id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms [Oct 07, 2011, 8:33 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," 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."
Graphics can go much further. The problem is, unexplored ideas in graphics are largely about nuance and making a believable simulation, which is something no one is interested in doing; you can't put "better immersion" as a bullet point on the box the same way you can't put anti-aliasing there, so it never gets done.
I disagree. The majority of graphical advancements over the past few years have been relatively subtle. HDR, tessellation, ambient occlusion, parallax occlusion mapping, etc, are all pretty subtle improvements that, when used properly, can really make a scene more immersive.
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