. It looked really nice, and the characters were well designed. but the gameplay was stale. ID apparently never learned a new trick since Doom as far gameplay is concerned. It was predictable from start to finish. Opponents are spawned for ever. Driving down a road a thousand times will spawn the same vehicles a thousand times. The game felt suffocatingly linear.
I got so disgusted with it that I stopped playing altogether, because I knew I would meet nothing new, nothing surprising, nothing interesting further on.
ID is a game technology company. They should let others build the actual games.
17/12/2012 at 00:47 thecat17 says:
This is not true. Unless you’re talking about Nightmare mode. Which has to be unlocked by beating the game, so it wouldn’t be true for most players.
Not true. Again, see above.
Yet, way less so than a Call of Duty game or Battlefield or etc.
Too bad. You missed a really fun, thrilling, and immersive mutantshooter!
17/12/2012 at 08:49 Iskariot says:
“Not true. Again, see above.”
When talking about forever respawning vehicles (and turrets)… I experienced it myself and was not playing on nightmare mode. It became an incredible annoyance because the driving in the game was the worst I have experienced in years (you can only look to the front when in a vehicle).
As far as respawning enemies in general you are right. I should have expressed myself better. What irritated me most were the rather cheap spawning tricks used for enemies. it reminded me of the way they did it for Doom 3 (They used it for all Doom games, but in the old days that was the norm). It felt like cheating to me and it irritated me.
Also… Remember for example the garage sequence? Unless you killed the guy in the vehicle your enemies kept spawning until hell froze over. I hate that, because it breaks immersion if it is done badly. And in Rage they did it very badly.
“Too bad. You missed a really fun, thrilling, and immersive mutantshooter!”
Well, I might try again, but from what I experienced it sure was more irritating than immersive.
22/12/2012 at 02:58 GeneralTso92 says:
“you can only look to the front when in a vehicle”
So like Borderlands?
My memory is fuzzy.
15/12/2012 at 12:02 Cytrom says:
I think I’ll just play some more borlerlands 2 instead.
17/12/2012 at 00:48 thecat17 says:
Not a fan of masterful shooting, eh?
15/12/2012 at 12:07 felisc says:
Some bits of Rage were quite good. I did enjoy the actual shooter part of this game, my main complaint was : enough with the car thing already; why so few ennemies ? All I want from this dlc is to have a nailgun, visit gorgeous environments and shoot idiots. Hopefully. At that price I’ll definitely get it.
15/12/2012 at 12:20 dufake says:
They should bring back the Gearhead. I demand more quake-like levels.
15/12/2012 at 13:00 SelfEsteemFund says:
id I’m so sorry I know you mean well but I just can’t take it any more. The aesthetic is great, the shooting is really fun, the animations are beautiful and the voice acting isn’t bad either but everything in between is just so fucking annoying that I can only play in tiny bursts up until I go mad with RAGE.
15/12/2012 at 13:11 JKjoker says:
heh, while the gun fights were fun early on (that didnt last long), for the most part the game was boring and repetitive gameplay with an open world aspect that actually worked against it, add to that an ending and last mission so painfully meh they turned me off completely out of any attempt at replaying it and you have the chance of me paying for a DLC : 0%
15/12/2012 at 17:33 Suits says:
Extended Cut please
15/12/2012 at 18:28 ResonanceCascade says:
So does this finally fix the awful pop-in that no one seems to be talking about anymore? I put the game away for six months and gave it another shot when I heard it had been fixed, but it hadn’t. It had been mildly lessened.
15/12/2012 at 21:21 vandinz says:
I don’t get that now in the default game, that’s without any config editing. I even use the new texture caching doodar they added in a patch. With max settings the game is flawless and I have far from a state-of-the-art PC (Amd 645, Nvidia 560 ti). Give it another go.
15/12/2012 at 18:32 Shooop says:
Do they really think people still care about this game?
15/12/2012 at 21:19 vandinz says:
One does. In fact I just restarted another play through last week and I’m loving it all over again. Smashing game.
15/12/2012 at 21:43 mpk says:
I thought Rage was enjoyably inoffensive (or inoffensively enjoyable, one of the two). It certainly hadn’t learned much new since Doom 3/Quake 4 but it is an iD game after all. I was annoyed with them after Doom 3 because it was Doom 3 and not some Doom\Half-Life amalgam but by the time Rage came about I was quite happy to play a well executed A-to-B shooter.
I’ll get this, if only because I loved their version of the trad post-apoc world. Shame it wasn’t more explorable.
15/12/2012 at 22:50 funtard says:
For what it’s worth I really liked Rage because it’s a great shooter. I just kinda ignored everything else. Will buy this dlc for sure.
OPINION AWAY!!!!
16/12/2012 at 03:11 HKZ says:
I want my $60 for the inoperable piece of shit I bought a year ago. Game still doesn’t work worth a shit, and they locked out ALL the console options that made it run somewhat decent on my PC. Never again will I buy an id piece of shit game, 1998 called and they want their game back. Mediocre garbage that still doesn’t work a year later. What a waste.
