John Carmack Addresses the Problems With the Launch of Rage
The legendary developer has some shocking comments.
id is a company that has been synonymous with the PC since its inception. The company that brought the world Doom and Quake has always pushed the PC as the lead platform for their games. Even though Doom 3 was released on the Xbox about six months after the PC launch, id had never gone fully multiplatform on day one until the release of Rage last week. While the 360 and PS3 versions are stable, there have been plenty of issues with the PC version of the game. John Carmack, the co-founder of id and driving force behind the company’s game engines, spoke out about those issues recently.
"The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$," Carmack wrote to Kotaku. “We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn't work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn't help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms."
When asked to elaborate on those prime platforms, Carmack made a surprising comment. "We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," he said. "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.”
Carmack, ever the defender of the PC format, makes a startling point. This is especially interesting considering that the console cycle is at a point where the PC is capable of outperforming the home consoles pretty easily. “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,” continues Carmack. “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."
Rage is out now, and by the time you read this, the driver issues have pretty much all been addressed.
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