240°

RAGE Online Pass locks out single-player content

RAGE's creative director Tim Willits has detailed the online pass system set to feature in the upcoming post-apocalyptic shooter, revealing that rather than locking second-hand buyers out of the game's multiplayer modes, certain single-player content will only be available to a "first-time buyer".

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gamerzines.com
DJMarty4681d ago

Good, that screws the pirates over.

Maybe they think twice before ripping off the dev.

Hicken4681d ago

Also screws over people who never buy new because the quality of the game can't be assured.

Guess they'll think twice before buying a game from the developer.

Perjoss4681d ago (Edited 4681d ago )

poor excuse, that's what reviews and demos are for. If you're still not sure then wait for the price to drop, which happens very fast these days apart from a few games like CoD, Sims and stuff by Blizzard.

edit: I just bought a ton of games I know are not AAA, stuff like Wolfenstein, Singularity Metro 2033, bought them all new at a quarter of the retail price, just need a little patience sir.

steve30x4681d ago

@ Perjoss : What are you talking about? Most games now do'nt have demos anymore and a review is one persons view of a game that they might like , but another person might think is rubbish after buying the game after reading good reviews.

For instance , Duke Nukem Forever got bad reviews and lots of people did'nt like the game , but I loved the game.

MidnytRain4681d ago (Edited 4681d ago )

@steve30x

Reviews are opinionated, but the trick is to take the relevant info out of multiple write-ups. Works for me, anyway.

LightofDarkness4681d ago

Whatever about people who never buy new (most people prefer to buy new if they can afford it, from experience), the real problem that people will see is that they're pricing the lowest income bracket out of the market. These are the people who make Madden, COD and FIFA so damn popular. If you're going to force them to pay 59.99/49.99 up front every time, you're going to see less and less players.

ElementX4681d ago (Edited 4681d ago )

@steve: wait a week and look at Amazon user reviews. You can find out which people have actually bought the game from Amazon by looking for verified purchases. Read a bunch of reviews from every star rating. It gives a pretty clear idea of how good or bad the game is. You can read positives and negatives and form your own opinion based on the experiences of multiple people who aren't given comp games.

@lightofdarkness: "Pricing the lowest income bracket out of the market"... so? If you can't afford food, clothing, rent, and utilities, I sure as hell hope you're not wasting money on video games. If you are using food stamps and you're a gamer, you really need to prioritize your life.

"These are the people who make Madden, COD, and FIFA so damn popular. If you're going to force them to pay 59.99/49.99 up front every time, you're going to see less and less players" Um... when was the last time id released a game? Doom 3 was released in 2004. Quake Live was released in 2009 and it was FREE! What are you talking about? id doesn't release games every year, why do you bring up Madden, COD, and FIFA? Your comment makes no sense

morganfell4681d ago (Edited 4681d ago )

Research my dear Mr Hicken. Research rather than knee jerk, my friends have it and I'm a lemming, impulse buying.

Not only is a little hesitance better for the gamer but it also forces companies to produce higher quality titles in order to entice and reassure gamers.

LightofDarkness4681d ago

@ElementX:

You either have terrible reading comprehension skills, or you're simply being a pedant. It's quite clear that I was speaking about online passes in general, and that if you want your game to be popular, make sure the people who can make a game extremely popular can afford them. And what the hell is your point about id Software not releasing a game in so long? That is completely inconsequential to my argument. But then again, that's what a pedant does.

"If you can't afford food, clothing, rent, and utilities, I sure as hell hope you're not wasting money on video games. If you are using food stamps and you're a gamer, you really need to prioritize your life."
- No one said these people can't afford the basic necessities. Are you saying that people with low income shouldn't be able to enjoy our favourite past-time? That they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy themselves with a videogame they like, because they should be beset with worry at all times? People should be able to enjoy a game with what little disposable income they have if they can afford to do so, which is why used games are a god-send for some. They make games affordable for a lot of people. You start taking options like this away and you keep furthering the divide between rich & poor, haves and have-nots.

If one could be assured that this money was going to the developers, I'd be a little more relaxed about this issue. But it's more than likely going straight into the publishers' pockets. It's just another unnecessary layer of greed at a time when we are all being stretched to our limits.

