Rage 2 and Game Feel

way back in my video on the original doom I stated that I thought rage the 2011 title by ed software is underrated but I think I've largely moved away from that position my belief at the time was that it was great because it was a continuation of the it'd house style a mishmash of things that don't necessarily go together but they clearly moved or inspired the game devs in some way in doom it was gory horror films and metal music in quake it was D&D monsters and gothic horror and Lovecraft and cyberpunk and industrial music and enrage it was British anarchist Punk aesthetics and Mad Max post-apocalyptic akar culture and steampunk and cowboys and Soviets spaceflight aesthetics and exoticized Asian imagery but revisiting it for this video I don't think rage ever really came together in the way it needed to doom and quake come by on abstract moods anger and angst respectively that unified and carried their varied influences but rage tried to marry its hodgepodge of ideas into an actual world and story and characters and never quite congealed into something that didn't feel like what it was a disparate set of parts awkwardly stitched together but the other reason I thought it was underrated at the time was that despite its nonsense plot and derivative world building the game felt really good to play released at the height of the everything as a military shooter with iron sights era of FPS games it was an it software style run and gun game that focused less on tactical decisions and precision aim than running around dodging projectiles and shooting ridiculous firearms it wasn't interested in verisimilitude or realism it was interested in providing an arcade II action blockbuster experience with larger-than-life enemies bested by larger than larger-than-life guns and to sell you on the hugeness of those guns there was a big emphasis on making sure they felt good to use or at least some of the time going back to it now of the melee is actually pretty terrible the animations and sound provide minimal feedback and whether you're actually hitting anything and mostly you just get your vision obscured and the starter ammunition for the settler pistol heals like a pea shooter you're causing little to no response from the enemies until they just flop over dead but once you get the shotgun and the Fatboy bullets for the settler pistol as well as a few grenades and wing sticks things start feeling nice and chunky enemies fly back armor pops off gore is splattered and your weapons released throaty roars all to signify the destruction you're waging in the wastes especially given that it was released in an era of border Lanza's and fall outs and calls of duties having a game that really focused not on stats or stop and pop combat but satisfying circle strafing action was a breath of fresh air and the way those weapons felt to use was absolutely a part of that power fantasy and at the time of my doom video I thought rage had never really gotten its due for succeeding in that because people were too busy complaining about mega textures or whatever but again that was 5 years ago and my views on the subject of game feel have started to shift with time I've brought game feel up as a subject as recently as the dusk video without really thinking critically about it and in retrospect that's largely a failure on my part I didn't ask the second half of that question dusk has good game feel or at least game feel that's trying to emulate 1990 shooters so what why does a nebulous sense of good game feel make the game any better for the playing what makes that good game feel good and if I can't describe that adequately then how is saying a game has good game feel any different than the concept of fun as a descriptor that I loathe it so very much and that combined with the ongoing criticism of the concept by writers like Liz Ryerson and others has caused me to question why I continually praise quote unquote good game feel without really thinking about it and the game that's really making me confront that issue head-on recently is rage - and to explain why this games got me thinking about it we sort of have to break that game down so join me on a brief rant about rage - you would think avalanche the development team behind Mad Max a waste land based cars and guns title would be a natural fit for Rage which is also a waste land based cars and guns title and rage to does draw a lot from avalanches Mad Max it's an open-world game with a rigid separation between on foot sections and vehicle combat effectively bifurcating the game in a somewhat awkward manner between the open-world exploration in a car bits and the points of interest action bits the overworld itself is broken down into a series of unique looking regions that have a quest giver overseeing them and your goal is to make each region happy by finding and completing various open-world activities eventually we're in a favor with the quest giver to do a story mission or two then rinse and repeat until you have to fight the final boss but unlike Mad Max which was a serviceable if cookie-cutter open world title rage to shows the scars of a game that has gone through multiple revisions deep cuts or extended creative spats it really feels like this game has seen some [ __ ] over the course of its development like you can start scratching at the surface and find layers upon layers of what the game was at different points of development as you play it there are the petty technical indications of this sort of turmoil the lines that introduce each type of event are repeated hey I'm eyeballing one sketchy looking place unrepeated hey Willy I'm eyeballing one sketchy looking place yeah things ain't fine when safe and repeated bosses that were really great fights the first time end up repeated and repeated and repeated the mutant hive level is just the same room over and over again and at one point when I interacted with a guy who was supposed to let me into one of the mutant hive rooms the noise came from a different guy who if I went to listen to him would trigger the exit from the conversation because that was triggered by the first guy and going down there it's straight suicide Ranger no I got a head out but more importantly there are structural signs that development was troubled the beginning is a rushed flaccid attempt at giving you motivation that lands with a thud failing to provide world building emotional grounding or a clearer sense of what the games even about it introduces a mentor character and kills them off less than five minutes later dear old aunt prolly decorated war hero Ranger and role model especially for Lily she took me in when my parents died at the same time you get a sister character who is introduced to give the mentors character death pathos but who never matters again until she shows up at the very end of the game out of nowhere 12 to 16 hours later and the ending itself is one of those incredibly abrupt the big bad dies and 30 seconds later the credits are rolling with nothing resembling a day Newmont style of endings that's great for a 30 minute arcade title but a little disappointing after several hours of gameplay where the original rage