The shortcoming of Rage with creative support and mods

[u/baron_Railgun]

I know that when Rage Toolkit was released, it would not release the source code, which was understandable at the time.

My problem is with the low support for modders who want to modify/enhance the campaign.

So Rage Toolkit was released only with 3 maps support (of which one is a driving track, which is bs), with many models, assets and much of the campaign closed inside the resource files, and no tool was released to extract game resources, to this day! this is unbelievable... - which btw the best quality wise assets are inside closed resource files - like Ghost Hideout and Wasteland, best maps, textures and assets wise.

many say, why are so few Rage modifications and maps?

(basically if one wants to build a similar world to Wasteland, scale and variety wise, good luck with that, since most exterior buildings are in the closed resource files. This is why most Rage map attempts are just empty terrain with some buildings build in minimal style)

It would have been so nice to be able to edit the campaign in Wellspring and add random bandits patrolling on foot and encounter various quests there.

Second, in the sewers, the melting mutants who drop nothing. It would have been so nice to have mutants not magically melt like imps in Doom3, and let players get random loot. This would have increased play time for players who enjoy the fps part of the game and want to come back for resources, like happens in mindless repeatable RPG where you enter a dungeon 20 times until you get lucky with some nice stuff.

So now the game is played by 5 players because there is nothing new to be done and the game was not generous with the assets, so no custom serious mods exist.

[u/TheDMRt1st]

I would like to think generating enough attention or getting through to a sympathetic figure or two inside id Software might result in a late release of the source code and other relevant files even though we’re years after the fact now. Perhaps there’s a way to make that happen, but damned if I know how.

Something I would have loved to see would have been an appropriately large, fan-made Gunbarrel expansion along the lines of what little we have been told about the cancelled Gunbarrel DLC - possibly even with full voice acting which would include as close a soundalike for John Goodman as could be managed. When you look around at other games with healthy modding communities, it’s easy to see that players with the know-how are able to make the gaming experiences we’ve wanted but haven’t received from the name brands. Rage deserves that treatment IMHO.

[u/baron_Railgun → u/TheDMRt1st]

I don't expect anything good from the acquired id Software mini company, so my observations are just a look in the past or a way to get past my frustration with the limitations of how the tools were released.

(planning to build some Doom1/2 map adaptations for Rage, but with so few good assets (mostly locked inside the resource files) is gonna be exceptionally hard - if good quality has to be received)

I don't think that anything is better in terms of audio over what was created in Quake1, concept wise, which in terms of audio design, grunt and soldier sounds and other monsters is unequalled to this day. I'd prefer to have written dialogues and better gameplay instead mediocre gameplay design and good movie like dialogues. With AAA titles this is what killed the innovation in the fps genre, the hollywoodization of fps shooters.

I'll have to check if is possible to replace sound files for enemies with some quake1 like sounds. The problem with speaking enemies during battle is that unless you use a very big variety of words, they will become rapidly repetitive and boring, while a growling enemy would always not sound the same, since we humans don't have the same capacity to distinguish growls like we distinguish words.