John Trollmack

[Alyxx Thorne]

RAGE was one of the most expected games this year. Not only was it going to be id's first game in almost an entire decade, it was also going to feature a ton of awesome features, including the new idTech5 engine which features huge megatextures and runs at a whopping 60 FPS.

 

Lo and behold, not only did the game initially ship with more bugs than a bait store, it either ran at 10 FPS with huge texture issues and NPC flickering, or didn't run at all. PC users all over the world have complained so much that only one day after the European launch, Bethesda released a patch to fix these issues.

 

John Carmack, CEO and lead programmer of Rage, called the whole thing a clusterf*** and went on record stating the game was developed for consoles specifically and that "the PC is no longer the leading gaming market". And this is coming from the man who single-handedly turned the PC into a viable and profitable gaming platform to begin with.

 

Thank you, John. You trolled the world of PC users.

 

[Scorpia]

O.O wow what a flake.

[Axeldeath]

John was never a good leader, I think iD went downhill when he started firing the original iD team when they thought it'd be a good idea to give their games a narrative or develop games that weren't exactly the same as the last ones they'd made.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Don't get me wrong, Rage is a blast to play when it finally worked. The game is fine and proves that id are still the best in the league.

 

But the backlash from the launch has already hurt his reputation badly.

 

And yes, he's not a good leader. He's a brilliant programmer though.

[Axeldeath]

Rage is scoring averaging reviews and it has a metacritic score of 79 for the PC. They are certainly not the best in the league any more, they had plenty of time and money to spend on this product so it should have been amazing.

[Alyxx Thorne]

In my opinion it is amazing. Critics are critics. I'm a gamer.

 

Review scores stem mostly from expectations and from the critic's taste. That's why i don't give a shit about reviews.

 

Seriously, I didn't expect a great game. I just expected a shooter with vehicles and rpg elements. And it succeeds in that. I have fun playing it, which is what matters to me.

 

Expect a spoiler-free review from me in the future.

[Axeldeath]

It may be a good game but it shows that iD are just not what they used to be. They fell behind the times, and it was mostly due to Carmack's stubbornness.

[Alyxx Thorne]

I agree. No matter how you look at it, Rage is not and will never be any Doom or Wolfenstein.

 

But it looks great, has a massive amount of detail and runs at 60 FPS even on the highest settings for me. I think that's actually impressive.

 

As I said, a review is coming up.

[Blightmare]

Is it just me or is shipping out games for the PC with loads of bugs becoming more and more common? I know this isn't the first time this year I've heard thing's like this.

[Kirkreng]

That's Consolization. However I don't even think Rage was released for consoles.

[Lord Sinister]

I heard that ID got really screwed over by driver issues that were not their fault. And his point is true, whilst the market for PC games is by no means small, I believe that there are a larger amount of console users out there than PC users.

 

Also people might find these two articles interesting. The first explains the PC release issues:

http://kotaku.com/5847761/why-was-the-pc-launch-of-rage-such-a-cluster

 

The second is an older interview from June:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/06/08/e3-2011-our-john-carmack-interview-covers-rage-the-pc-and-gamma-corrected-anti-aliasing/

[Alyxx Thorne]

That's Consolization. However I don't even think Rage was released for consoles.

It was a multi-platform project, designed to run on PS3, XB360 and PC, and id was focusing on making the game equal on all platforms. However, I think they failed on PC.

[Kirkreng]

Really? I didn't even know(or expect that), seeing as id is very PC focused.

[Alyxx Thorne]

They used to be. Now I have the feeling they are developing games for consoles and then porting them to PC.

[Lord Sinister]

They used to be. Now I have the feeling they are developing games for consoles and then porting them to PC.

 

Did you read the Kotaku link I posted?

[Alyxx Thorne]

I've been reading up on Kotaku a lot lately actually.

[The Hamburglar]

Implying that this wasn't as bad as Dead Island's PC release?

[Alyxx Thorne]

I'd say they were similar.

[Axeldeath]

Implying that this wasn't as bad as Dead Island's PC release?

 

I think the big thing about this was that iD was a huge PC dev yet they released a bad port.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Yeah, the issue here is that the game has been hyped almost to a fever pitch. That's why it hit so hard when it failed.