Since you're reading this site, we're going to assume you're, well, a PC gamer. As such, we imagine you frequently drift into fond flashbacks to the days when big developers treated your platform of choice like royalty. Even with PC once again on the rise, random delays and glitchy ports run rampant. Meanwhile, buzzwords like "accessibility" and "wider audiences" leave the hardest of the hardcore out in the cold. If you like games that melt your graphics card and your brain, these are dark times we live in.
id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead, however, would disagree with that notion. Consoles, he says, have definitely stolen some thunder from gaming's graphical side, but - in exchange - modern games are now better than ever. Here's why:
“For us, there are some things that we do with id Tech 5 that if we were just making the game for the PC, we might make some different technical decisions. For what exactly those are, that's a question for Carmack because I'm not a programmer,” Hollenshead said in an interview with Ripten .
“We do obviously invest a significant amount of our engineering cycles working on 360 and PS3, so if those are all devoted to the PC, then obviously there's a tradeoff that takes place there."
What games like RAGE lose in meticulously rendered eyebrow textures, though, they make up for with, well, more. More to see, more to do, more to experience. More of everything. Hollenshead, then, doesn't even hesitate to think it's a worthwhile trade-off.
“But at the same time, there's a give back the other way too because everything we do in the game and the scope of the game has also been like, RAGE is the deepest game we've ever done. And part of that is that we want to make sure we're not just appealing to a hardcore PC audience, but also to the console audience as well," he explained.
“So as much as the consoles may take away, I think they actually give back more in terms of what we're able to do just to build out the game.”
Bold words. But what do you think? Is Hollenshead onto something here, or do you disagree with him entirely? You might want to be sort of quiet about it, though. Based on appearances, we imagine the man follows up his morning workout with a breakfast composed of raw eggs, nails, and the hearts of his enemies.
