John Carmack, IDsoftware’s founder and technical director is usually reserved and level headed, how it seems with the issues that are plaguing the PC release of their latest release, he seems to be less than satisfied. In a recent interview with Kotaku, he goes on record stating that the release on the PC was a “Clusterfuck”. I agree with him there. I can’t even get this game run properly on my high-end gaming PC, though I can get beta’s of other games that aren’t even optimized running just fine.
“The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$,” he wrote. “We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch; we had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions.”
Going forward he even goes as far as to say the PC simply isn’t what it used to be and will not be IDsoftware’s lead platform.
“We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. 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.”
Oh Johnny, how the mighty have fallen! You to are out for the money it seems and have abandoned the PC gaming community to focus on the consoles, which is sad as the PC was once again the platform that made IDsoftware the company it is today. However it’s still good to see that other company’s have realized that not making the PC the lead platform has been a mistake and have set out to correct this, companies such as Epic, Hi-Rez Studios, EA, Dice and countless Indie studios. I’ll be the first to admit that this offends me deeply as I grew up on games released by IDsoftware; Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Commander Keen, Hexen and Heretic, now only to hear that my gaming system of choose isn’t as important as another.
You can read the entire interview over at Kotaku.com – here. Meanwhile I’m going go chat with Gamestop and see if I an get a refund for RAGE. I doubt it but it can’t hurt to try.