id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms

id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms
[Oct 07, 2011, 9:33 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments

Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," getting answers from id on the topic, who express frustration with problems that were largely caused by driver issues. Along the way they also address how the game being designed for consoles holds back the PC edition. "You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," John Carmack tells them. "We chose the latter." He also bluntly addresses why this makes sense for id (emphasis Kotaku's):

"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."

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28.

Re: id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms
Oct 7, 2011, 23:11

Parallax Abstraction

28.

Re: id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms Oct 7, 2011, 23:11

Oct 7, 2011, 23:11

Parallax Abstraction

Here's my problem with the whole driver argument Carmack is making. This largely spawned from a discussion had on today's Tested.com podcast. While I obviously had to pay for my video card and it is the chip manufacturer's job to keep it supplied with drivers, in the case of RAGE, I paid id for it, not NVIDIA or ATI. It's id's job to ensure that their brand new engine works properly and if that requires special driver considerations, it's their responsibility to contact NVIDIA and ATI and get that done before the game comes out. If they called these companies and said "John Carmack would like to talk to you to make sure id Tech 5 works with your cards", they'd probably have their lead drivers engineers on the phone with him instantly. There is absolutely no excuse for drivers not being ready for this game that was in development for 6 years well in advance of launch. For Carmack to claim it's all the video chip maker's faults when he apparently made no effort to loop them in on his tech is ridiculous.

Frankly, I see this as a potential failing of their Zenimax acquisition. Bethesda hasn't put out a game I can think of that didn't have major launch problems and this seems to be the latest one. They seem to have an aversion to setting realistic release dates and sticking to those no matter what, even if the products clearly aren't ready yet. As someone who gave my money to them and no one else for RAGE, I think it's perfectly fair to put this bad launch on their shoulders. Had they contacted NVIDIA and ATI 6 months ago, I wonder if these problems would be here now.

Parallax Abstraction
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