Biggest4681d ago

I don't understand you guys. You cry about online passes and say the model should be a "reward for buying new" system. They do that and the "media" flips the meaning, which allows you kids to cry more. Rage is doing it the way you wanted, fools!

Hicken4681d ago

tehReaper down at 15.1 has the right idea, and it's an analogy I use all the time.

You have the options to buy new/used versions of many things: cars, movies, books, houses, furniture, pretty much everything. But only the gaming industry tells you that features you paid for cannot be passed on to the next owner. Can't pass it down to someone else in your family. Hell, you can't even give it away.

Developers seem to be under the impression that they should be making money off used sales of their games. To be honest, I'm glad they're the only ones. It'd be horrible if EVERY industry out there was charging you extra to access content built into their product just because you didn't buy it new.

@Perjoss, ElementX, morganfell, and Biggest:
Yes, research DOES exist. I do it; it's one of the reasons I'm here. I also sell games, and that makes me a more informed seller.

But a lot of "reviewers" out there don't share my interests. When I see somebody give Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 a 6- a game which I love- I know that person and I share at least SOME different tastes. If I went by reviews alone, I would have bought all the last Call of Duty titles and never looked back; I'd have been out 150 bucks for the same game.

And who wants to be patient and wait five or six months for a game to hopefully drop? That's STILL playing into the developer's hands: Black Ops, for example, is STILL sixty dollars brand new.

I don't like online passes for this very same reason. (It's also why I don't like XBOX Live, but that's another story.) The game has already been paid for. The features are built onto the disc. The developer has already made money off that copy. People can say, "Oh, but the devs pay for the servers that person is playing on!" Yeah, and they got that money from the person who bought the game the first time. As someone else in another thread said, there are NO used copies without NEW copies. There can never be (well, not until it's many years down the line, at least) a used copy of a game that wasn't first bought new, and as long as that's the case, it means that the exact same number of people, technically speaking, are playing the game. No extra load on the servers, no extra money out of the developer's pocket.

The bottom line is greed. These guys feel sleighted, somehow, by the fact that people aren't rushing out to buy new copies because used copies exist. They call it a lack of money, or an effort to curb piracy, and then they make their customers suffer. If they REALLY wanted more money, they'd go to the publishers, who never seem to be lacking in funds.

radphil4681d ago (Edited 4681d ago )

"I don't understand you guys. You cry about online passes and say the model should be a "reward for buying new" system. They do that and the "media" flips the meaning, which allows you kids to cry more. Rage is doing it the way you wanted, fools!""

How is cutting content out rewarding? I'm talking about the MP stuff. If they were like "Hey we have extra stuff in SP, but nothing else is affected" that would be fine.

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4681d ago
Blaze9294681d ago

So what about all those who buy the game new but don't have an Internet connection to use the pass? They loose content too for doing the right thing? Pathetic

KUV19774681d ago

I always buy new. Still i think it's majorly annoying.

NuclearDuke4681d ago

Why are you annoyed by something that doesn't affect you? The people who buy used games don't contribute 0.001% to future development of the games you play.

KUV19774681d ago (Edited 4681d ago )

Probably because i am a collector freak. I keep all my bought games in mint condition. I don't intend to sell them but as far as i am concerned they are as good as new minus the shrink-wrap. From now on they will also always have a worthless piece of paper in them that has a completely meaningless code on them. And they don't have the same 'as new'-status. For me that devaluates the package. I don't care how stupid that sounds. It's like buying a car with a navigation system inbuilt and you can only use it on the first drive, afterwards you have a completely useless device in the car. How great would that be?

Also i play on consoles because i don't have to worry about that stupid stuff, but now the consoles are getting all the inconveniences of the pc (installation, serials) without the good things (side functionality, upgradability, free dlc) and with a higher price tag right from the start. It just seems silly.

Also i am split between the used and new market points. Theoretically i support the point that the developers should get more money and more people should buy games new. It's just fair and i want the devs to make more money. On the other side, there are tons of markets that have to deal with used items and they still kinda work without the companies having to shut down. Maybe if they lowered the prices from the get go they would sell overproportianally more products in the first place. But why try something like that when you can just annoy the customers that supported you all along?