struggled to justify its shifts between car combat and on foot bits rage 2 solves that problem by just making car combat pointless optional and unrewarding and despite a wide open world with varied environments rage 2 never does anything with all that open space it just means you have more driving to do between mission objectives so just like structurally as an experience it's an undercooked mess and then there's the tone the marketing for the game would have you believe it's a laugh-a-minute absurdist comedy like sunset overdrive I don't even remember but it isn't or at least not usually like 80% of the game is played completely straight for example you meet a character who is implied to be the protagonist from the last rage and they do a big passing of the torch thing through a voice recording and oh god it's played so straight it's actually kind of awkward keep them they belong to Nicolas rain guns little rage rage - is ridiculous and pulpy but it's taken dead seriously by the characters in the universe with the wings coming through not by the characters making pop-culture references or whatever but by the gratuitous gore and the ridiculous names everyone has side note can I just point out how amazing this games character names are like I want another game that is just populated with characters with these names everyone's incidental names here are something amazing chainsaw heart how do you not love chainsaw heart or bruised arm bar or Aminah cross or the duo of andy wasteland and dave Ambrosia anyways the totally self-serious nature of the story mixed with the absurd characters and over-the-top violence gives it a feeling of something like an 80s b-movie but not a parody like Far Cry Blood Dragon an actual cornball bad but fun VHS title but done up with enough ultra violence and monsters like they had a really good budget it's bad but kind of fun bad think like a slightly less twee take on turbo kid and that's about where it lands totally most of the time but then every once in a while the game will pull out some Hyuk Hyuk jokes for being a super scientist your breakdown you're breaking up or to lean really hard into a different kind of overstated camp that clashes with the bone crusher ATS omage vibe and feels more flamboyant and Saints Row II [Music] or give you characters that feel transphobic but are so underwritten it's unclear what the intent even is names Joseph but everyone around here calls me mama Jojo and it's like where is this stuff coming from it makes rage to feel like a comedy game that was papered over with more serious line reads later on or a somber dull game that someone tried to inject some life into it the last minute but either way it doesn't work at all it's jarring and when you put the outright goofy stuff next to the over-the-top 80s cheese it becomes difficult to say just how earnest or tongue-in-cheek any of it really is but perhaps my most frustrating problem with rage too is that likely as a result of whatever the development turmoil was the game feels like it has disdain for its characters its story and even humans in general it is not a nice game it's willing to kill characters for cheap stakes raising and it doesn't seem to care about the ones that leaves alive rage 2 gives you three potential allies who all jokingly just treat you as a gopher and then in the end knowingly almost kill you no see I told you she would be fine little not not right to reprogram in cocktail was all that was needed I say you got its universe treats mutants who as far as I can tell are mutated former humans as a sort of feral infestation that needs to be routed out and exterminated but never really examines that in the way that say fallout does with it schools which is doubly concerning when you realize it paints its bandits and scavengers as just as bloodthirsty and mindless as the mutants none of them have any motivation enemies are just there to be shot they guard fuel depots or make road blocks not for their own ends but they give you something on a map to clear and once you've cleared it they never bother to do it again it famously never did anything about its overuse of cleft lip imagery despite criticism that it was in poor taste it's opening promotes you to the status of Ranger giving you the responsibility of keeping peace and the wastes and rebuilding Vineland and you do this by just shooting anyone and everyone outside of vineland settlement and while anything outside of a town is a target anyone inside of a settlement that isn't a vendor or quest giver is a prop consider the fate of poor Bobby tackle a character stuck in the nightmare shell of a perpetual animation loop where he pukes on himself then pukes where he's standing wipes his mouth and repeats all while gently smoking - probably very moist - cigarettes this is Bobby tackles entire existence it's all he's ever known or will know he is a bit of environmental storytelling a way to sell you on lagoon ease grimy bar I pity him but I can't save him humans are targets their props they're tools to give out items and quests but no one has anything remotely resembling agency or an inner life just cool names and idle animations I have no doubt that some design Doc's somewhere has backstories for the different gangs for each region or a more robust vision for the inhabitants of each town but the game that was released feels more interested in its painterly landscapes than in anything human so if the game is really not all that great why am I even talking about it what does any of this have to do with game feel well despite my myriad of grave with the game I found I couldn't stop playing it even though the open-world approach meant that I had to walk or drive for five or ten minutes in between each first-person shooter bit the first person shooter bits really clicked with me that core gameplay loop felt really captivating enough to put up with all of the boring map traversal the weird tone of the uninventive and repetitive mission designs in the empty soulless game world most people compared rage 2's first-person combat to doom 2016 because it's an odd property and it's super fast paced and enemies drop health shards when you kill them and yeah that's all true but rage 2 mixes things up by making it less about blind rage and more about juggling enemies there are a lot of weapons and powers and involve flinging people around from the graph dart launcher that lets you pump enemies full of potential energy and then direct where they get pulled to a shotgun alt fire that launches enemies backwards to avoid bombs and force pushes this gives the game a measure of crowd control where you can temporarily remove some enemies from the field by knocking them down and focusing fire on other enemies this is combined with the system wherein the enemies have armor that needs to be broken off before you can do real damage but it doesn't operate like a generic shield bar each body part has its own armor that can be destroyed this leads to situations where you want to find enemies with unarmored bits and focus fire on those while using your crowd control powers to knock armored enemies down to soften them up until you're ready to focus fire on them and