Posted 11/07/09 at 02:26:28 AM by Nathan Grayson

Well, we now have absolute proof that at least one member of the PC gaming community wasn’t living in the hornets’ nest Infinity Ward stepped on when it announced that Modern Warfare 2 won’t support dedicated servers. Unfortunately, that one person is none other than id Software’s John Carmack.

“It’s not cast in stone yet, but at this point no, we don’t think [RAGE] will have dedicated servers,” Carmack told Variety’s Cut Scene blog. “The great thing is we won’t have to be a pioneer on that. We’ll see how it works out for everyone else.”

If it’s any consolation, RAGE is primarily a single-player game. But then, knowing id, we imagine that the game’s multiplayer component will still be better than most.

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?

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Posted 08/26/09 at 03:27:43 AM by Nathan Grayson

Racing and shooting? Sometimes at the same time? Gee whiz, that sounds complicated. Surprisingly, though, id Software’s Todd Hollenshead thinks RAGE can pull off such a tricky balancing act in only one go and – as such – sees no need for an open beta. He said as much in an interview with VG247.

“I doubt there will be an open beta,” he stated, simply.

Well, what about a demo, then? RAGE may look, sound, and perhaps even taste great, but what if we’re still not sold on it? Is there hope for us yet?

“The demo question is hard to answer, because I don’t know what the development cycle will be like. We don’t have anything against demos or tests; we typically do that – probably – to a greater extent than almost anybody else in the industry, so my guess would be that we will have something, but that’s far from set in stone,” said Hollenshead.
 
So then, what will the demo be called? MILD IRRITATION?

Er, yeah... So, uh, what's the deal with airline food? 

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Posted 08/14/09 at 12:07:16 AM by Nathan Grayson

Day one of id Software’s annual ode to the art of frag is in the books, and as with any slain beast, that which was inside it (usually blood, sometimes candy, but – in this case -- news) is now out in the open for all eyes to see. So, without any further ado, here’s today’s installment of the QuakeCon Times.

Premium service coming to QuakeLive, Carmack confirms – There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, and Quake Live’s learning that lesson the hard way. According to id’s John Carmack, in-game ads simply couldn’t rocket-jump the game into profitability, so a subscription-based tier was needed. Fortunately, it’s optional, so – whether you’re filthy-rich or dirt-poor – blowing anonymous people into tiny giblets will always be a viable option.

New RAGE trailer makes us feel another emotion: envy – Guys and gals who are play-testing this game right now, we hate you. RAGE looks amazing, but one can only watch a trailer so many times before they start longing for something more. Luckily, we hear RAGE will include that newfangled “gameplay” feature that so many games these days support. Now if only we could try it out…

Carmack says id will put three AAA titles into development – So let’s see, that’s RAGE, Doom 4, and…? Don’t think id’s trying to pull a fast one on you, though; even Carmack and co. don’t know what their third team’s up to – mostly because they haven’t decided yet. Odds are, though, we won’t find out for quite some time, especially because…

Want to see Doom 4? Wait until QuakeCon 2010, says Hollenshead – Sorry, Doom fans. As a reward for your patience after last year’s announcement, you get an IOU. “When we show it to you you’re gonna love it,” Hollenshead added, only breaking our hearts further.

So, that’s that – for day one, anyway. QuakeCon still has plenty more fight left in it, though, and we’ll be on the show floor, bringing you all the news as it happens. 

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Posted 03/08/09 at 05:09:34 AM by Nathan Grayson

Update: Looks like we (along with a few other websites) spent too much time losing ourselves in Hollenshead's beautiful blues and -- hearts full of hope -- skimmed over his real meaning entirely. Maybe if they'd stop making these alarm buttons so red and shiny, we'd be less tempted to press them so often. 

“When it’s done,” you’re done. Go running back to Duke Nukem Forever. You knew what this was.

While speaking with GameTrailers TV at last month’s DICE Summit, id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead gave gamers the signal to look out over the horizon, because Rage is a comin’.

When asked whether his company’s latest monosyllabic murder simulator would blow its top in 2010, Hollenshead replied, “No, we'll be out this year."

Well, that’s good enough for us. Rage will be published by Electronic Arts and will probably aid F.E.A.R. 2 and Sadness in helping some website establish a “Best Game Ostensibly about a Vague, One-Word Emotion” award category for their best games of – take of whiff of that new release window smell – 2009. We can’t wait to hear more.

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Posted 11/05/08 at 08:11:52 AM by Paul Lilly

Tread carefully fellow surfers, for there are angry netizens all throughout the web. Apparently, the anonymity the internet provides has users flinging insults and saying things online they wouldn't otherwise say in a face to face confrontation. The epiphany comes courtesy of a CNN report, which points out that blogs and forum posts often times "descend into ad hominem attacks, insults, and plain old name-calling." Welcome to the internet, CNN.