Also, does anyone really think that the pirates are annoyed by something like that? Then they play the game without sewers but for free. They play the game without multiplayer, but for free. Or they hack it. They have so many games, they don't have time to really play every aspect of them anyway (which is kinda stupid - what good are games when you can't fully enjoy them - but it's their choice) The only ones that are affected, be it the minor inconvenience of typing in the code, or the bigger one of buying a pass, are the honest customers, that have decided against pirated copies. It's like the guys that pirate movies. Buy them and you are forced through a bazillion unskippable trailers and legal notices. Have a pirated copy and enjoy only the movie. There is something inherently wrong with this - as far as i am concerned.

So part of me being annoyed is also that I, who bought every game ever possessed new, have to go the extra step when everyone else is too cheap to buy a game new or the companies are too greedy to lower the price or too lazy to make the games worth their money for more people...

NuclearDuke4681d ago

I find your interest in keeping your game copies in a mint condition absolutely fine. However, seeing as you are not intending to sell any of your games, devaluation of them shouldn't be a dealbreaker to you. I am sure that if you are a collector freak not interesting in selling your items, you would not worry about the value of your games, as long as you find interest in just being a collector.

I don't mind publishers attempting to close the pirate market. DRM & Online Passes has it's downside, but is also a stepstone into new engineering on the field to prevent piracy which hurts both the publisher and developer, but certainly also the retail market.

I believe that settling with individuals who pirate video games is wrong. The intention of piracy may be to try out a new game, but it's definately also an intention of not having trust in the developer. An example could be a car purchase. Most car dealers allows a customer to take a veichle for a test drive, compare the test drive to a demo. If you are not allowed a test drive, would you steal the car to either test it or completely avoid paying for it. I would say, no. No decent human being would do this and I do not understand the people who illegally copy games or download them from torrent websites.

I honestly do not see why you are annoyed. This should not affect you. You puchase new games, exclusively. No used games purchase, according to your statement, is made. If you wish to play a game with it's full content, purchase the game and support the developer in their future to provide you with more fun and exciting games. Right now, to you, DRM and online passes might seem as a mistrust by Rage, Ubisoft and Blizzard - but they need a way to protect their IPs from both piracy but also used game sales as they earn nothing from those sales.

KUV19774681d ago (Edited 4681d ago )

I can perfectly understand your logic. It just doesn't work for me personally. When i mean loss of value i am not talking about sales price but personal value. Sales price really is irrelevant to me, but somehow my collection seems stained by the useless (after using) code pieces in the package.

I am not a big multiplayer-gamer so it didn't really affect me so far. In Dead Space i didn't even try the multiplayer. In Mortal Kombat i found it annoying and the trial period was enough to realize this, but Rage and Resistance will finally force me to use the packaged codes and i guess over time i will get used to it. It will however always annoy me, that the person who supports the devs the most is the one who is 'punished' by these extra requirements. However, i really don't see a way to make it work otherwise.

As far as the car example goes. I am not saying that people would steal cars to try them, but that people who steal cars don't care if the navigation system in the stolen car doesn't work because they are not the first owner. It's kind of a far fetched example anyway...

Philoctetes4681d ago

Same here. I'm basically okay with online passes for multiplayer -- though those are annoying too -- but locking out some of the single player content is going too far IMO.

I probably wasn't going to buy RAGE any time soon if at all (too much other stuff coming out), so admittedly it's not that big a deal, but I don't like the precedent.

Also, the single player stuff this article is talking about shoult be on the disc and shouldn't require a download. I don't want my ability to play a single-player game to be dictated by network access.

Snowii4681d ago

online pass?

what does online already have racing?

Snowii4681d ago

still

cant believe theyll fuck us with a pass :(

steve30x4681d ago

I wont be buying any game with online pass even if afterwards I would have traded in the game. This is just pissing all over the people who cant afford each and every new game that they like. I buy some used games and I also buy new games. I buy used games sometimes , because the simple fact is that I cant always afford the price of a new game.

NuclearDuke4681d ago

Prioritize. Either you get A,B,C or you get D,E,F. If you got money for A,B,C,D,E,F - get em, if not - too bad.

Da One4681d ago

IT should be able to buy whatever, whenever the **** he wants. Especially if it's cheaper and convenient to him.