remove some of their protective plating so unlike doom which focused almost exclusively on movement as a defensive mechanic rage - focuses on mixing empowers the toss enemies like ragdolls and guns that do real damage to enemies ultimately culminating in each bandit defeated playing as satisfying goosh noise and the UI displaying a red skull icon to indicate that you can move on to your next target it's doom 2016 if doom 2016 was less interested in visceral anger and ripping and tearing mindlessly and it said more focused on mixing up your various powers and not only do they feel great but they look cool I don't think I've ever played a game where a lot of the encounters feel like they could be scripted sequences in an e3 demo if you play them right but here they totally are being able to knock an armored soldier off a ledge and then power slam into the ground to finish them off or dodge an incoming laser blast only to counter with a rocket that takes out the whole group or empty a clip into a bunch of mutants and then force push the last one who made it through back seconds before they bite you like you're 11 from stranger things the general loop of rag dolling some enemies throwing a wing stick with your offhand and then shooting the other enemies until their armor breaks and they pop is just mmm satisfying the way rage to drip fed me dopamine by letting me be creative with a set of tools that each play off of one another and result in a bedlam I control gave me a response to the game that was almost Pavlovian despite all that's wrong with rage - I kept seeking out those first-person bits because they just felt so good to play there was actually a Kotaku piece by Nathan Grayson that compared fighting rage to enemies to popping pimples the application of tension to each encounter culminating in a gooey climax and release and totally gross metaphor or not it really captured something about how the game worked for me I saw those shooty bits out and it was worth waiting through the muck that was this mean ugly unfinished game to get to them the thing is though I reached the end of the game and tried to think about what I really felt about it and my initial reaction was that it's a great shooter that's just hampered by being set in a soulless open world and that the first-person bits really buoyed what could have been an otherwise forgettable experience but the more I let the game sit with me the more that bugged me because that outlook puts some weird primacy on how a game feels when played it lets a bunch of game design tricks to make its core loop satisfying to my lizard brain replace any other responsibilities the game may have to its story its characters its world its structure its pacing its tone or its themes I thought about all the times I was driving through an open world that it had no idea what to do with hours of my life gone to an open world conceit that served no-one any value I thought back to how pretty the sight lines were in Rage 1 and how they felt like concept art made manifest and how there was really nothing like that enraged to just pretty sunsets over some wastes and I thought back to bobby tackle in his unending torment and I realized that I as a critic probably placed too much emphasis on the concept of game feel if the warm fuzzies a games violence gives me can override all of that that's not to say I reject the notion of game feel entirely it can be incredibly important to games the most recent example I could probably cite that I've played is dangerous driving a game that is clearly trying hard to be a spiritual successor to burnout 3 takedown but because of its understated card damage model wonky physics and overly fragile cars it all feels wrong burnout is supposed to feel like the movie Ronan where you're driving a two-ton car going 100 miles an hour on the razor's edge of catastrophe and when the crashes happened they're supposed to be intense and violent dangerous driving instead feels like you're skating on ice and the smallest tap from another vehicle magically stops your car dead [Music] it doesn't feel like you're careening on the edge of control at any second and moments from Iraq it feels like you're holding a turbo button down and avoiding annoying death boxes in the form of other cars it's an example of how a game can be hurt by having bad game feel and I'd certainly rather play a platformer like say Mario with its delicate control over jump height and direction than pitfall with its canned jumps so I'm not dismissing game feel as a concept out of hand or an idea to explore but I think it's become too dominant in the discourse and certainly in my discourse and I think it took playing rage too to see that the thing is good game feel is all about engineering satisfactory responses to player inputs and sometimes that just means improving how frequently and with what level of finesse a game system responds to your input as with the Mario jumping and other times it means more direct means of letting you see your impact on the game world throaty gun roars flashy explosions or particle effects bassy whooshing sounds when you hit the boost button dozens of large numbers popping up on screen when you damage multiple enemies that sort of thing visual an audio feedback that isn't just tightening up the game's physics engines raw responsiveness but giving you feedback that makes you go I did the good thing and then get that dopamine release casual and mobile games actually use this technique a lot think of how like Pagels last shot makes a single button click into a thrilling slow motion zoom followed by particle effects a rainbow ode to joy' and a final descent into a glorious bonus point spit or how unlocking things and games like apex legends involves watching bursts that are usually white or blue but could be purple gold or orange with ever more satisfactory animations and sounds tying big wins to flashing lights and bacey washes signifying your action did something cool even if it was the random number generator that did all the work - easily I think we and certainly I go from this system has feedback mechanisms that release dopamine which feels good - this is good to play - this is a good game even if it isn't this game has good game feel - easily becomes an empty descriptor that implies you enjoy the act of playing a game without needing to explain why or what that means it's just like using the empty meaningless word fun but with more steps and some highfalutin game design to back it up and I think we need to be careful about how we let solidly design gameplay loops control how we approach a text whether it's the addictive gotcha game trying to get you to buy more polls or whether it's a really slick feeling comment system in a game that feels vacuous and even kind of mean rage twos combat system is genuinely a pretty great remix of doom 2016 s high-octane approach with some clever twists on both crowd control and strategy but and this is the part I've been bad at remembering that doesn't mean that rage 2 is a good game you baba glass glisten success blast hearty Moe rummy just Tony Saul solid TV punchy Macduff mic chain wag Jefferson crewneck dexter louver slag head

