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."
Re: id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms
Oct 10, 2011, 14:15
Oct 10, 2011, 14:15
The characters look amazing but don't have any depth to them. The gameplay itself actually feels very dated, from the invisible walls to the doors you cannot open to environments that have very little interactivity to enemies that drop weapons you cannot pickup. And some decisions are just inconsistent - for instance, you cannot jump over railings because of invisible walls and yet if you overstep a platform on the rope-slide you fall to instant death.
RAGE is anything but innovative. It copies games like Borderlands but does a half-assed job. The texturing is the biggest addition, but they butchered the quality by compressing it "down" to 25GB, leaving low resolution textures everywhere. And the pre-baked lighting is actually a backward step from even Doom 3, especially from games like Far Cry 2 - it's easy to get good performance if you pre-calculate virtually all the lighting.
RAGE is anything but innovative. It copies games like Borderlands but does a half-assed job. The texturing is the biggest addition, but they butchered the quality by compressing it "down" to 25GB, leaving low resolution textures everywhere. And the pre-baked lighting is actually a backward step from even Doom 3, especially from games like Far Cry 2 - it's easy to get good performance if you pre-calculate virtually all the lighting.
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