At the time of writing, the main support topic for Rage on the Steam forums has been viewed an amazing 475,000 times. The comparable thread on Bethesda’s forums – a whopping 140,000 views.
In addition to the most egregious issues with texture popping above, Vsync, Anisotropic filtering and texture quality settings were only added in a patch. The first (1st) and only (1) patch. Certainly, omitting these more fine-tuned customization features in this day and age is not in the least unheard of, but finding the paragons of the PC platform since 1991 – Id Software – as the offending party is rather inconceivable, even in a gaming world where Crytek, Epic and Rockstar Games have long since bailed out.
The texture popping above is related to the game’s texture Auto-Balancer, which somehow tends to load and utilize 4096k textures instead of the much crisper 8192k (or the gargantuan 16384k textures that take most of the game’s 21659 Mb install size!). 1
More puzzling yet is the inability for players to bind numpad keys properly – especially the number 5(!?) – leaving left-handers in a proverbial bind. Different mice and keyboards are exhibiting various symptoms as well.
Let’s not even mention the 64-bit executable. …or lack thereof. Let us however mention the missing idstudio level editor, which is apparently dependent on the very same 64-bit .exe.
To wrap up this terribly clever post before things get utterly out of hand, we could take a look at the game’s collector edition (check out the comparison photo on the left), which comes bundled with a Rage comic that not only is 2/3 the size of the normal issues, but also only contains 2/3 of the Rage story arc. Boom!
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