The news site put a lot of research into its report and is worth reading if for no other reason than to see a major news outlet devote a paragraph to "lulz" and what the term means. True credit for this one goes out to The New York Times Magazine, who as CNN points out published a story about trolls back in August. As one ex-troll told the publication, "Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh."

And it's not just caffeinated teens who are responsible for internet-rage. CNN references the recent account of a 43-year-old Japanese woman who killed her online "husband's" avatar after he divorced her. And don't forget those "celebrity gossip sites [that] are full of snarky comments about stars."

Our response to the 1,200-world write-up? "No s*%t." Hit the jump and tell us yours.

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Posted 10/01/08 at 10:19:10 PM by Nathan Grayson

At this year's QuakeCon, programming god John Carmack turned an entire Internet's worth of heads with his announcement that Rage would only storm your PC's walls via DVD-ROM. Well, kids, it's time to un-cry those salty tears, because id intends to digitally distribute its latest first-person beauty after all.

"We haven't quite worked through our electronic-distribution," said id Software creative director Tim Willits. "John Carmack [id co-founder] made a comment about the media size, which unfortunately wasn't exactly correct because we haven't crossed that bridge yet. He said it was going to be too large to download, and I was thinking to myself, 'You know, uhhhhh, people can do lots of things.'"

"Rage won't break the Internet. Our relationship with Valve and our stuff on Steam has been very successful for us. A lot of the older games that we had to fix to work on newer operating systems allowed us to make them current. I had a Steam account on my machine at work, and if I wanted to load up old Wolfenstein or Doom at work, I [would] load it up on Steam because of DOSBox and all that stuff. And it's actually pretty awesome. We've been very successful with that."

"We haven't figured out what we want to do yet. But I do want to fix the fact that John said [digital distribution is] not going to happen. What I'm saying is that's not true."

Left hand, meet right hand. Again. 

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Posted 09/16/08 at 08:48:45 PM by Nathan Grayson

 Update: Looks like this one got blown out of proportion. Willits, after a glance at his inbox, released the following statement: "During my talk at Austin GDC I mentioned that we originally wanted to have around five or six smaller wasteland environments but later decided instead to have two larger wastelands - mostly because we were going to be shipping on two DVDs for the 360 and felt that it would play better with one large wasteland on each disc so there would be no loading between wastelands.  Not loading levels while you drive around is a much better decision regardless of platform.  There was NO CONTENT removed from RAGE because of the 360--NONE AT ALL. Moving from multiple wastelands into fewer but larger wastelands was a far better decision and is actually giving us more gameplay in the game.  We feel the 360 is a great platform and will provide a fantastic Rage experience."

So, nothing to see here. Move along.  

Carmack and co. already tempered the force of this blow at QuakeCon, but a punch in the mouth is still a punch in the mouth, no matter how many fewer teeth are scraping the bottom of your glass of milk afterward. Said id Software lead designer Tim Willits at the Austin Game Developers Conference:

"The PC is limitless in the amount of data you can put on it.The PS3 has about 25GB. But the Xbox 360 roughly has 6 to 8 GB of data. We're hoping we can squeeze the game down to two discs for the 360 version."

"I wouldn't say the overall story was changed in any way in order to fit on the Xbox 360 version," Willits explained, "but how the player experiences Rage's story has been altered."

Foremost, he said, the game's overall structure has changed significantly. Whereas before, Rage featured "several" wastelands in which players could run race and gun, now only two remain. Don't worry, though; the two wastelands have been split into multiple, hardware-friendly instances, so it'll be just like traveling through multiple areas!

Somewhat perplexingly -- though probably in order to wave the game out the door by "When it's done" instead of "When your great grandchild begins balding" -- id elected to take the razor to all three versions of the game, as opposed to merely the Xbox edition.

This, it would seem, is only the beginning of a very slippery slope.

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Posted 08/08/08 at 03:55:25 PM by Will Smith

Here’s the second part of our exclusive QuakeCon interview with John Carmack. In the first part of our conversation, Carmack discussed his hopes for Quake Live and the id Software’s new gaming direction in Rage. This time around, he gets more into the heady technical stuff with his thoughts on Nvidia’s CUDA, physics accelerators, general purpose computing, and ATI’s rumored Fusion technology. Here’s a snippet:

John Carmack – I was well known as not being a supporter of the PhysX accelerators. It’s always felt like a gimmicky plan with people setting up a company to be acquired. For years, the tack has been what do you do with any time Intel delivers something more with processors and more cores? It’s never really proven out right and there’re a lot of reasons for it.

For one thing you can’t scale AI and physics in general with your gameplay, while with graphics, you could scale. Without scaling, you can’t design a game that requires fancy AI and then turn off the fancy AI for the low end systems because practically that’s not possible. Similarly for physics, if it’s anything other than eye candy, you also can’t scale. If the building is going to fall down you need to know whether you’re going to be able to get past it on the high end or the low end.

Click through for the good stuff.

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