I’ve been anticipating id’s new game, Rage, for some time. Now it’s out, and I can’t bring myself to play past the first level. Here’s why:

On the left, half-loaded textures; on the right, even less-loaded ones (click for full resolution)

I’ve played games with bad texture pop-in before — Unreal 3 Engine games have always given me grief — but even then, once you turned your head and looked at a texture and allowed it to load, it would stay loaded. In Rage, no matter how many times you look at something, if you look away it’s going to have to load again. Rage looks sublime once the textures are loaded, but it’s a fast-paced game, and there’s no time to slow down to wait for the game to catch up.

Rage after three seconds of standing still

I wouldn’t mind so much if this wasn’t the second time this year Bethesda decided to release a game that runs like it couldn’t have been tested on the not-unpopular ATI 5000 series. I also wouldn’t mind if the day-1 ATI driver update made specifically to fix the problem had worked at all instead of forcing me to overwrite the driver that was making the Battlefield 3 beta run correctly.

But since it hasn’t worked, I have a proposal for id and Bethesda — a stopgap, if you will: just leave the textures muddy and low-res. I find that untextured look appealing in a retro sort of way. What I can’t stand is all the textures warping and transforming every time I look somewhere. Really, this would be fine. Then at the absolute least, the game will remind me of certain low-res games that I’ve grown quite fond of.

Nothing to be ashamed of