I've been playing lots of games lately: beat Deus Ex: HR to 100% completion, same with the Missing Link expansion (GotY for me, by far). Trying to get 100% completion on Alan Wake which was surprisingly enjoyable and also longer than I expected. Still toiling away at Skyrim. Will probably jump into Assassin's Creed 2 or LA Noire next.
Beat Rage yesterday. On Ultra-Violence with a gamepad and barely experienced any challenge throughout the game. Wtf is wrong with today's designers? Also, that ending, holy crap a firing squad is not punishing enough. Btw, I enjoyed Rage a lot more than I thought I would. It's a solid 8/10 game, probably an 8.5 game however lack of challenge and INVISIBLE WALLS EVERYWHERE!
Also, now I can speak intelligently about id Tech 5's MegaTexture: NOT. FRICKING. WORTH. IT.
The ocasional beatiful vista or set piece at a distance is not worth the mountains of low-rez textures that move across your screen without needing to put your face to a wall. In fact, last year I thought the texture pop-in would be a far bigger problem but it's not AT ALL (at least on my machine it isn't - it's there, it's noticeable but playing with a gamepad it's not too annoying). However, you see low-rez textures everywhere, you see lighting shadow artefacts everywhere. When the lighting/shadowing are dynamic you kind of forgive some corner case problems but not when it's offline baked!
You have phantom shadows, phantom lights, lights going through occluders, shadows being broken, you got shadow precision issues (the same ones you get with real-time shadow buffers). You have texture compression issues, you see large blocky patches of textures whenever the surface brightness goes below 0.3 or similar. The texture detail option they added is a toss-up. It masks the lack of resolution, yes but it also makes you feel like you're playing a game through an old tv set with an horror flick filter.
And you absolutely, positively notice the difference between static and dynamic geometry. I'm never surprised by a fictional door because I know a door is part of the scenery simply the way it is lit compared to a real door.
I really thought all those screenshots we saw of low rez phones and pipes and whatever being posted when the game launched were simply the result of trolls trying to find the few rough spots but no, nearly every static surface has a texel density far below the standard today. On the floor, the walls, far away building landscapes, it's everywhere.
What is worse is that the characters/dynamic objects have excellent texel density so they stand out even more!
Act 2 is slightly better in this regard btw, with Jackal Valley being a particularly great example of how MT can improve the IQ. However, like I said, it's not worth all the tradeoffs. Also, INVISIBLE WALLS MOTHATRUCKER!