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110°

Xbox Deals With Gold and Spotlight Sale Discounts – 4th-10th Aug 2020

Neil writes: "Just been paid? Fancy getting a new game added to that backlog of shame? The Xbox Deals With Gold and Spotlight Sale is back with even more discounts on a variety of great Xbox titles. If you've got time in your life for a new gaming experience, the following bargain basement titles are available for your cut-price purchasing between 4th-10th August 2020."

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thexboxhub.com
90°

Rage's Open World Was Intimate & Memorable, Not Another Huge, Empty Sandbox

Rage from id Software and Bethesda Softworks was largely overlooked, yet its handcrafted FPS open world and memorable characters transcend genre convention.

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escapistmagazine.com
Fist4achin1657d ago

I enjoyed the first game. I plan to play the sequel soon!

210°

Here are Star Wars The Force Unleashed, Crysis 2, RAGE & Resident Evil 2 Remake with Ray Tracing

YouTube’s members ‘Digital Dreams’ and ‘Jose cangrejo’ have shared some videos, showcasing Pascal Gilcher’s Reshade mod – which adds Ray Tracing/Path Tracing effects – in some really old games such as Star Wars The Force Unleashed, Crysis 2, RAGE and Resident Evil 6.

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dsogaming.com
traumadisaster1810d ago

I'm still learning how to look for the differences. At first I was focusing on shadows for some reason but I don't think that changes much, is it reflections that change?

rashada071810d ago (Edited 1810d ago )

It is supposed to be simulating how light actually works- so yes if light is reflecting off a surface accurately it should show reflection or an effect that matches what you are looking at in the environment. Next time you play a game look at a puddle of water there may be just a "baked" in texture that if you aren't paying attention seems like it is reflecting but it isn't. I would say though if the light is reflecting more accurately I would think that would give more accurate shadows as well.
I am still not 100% sold on it- it looks okay but I can't get over the hardware price jump for better reflections..

Taz X141810d ago

While games won't look immensely better, it opens up more possibilities overall. Understandably, the price jump is huge. But, that can be said for being at the forefront for any new technology. I'm currently using a 2080ti and while I've played a few games that enable it, the gpu also plays everything else incredibly well so it's not like you're buying this tech for ONLY that option. Enthusiasts will pay top dollar to check out the newest things, but this will eventually become an everyday consumer and by then they'll have optimized and become a lot cheaper.

warriorcase1809d ago

Ray/path tracing can be used how the developer wants it to be. Tracing can be used to calculate shadows/lighting, reflection and even audio, where audio waves are calculated on the bounce off material types to simulate enviroment and echos accuratly.

Should also keep in mind that this ray/path tracing system is different and less accurate option from Nvidias RTX branded type. McFly's is a reshade that layers over the top of the game and therefor the quality will vary drastically. For example you can see nice reflection in the Star Wars demo here but it then introduces colour clipping with the light saber. On a video of GTA 5 for example it was incorrectly projecting a reflection of a red car onto the road which caused a very faint red glow on the ground around the car.

If you want to see a good example of a game developed with ray tracing reflection and lighting in mind then you could look up the youtube video of "Control - Exclusive E3 RTX GAMEPLAY Trailer".

DigitallyAfflicted1810d ago

It supposed to add more realistic light Not actually more light effects and explosions

traumadisaster1810d ago

I hate to say it but I’m fine with fake lights, shadows, reflections. I just kind of like the effect, it’s also great it saves resources for other things.

I’ve been checking out some original Xbox games on x360/x1x and the engine has fake light streaming in through a stained glass window, and I love it even though I know it’s not real time lighting. Heck it even shifts as I move about.

I’ve about convinced my self rt and hdr just doesn’t work for me. Before hdr I would even complain damn why are the headlights killing me they are so bright.

I notice most frame rate, then jaggies, then resolution; with the last two interchangeable depending.

Other day watched an enthusiast rave over 4k and the poor guy was in 1080p. I played the same game the night before and thought wow this is clean, I wonder if it’s 4k, but knew differently and I thought wow even resolution is not always important. The next day he apologized and was surprised he could be fooled.

RaidenBlack1809d ago

EA should have released the Crysis Trilogy Remaster for this gen.

FGHFGHFGH1804d ago

How come the lightsabers don't give off any light? Even in the EA star wars game the guy uses it to light up a dark cave. I guess if it is using frostbite it will support rtx cards.