They gave glimpses of the shooter ”too damn early” which ended up warping fan perception. He also admits they’re ”definitely a NVIDIA shop,” and ATI issues hurt them.
”I wanted to strangle him. It’s QuakeCon! Everyone f*cking loves Rage here, shut up!” joked Tim Willits on John Carmack’s Rage apology at QuakeCon, where he ”stabbed himself a little”.
”The lesson learned is we need to make sure developers have ATI cards. We worked with NVIDIA for so long, we worked with ATI a long time, but we’re definitely a NVIDIA shop. So we said alright, everyone needs to have some ATI cards in here. But really, if it was a DirectX game it wouldn’t have been a problem,” explained Willits.
Driver issues aside, Rage didn’t impress many. What started the problem between expectation and what was actually delivered is the way id marketed Rage: ”One thing we did learn with Rage, one of the thing that changed was going from no publisher to working with EA to working with Bethesda, we learned that we showed stuff too damn early.”
”I’ve said in some talks I was so worried that people would not understand the vehicle-based combat so I talked about it first,” continued Willits. ”We knew we were doing first-person, we’re id! Of course we’re doing first-person!”
However the early talk of vehicles ”skewed everyone’s ideas so much we had to play catch up. So we talked to EA and, heck we even talked to Activision originally about it, so it went through the publishers, and we teamed up with Bethesda. So when we’re ready to show stuff, we’ll have a plan,” he said, referring to Doom 4.
Willits is confident that Bethesda can help id market the next Doom as well as they did The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which the veteran developer considers to be ”perfect. So hopefully we can do that again.”
John Carmack did confirm two things at least for Doom 4 during his keynote: ”Everyone knows what Doom is,” he told the crowd. “There are demons and shotguns.” Check out the full interview between Tim Willits and Penny Arcade.
