Historically id has never been known for deep characters or good stories. To me their games were just advertisements for their engines.

I would have been surprised if Rage was able to match worlds from companies like Bethesda, Bioware (before the EA buyout), or Obsidian.

I don't want to bag out on id.. but the games they've done in the past that qualified as FUN - the basic premise was to just kill wave after wave of bad guy/demon/robot type soldier guy. Their games have never been very "deep", but they have been fun to play. This looks to me like they felt a bioware style game was more appropriate but have none of the bioware talent for making engaging story/dialogue.

I'm sure I read somewhere that id were no longer going to be in the game of tech licensing, but I could just be mistaken.

It's my impression that they're holding out on open sourcing id Tech 4 until after the release of Rage, so it would make sense that they still intend on licensing id Tech 5.

What did the reviewer expect from an iD game?

Glad to know they've still got it though. Maybe I'll end up making my first video game purchase in years...

The story tomorrow isn't going to be the bad reviews, it's going to be the fact that almost nobody seems to be able to actually play the game. There are tons of graphics issues and crashes. It really looks like they botched the launch (on Steam, anyway.)