The first “video game” I can remember playing is Midnight Rescue! by The Learning Company. I was 5 years old, and we had just gotten our first computer. The year was 1989.
The first real video game I remember playing was Doom 2, released by id Software in 1994. The second was Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1995.
For my entire gaming life, id and Blizzard have been the golden standards by which I judge all over video game publishers. Valve (Half-Life, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Portal), Bioware (Mass Effect), Visceral (Dead Space), RockSteady (Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkahm City), Epic (Unreal, Gears of War), Ubisoft (Assassin’s Creed), and Relic (Homeworld, Impossible Creatures, Dawn of War) have all joined the Pantheon of Must Buy Developers, but until now id and Blizzard have stood alone.
Today, I am removing id Software from their place among my golden standards. That’s how disappointing the launch of RAGE and id’s response to it was for me.
If you’ve been following gaming news or my twitter feed at all, you’ve probably seen something about the difficulties PC players have had with RAGE since it was released last Tuesday. In it’s shipped, unpatched form, it was literally unplayable. The graphics suffered from extreme levels of pop-in, where parts of the world would appear blank or completely undetailed then pop in with full detail. The game would suffer from random slowdowns and crashes. id finally released a patch for it a few days ago, which still requires some tweaking to work perfectly.
PC Gamers are, by and large, a patient and intelligent lot. We tend to be older than console gamers, more willing to invest time and money into our computers, better able to identify and remediate problems, and generally easier to work with.
That, however, does not mean that we are a particularly understanding lot when a game ships with so many bugs and issues that it is rendered utterly unplayable for days while the developer is trying to fix it, and the community figures out a handful of fixes that make it at least playable.
What makes it worse is id’s John Carmack, who is widely considered the father of the first person shooter and whose company, id, has been a major PC developer stretching back to the early days of PC gaming, saying that the reason RAGE was screwed up was because of a driver issue with the two major video card manufacturers and because the primary target platform was the XBox 360 and PS3.
Now, there are three main issues with PC Gaming: cost, configuration, and piracy. Consoles solve all of these issues. You cannot build a gaming PC for $250, a game released for XBox 360 or PS3 today will run on an XBox 360 or PS3 released on launch day nearly five years ago, and console piracy is significantly more difficult to make work with higher consequences if you get caught.
That being said, for all its flaws PC Gaming is important. Really important, for PCs and consoles alike.
Ultimately, every game is born on the PC. You can’t code on a 360 or PS3. You can’t build levels, develop art assets, create and edit sound, or do really anything necessary to create a full game anywhere but on the PC. Moreover, the day a gaming console is released, it has 6-12 months on top of the gaming heap before PC gaming hardware eclipses it. By the end of the console’s lifecycle, PCs are 10x-50x faster. Every major development made in gaming, whether it’s from a technical or gameplay perspective or really any perspective at all took place on the PC first.
Gaming-quality PC hardware doesn’t just affect PC Gamers. It affects everyone who uses a PC (which is pretty much everyone). See, gamers buy the obscenely expensive hardware companies sell that allows them to continue R&D to make those things more affordable for the mainstream. The reason you can buy a new laptop for $500 is because five years ago some gamer bought predecessors of those parts to put in his gaming rig to play Quake 4. Without gamers, without someone demanding and willing to pay for the latest and greatest, technology stagnates and plateaus.
So, when one of the longest tenured PC developers in existence, whose technology has always been designed to push the absolute limits of what hardware at the time can do, comes out and says “We’re developing with consoles and their five year old hardware in mind as our target platform”, and then ships their latest triple-A flagship title with issues that make it unplayable on the platform that gave them their success, it’s a BIG problem.
By all accounts, RAGE is a good game. Not great. Just good. It’s entertaining enough. But, like the vast majority of console games, it fails to do anything to push the envelope. There is nothing revolutionary about it. There is nothing even evolutionary about it. It’s another post-apocalyptic brown first person shooter with a semi-linear story, kind of open world, some RPG elements, and a driving element that’s just OK. There are ten games I can name off the top of my head that do all of those things better individually, and about five that do all of them together as well or better.
I guess what bothers me most about RAGE is that it represents a future for gaming as bleak as the game’s setting. Where innovation and creativity has been extinguished in the service of the dark gods of sales figures. Where PC gaming hardware fails to advance because it’s been suffocated under the technical limitations of consoles made cheap on the backs of PC gamers.
RAGE, to borrow from another recent exceptionally innovative multiplatform game that was released simultaneously and ran just fine on PCs, is not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.
Finally, a picture of a cat.
