I’ve spent far too much of my life walking slowly back through the windows, walls and skies of games that deserve a ‘WARNING: STEP AWAY FROM THE TEXTURES’ sign next to every point of interest. So, to answer the question I’ve been getting all week: yeah, I’m still doing Rage. The fact it suffers ‘texture shock’ bordering on ‘texture having-a-fucking-heart-attack-in-my-eyes’ just makes it all the more interesting.

Here is a game with one foot squarely in the past – and I’m not just talking about its Borderlands-esque mix of Mad Max and the Stardust International Raceway. In an age of technical austerity where big studio games have to strike a balance between static and dynamic world building, Rage throws the slider hard towards the former. It is a massively pre-baked, painterly diorama indifferent to the movements of its superimposed pieces – almost like a board game. Destruction and deformation? You may as well ask the Mona Lisa to ‘cheer up’.

It’s an old-school faker. The abrupt colour-grading that simulates HDR; the tiny flocks of birds against a flat and frozen sky; the vast shadowmaps imposing the stage’s authority on the actors: these aren’t ugly, just conspicuous. Then there’s sparse virtual texturing (aka the MegaTexture), an illusion so data-intensive that it would, some suggest, take something in the region of 80-130gb more data to give it the consistent detail you’d expect.

People aren’t too happy about this. In a narrative of betrayals – the ‘consolisation’ of Epic, Crytek and BioWare, among others – John Carmack has made what many seem to regard as the ultimate heel turn, cashing in his role as the god of PC graphics. I expected the worst of Rage, especially after talk (and screenshots) of horrific texture pop-in due to the paranoid antics of a console-oriented engine. And, sure enough, there it was. Seeing a beautifully detailed crossbow sat flush against a wall you could generously call ‘a big brown skidmark’ was not what I’d expected from id Tech 5. Not quite, anyway.

I did expect that things would get messy in one way or other. Carmack might not be the god of PC gaming but he is the mad professor, a dogmatic genius who has Eureka moments in the shower, and spends the next six years trying to teach us what they mean. In Doom 3 it was dynamic per-pixel lighting and the geometric stencil shadow (‘Carmack’s Reverse’), which gave us a game that painted in darkness. In Rage, as in fellow id Tech user Brink, it’s the virtual texture.

Put very simply, the advantage virtual texturing brings to Rage is that its artists can ‘unique’ every surface of the game without ever damaging its performance. Rather than the traditional method of using multiple repeating textures, it uses a single massive one (128000x128000px) that can be indexed and streamed from on-demand, allowing huge amounts of detail with a minumum of waste.

With so much light and shadow baked into this MegaTexture, and so much finessing from id’s artists, there are times in Rage (about once-a-minute by my calculations) where you’d think the pixels were actually drying on the screen. It breathes new life into the cliché of games-as-concept-art, suffering no tiling or repetition of any kind, from the raceway decals on the walls to the pillars and valleys on the horizon.

It’s hard to imagine anyone better to stress-test this technology than art director Stephan Martiniere, whom I’ve spoken about briefly before. His remarkable work on Stranglehold is just one stop on a journey that’s seen him tackle Saturday morning TV shows, Japanese theme parks, Star Trek, and concept work on movies like The Fifth Element and the Star Wars prequels. With his background in animation, it’s no surprise that the game’s characters and enemies express themselves in movement more than words. id Tech 5, he’s said, let him “play” at the pixel level.

Calling the tech ‘revolutionary’ seems a little premature when so much seems geared to Rage’s old habits, its look harking back to the likes of Myst and Riven. But it is disruptive tech which, at a time when games are still struggling with parallel processing, provides the clearest indication yet of how old techniques – sparse voxel octrees and the like, which in id Tech 6 might bring this game’s uniqueness to geometry as well – can show us the way forward.

On top of that, Rage is a disruptive game. It reminds us how far we’ve erred from the thrills of ‘run-and-gun’ into pedestrian ‘stop-and-pop’; how we’ve lost the rhythm of the firstperson shooter; and how look and feel are still more important than gimmicks and Gamerscore.

Enough of that. Let’s talk screenshots.

Others did much of the research when it came to getting the texture resolution closer to what I’m guessing is their native resolution. The game has just-this-minute been patched to incorporate these values as menu options, but it’ll take more than just tweaks to get it closer to the version on id’s hard drives.

Then there’s the mixed bag of console commands. Yes, you can adjust the FOV, stop time, and remove the ‘hands’ model. You can even bind FOV increments to the mousewheel, and take screenshots using id’s nifty custom multisampling function, which has the added benefit of hiding all the GUI elements. But there’s no noclip function or free camera, which is a bit weird. The way around this was to add further incremental bindings to the cvar affecting the player’s height, which at least lets your eyes fly somewhere.