No News Is Good News (Rage)

I've been working on some art projects for PAX. Today I decided I should stop and catch up on some news. QuakeCon (the convention id Software throws for its die hard fans) is going on, and Carmack's keynote is getting a lot of coverage. Most years, he's talking completely over the heads of the people listening, so they just point readers to a transcript and ignore him. This year he said some things people understood.

Microsoft's charging a "per disc" licensing fee. So if you want to do a giant, detailed game world (like id Software's own game "Rage" is trying to do), you can either ship the 360 version with low resolution textures or pay Microsoft tons of extra money. And according to this Kotaku interview with id's Todd Hollenshead, Microsoft requires developers to put more than two gigs of "information" (What?) on the disc, so they don't even get a full DVD's worth of room. According to my "sit on my butt" sleuthing, this means developers have something under 6.5 gigs to play with, since according to Wikipedia's DVD capacity chart the most a single single sided DVD can hold is 8.54 GB.

This isn't too surprising. The 360 will soon be three years old, and it seems highly likely that Microsoft just wanted HD DVD to stall Blu-Ray long enough to get online video distribution working (and largely succeeded). Heck even without NetFlix, one third of Xbox Live purchases were video. And it's even rumored that they're taking another step at getting the 360's price down to mass market viability. So good on them.

But penalizing developers for trying to make their games the best they can be is pretty messed up. Maybe id can release the game on DVD and have free downloadable content with the high res textures available. It'd be a pain, but it'd be something. Besides, as long as it doesn't take much longer to download than the install process on the PS3 version, the fanboys won't have much to argue about, not that they need much. :)

You know what else isn't surprising? Carmack said the PS3 is a pain to code for. Developers were complaining to game journalists about this since 2006. Kotaku actually wrote a story about Carmack dissing the PS3 (with footage from G4) on May 16 2006. But for some reason, when Carmack said it in 2008 it was news, at least to some sites. *shrug*

Unfortunately, the real news will be if Rage can return id to it's former glory as an industry leader instead of a company that makes cool but not terribly user friendly engines and pretty good games in an overcrowded genre. id may have an uphill battle in convincing people to use their engine if an important selling point (ridiculous amounts of detail) doesn't really work on the 360.

Oh, and watch this video showing off some Rage editing from a year ago. (Thanks to Telemachus on the PA forums for the link.) It's pretty cool.