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."
PHJF wrote on Oct 7, 2011, 23:32:
Wasn't he just quoted saying "In the future we will design for the PC and shave things off for the consoles"?
This... kind of sounds like the opposite.
That was from an interview last summer. Apparently he changed his stance.
While I'm saddened by what he says, it's really no surprise. I'm not sure if id is a company that can have the same impact on consoles as on the PC; people there care even less about the hooplah tied to a new engine; as a whole, the console market is a market of ADD hamsters on meth. It's not "what are you playing?", it's "what are you playing next?"
This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2011, 00:08.
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