16/12/2012 at 03:37 SypherLane says:
One of the greatest PC gaming years ever called to say that it wanted Rage?
16/12/2012 at 19:24 HKZ says:
Well, yes and no. I don’t see anything in Rage that wasn’t done in 1998 gameplay wise. It simply isn’t that great a game on the face of it, and it was (and still is) riddled with technical problems. I STILL can’t play this game because there is a two second delay in loading textures. With the console tweaks that were allowed when the game came out it wasn’t so bad because I was able to get it to run pretty darn well. Now that the console is completely locked out, and the “fixes” came out and broke the entire game again, I can’t do anything about it being a horribly ugly game. My favorite part about it the gameplay is that you could literally stand in one place and fight a boss without taking one point of damage. Rarely, if ever, you’d have to strafe a few feet side to side to avoid an attack, but overall the gameplay is utterly laughable. I’d rather not waste any of my money on id games because it’s obvious they haven’t learned anything in the last 15 years on how to make a good /game/, much less one that works without resorting to console tweaks.
17/12/2012 at 11:46 Droniac says:
“I don’t see anything in Rage that wasn’t done in 1998 gameplay wise.”
You do realize that you can say exactly the same for practically every modern AAA title, right? Rage is hardly unique in this respect.
16/12/2012 at 07:52 Zanders1981 says:
Metropolitan ice cream? Did you maybe mean Neapolitan ice cream?
16/12/2012 at 13:08 Chorltonwheelie says:
I liked the shooting, the setting and the characters.
However, the unskippable fookin’ driving to progress anywhere was awful. Pretty much ruined it for me as I had to spend hours going around and around until I fluked through the bloody thing. It raises my heckles just remembering it.
Get rid of that nonsense and I’d be happy to continue my pursuit of Loosum Hagar. Hmmmmm…Loosum.
16/12/2012 at 20:31 catherinecatherine says:
like Edna replied I’m dazzled that someone able to get paid $5103 in a few weeks on the internet. did you read this webpage http://www.ASK22.com
20/12/2012 at 02:44 Hobbes says:
Played through the DLC.
It’s not amazing.
But it is decent. It adds several missions suited for the early game progression (i.e. just as you begin to open up Wellspring), and one for mid-game ish, like, once you have the crossbow and have got used to the nailgun.
There’s an extra episode of Mutant Bash TV which is more of the same but with the sky above your head, followed by the first half of a lengthy crawl which involves something akin to it but without the announcer, or the nice monetary reward. The boss fight however, is fun, and worth it. The big payoff though is the nailgun. It’s ridiculous, this feels a lot closer to what RAGE had in mind I think with different ammunition types. In this case you can alternate between nails (very high fire rate, low damage, an SMG but with nails), rebar (think of painkillers wooden stake thrower, and you’ll have the idea) and railgun rounds (a very effective sniper rifle option). There’s a certain unhinged inventiveness in the way the gun works that gives a flash of what could have been for the rest of rage.
Maybe if they get around to adding a few more DLC packs in we’ll be approaching the point where RAGE feels like a complete game. The Scorchers certainly did it no harm, put that way.
15/12/2012 at 10:58 Branthog says:
The game was released fourteen months ago. Even if it were an amazing game, instead of a bland game filled with incomplete ideas, a dead/static feeling environment, and one of the dumbest and most abrupt endings ever . . . it is hard to see myself going out and downloading the entire 10gb (or whatever it was) game all over again, just for the privilege of paying more money to install a piece of late DLC.
This goes beyond lipstick on a pig. This is lipstick on a pig’s corpse.
15/12/2012 at 17:14 SkittleDiddler says:
Careful about hating on a game without providing details around here. You might get called out for a troll.
That said, RAGE is one of the most vapid game experiences I’ve ever had. I played the entire thing through to the end, and that’s time I will never get back.
15/12/2012 at 11:07 TheTingler says:
It was 25 f***ing Gigabytes, mate. Like Max Payne 3 I couldn’t get it off my hard drive fast enough.
15/12/2012 at 11:32 SuperNashwanPower says:
I AM SOOO PRETTY
15/12/2012 at 12:38 Iskariot says:
LOL
15/12/2012 at 12:47 SuperNashwanPower says:
Boooo you edited :D hehe
15/12/2012 at 18:36 Ruffian says:
Nah, it’s cool, RAGE was a pretty big freakin disappointment.
18/12/2012 at 18:42 reggiep says:
The game was definitely not fleshed out. They almost penalized you for exploring even the little bits that could be explored. Other games include even little pickups like ammo in the little nooks and crannies — rewarding you for exploration. RAGE teases you with little nooks, but they’re all empty.
I’m not even sure why the game includes a jump button. There’s literally no use for it since even the obstacles that *could* be jumped, can’t be due to invisible walls.
No way in hell will I buy the DLC for this crapfest. I’ve sworn off id games forever after getting Doom 3 and RAGE. I’m sick of id tech demos passing for games.