Despite being perhaps the most anticipated AAA game product on PC this year, Rage's launch was met with large amounts of technical difficulties. id Software's “build system” created all three versions of the game, which resulted in the differing results between the console and PC versions, despite testing.
"This system has led to incredibly solid and bug-free 360 and PS3 versions," said Rage creative director Tim Willits to Kotaku. "Unfortunately, we have had video driver issues that have caused problems and frustrations with our PC fans. Everyone at id Software is very upset by these issues which are mostly out of our control. We are working with both AMD/ATI and Nvidia to help them identify and fix the issues with their drivers. We've had assurances that these problems are being addressed and new drivers will be available soon."
id founder John Carmack is equally disappointed at the launch, describing it as a “cluster !@#$.” He answered frankly whether this was a result of PC no longer being id's lead platform for games.
"You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," Carmack replied. "We chose the latter."
"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "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. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."
