John Carmack Apologizes for Rage's "Inexcusable" PC Release

[Timothy Chang]

John Carmack Apologizes for Rage's "Inexcusable" PC Release

id Software admits that Rage's widespread driver issue was "really, really poorly handled."


Rage's launch on the PC in 2011 was marred with flaws [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/113479-Graphics-Card-Drivers-To-Blame-For-Rages-PC-Issues], resulting in performance problems like texture pop-in and screen tearing. John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, acknowledged these problems in this year's QuakeCon keynote speech and has formally apologized for the shaky release.

Carmack dedicated the first few minutes of his speech to a retrospective on the post-apocalyptic shooter before moving on to its troubled PC debut. Members of the audience responded with scattered applause and calls of "thank you" after Carmack admitted that the game had performed badly in the PC space, saying that the entire situation was "really, really poorly handled".

"There's no way to, you know, to argue our way out of it one way or another," Carmack acknowledged. "The release on the PC not working for over half of our customers because of the driver issues that we had really was inexcusable on our part."

"It was optimistic naïveté," he continued. "We tried to get the drivers to work the way they were supposed to, but we weren't smart about the fact that most people wouldn't have these drivers if everything had gone right." He concluded the brief discussion that the company was going to handle these issues better in the future.

Carmack also praised the "moment to moment" gameplay in Rage, saying that id did a good job in pushing for a highly responsive, fast action game. On the other hand, he criticized the game's ending and the lack of a checkpoint save system, and believed that Rage "would've been good if we spent some time to get it working right."

Despite the game's problems with graphics drivers affecting more than half of Rage's player base, Carmack still has a soft spot for the PC platform: "PC, when its working right, is far, far better."

Source: Shacknews [http://www.shacknews.com/article/75113/carmack-sorry-about-performance-of-rage-on-pc]

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[hino77]

If i remember corectly(and i probably dont), didnt he , or someone else from his studio say that pc`s are annoyng to make games for? And , besides, the game had more problems besides the whole driver thing,like beng extreamly mediocre for example.

 

[Scorpid]

Yeah when you spend all your time working on the graphics things are bound to slip past. Like ooooh say the game works, or the story is interesting, or there is a game there at all with any depth beyond the shiny paint. You know, the little things.

 

[Scorpid]

Yeah when you spend all your time working on the graphics things are bound to slip past. Like ooooh say the game works, or the story is interesting, or there is a game there at all with any depth beyond the shiny paint. You know, the little things.

When has ANY id game have Depth?

They all consist of Shooting the shit out of something. Which is why I love them.

You can shoot the shit out of something in a game with a good story. Senseless violence is just hollow now for me. I've been playing games for awhile now and it gets old.

 

[Doom972]

If i remember corectly(and i probably dont), didnt he , or someone else from his studio say that pc`s are annoyng to make games for? And , besides, the game had more problems besides the whole driver thing,like beng extreamly mediocre for example.

He said that it makes more sense to make the game for the consoles and then porting it to the PC, rather than the other way around, and that PC is not the leading platform.

OT: It's good of him to acknowledge their mistakes and the potential of the PC. I hope that their next games would reflect that.

 

[grigjd3]

Would you look at that? A developer that owns up to their mistakes. I've never been a big id fan but this might be turning me.

 

[AJax_21]

RAGE had one of the best shooting mechanics I've played in a single-player FPS in a very long time but it's biggest problem is all the bullshit between the fantastic shooty bits. The uninteresting story, the writing, the goddamn driving, the pointless open-world, the "RPG" mechanics... and so on.

 

[Rednog]

Honestly I don't think there is much to say, I hope people learn from both Brink and Rage, to not buy any PC game that has Id tech. Seriously Brink comes out and is ported over with Id tech and it has a boatload of problems, Rage comes out a few months later and has the exact same problems, they either didn't learn or just didn't care. Either case I won't buy their lazy and poorly ported games anymore.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Honestly I don't think there is much to say, I hope people learn from both Brink and Rage, to not buy any PC game that has Id tech. Seriously Brink comes out and is ported over with Id tech and it has a boatload of problems, Rage comes out a few months later and has the exact same problems, they either didn't learn or just didn't care. Either case I won't buy their lazy and poorly ported games anymore.

Agreed.

And seriously, people applauding him for an apology that's almost a YEAR overdue? Too little too late.

 

[cerebus23]

This is something an younger carmack would never have put out, when he was still making pc games and doing it better than most anyone else.

but he could port the game running over to an iphone on a weekend, but never bothered to make sure the game ran on a pc....

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

"PC, when its working right, is far, far better."

Surely that should be "PC, when it's products are working right, is far, far better"

 

[Steve the Pocket]

But did they ever actually fix those issues, or is the game in its current state still unplayable?

 

[Boris Goodenough]

But did they ever actually fix those issues, or is the game in its current state still unplayable?

Playable, more the graphic glitches are still present to some degree (at least on Nvidia).

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

PC is a great platform, but the downside is hardware. There's no real standards when it comes to drivers and hardware, and not all gamers are hardware buffs. Thus creating the problem of faulty ass drivers and crappy ass hardware interfering with games functionality.
It sucks ass, I know. Moreover its tough for developers to accommodate every single piece of hardware imaginable. I'd be much happier if developers decided to make their own standards and just refuse to program games for shit hardware. Sucks for the low-end budget gamer, but I learned long ago that researching your hardware is a must-do when being a gamer.
Still its nice of Carmack to admit he's not infallible.

 

[Boris Goodenough]

PC is a great platform, but the downside is hardware. There's no real standards when it comes to drivers and hardware, and not all gamers are hardware buffs. Thus creating the problem of faulty ass drivers and crappy ass hardware interfering with games functionality.
It sucks ass, I know. Moreover its tough for developers to accommodate every single piece of hardware imaginable. I'd be much happier if developers decided to make their own standards and just refuse to program games for shit hardware. Sucks for the low-end budget gamer, but I learned long ago that researching your hardware is a must-do when being a gamer.
Still its nice of Carmack to admit he's not infallible.

Considering there are only two major players in the graphics world and Carmack had to have run it on something (as I remember it they use AMD, which would explain why it's worse on Nvidia), so it wouldn't have been THAT much out of their way to test in on Nvidia hardware and tell them something isn't right (maybe they did), although I don't understand why Nvidia didn't contact the grandfather of shooters when they knew he was making Rage (maybe they did)...