Channel: Errant Signal

Views: 97,272

Keywords: errant signal, rage 2, rage

Id: 15tqE-I8L4U

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/THEBAESGOD]

This video is the only one I've seen that really describes how I feel about the game. Rage 2 is probably the weirdest AAA game I've ever played in how inconsistent it is. The shooting is in my top 3 with probably the best combination of arsenal + sound design and animations of any sci-fi shooter I can remember. The rest of the game design is straight terrible. Mission types, pacing of action, overall repetition, and how character upgrades work made me regret finishing the game.

[u/chenDawg]

I like the idea of being aware that you only like a thing because it was mathematically engineered to make my brain feel good, but whether or not that is enough to carry a game just comes down to price. For me, anyway...

$60 is just too much to ask for a game that only does one thing well.

[u/bah77]

I played through rage 2 thought it was pretty fun, although a little easy - walk into a base press the "I win" button and everything explodes in a shower of gibs.

Was playing on second hardest level. thought i'd up the difficulty and immediately got shredded. Thinking the difficulty scaling was odd, googled rage 2 difficulty - turns out there was a bug where the difficulty went straight back to easy and i had been playing on easy the whole game :/

Im torn as to whether it was a bad thing, because slaughtering everything was great, hours of frustration might not have been.

[u/[deleted]]

I had a blast with the combat. It's very smooth, intuitive and just has the right feel. The story was alright and the world, while it has a lot to do, doesn't really help out with the whole story.

I would buy Rage 3 if it was more narrow and focused.

[u/Coypop]

I think I'm going to get my money's worth out of Rage 2 after all the patching they've been doing, I haven't touched it since release but the patch notes look great. I don't think the open world is entirely misguided either, the most fun I had playing initially was drifting around the map between landmarks, either obtaining Ark upgrades or clearing bandit bases.

The Ark upgrades felt good because the weapon unlocks are fairly non-linear and have a decent amount of horizontal progression as well as vertical, you're free to build your Ranger's abilities to your taste from the start.

And the bandit bases presented what I think was an unintentional roleplaying moment for me; the Ranger was a cop crashing a rave, completely coherent with the game's party aesthetics and even a little poetically ironic because it somewhat lined my goals up with the Authority's, an actual "we"re not so different, you and I" moment.

[u/cp5184]

So what IS a good game if you hold games to that standard? Does quake meet that standard? Doom? Wolfenstein 3d?

Why not just appreciate games that are fun to play, appreciate games that have a great story and environment, and appreciate those rare games that both have a good game and a good story/environment?

...

I wouldn't be very good at this whole writing/narrating opinion pieces thing...

[u/DoctahDonkey]

I played Rage 2 on Nightmare on PC and it felt absolutely amazing. It kept me going right up until the end, despite every single other aspect of the game being really terrible. It actually got me even more excited for DOOM Eternal. The abilities feel really good and the balance is great on Nightmare difficulty.

There's a good game in there, you'd just have to strip out 80% of it and redo everything.