This is business as usual for PC games, and has been as long : Othor Games

» Tue May 15, 2012 8:11 am

OP, PC usual has been nothing but patches and updates from Microsoft to Adobe and everything in between.

The reason PC's have software issues is the freedom they give users to add and remove various programs,this has not changed since the beginning.

» Tue May 15, 2012 5:29 am

I am a New Product Introduction Engineer with F5 Networks. I handle the successful launch of hardware and software devices used by all of the worlds banks, DOD and web monsters outside of Google. I have influence over the complete design and implementation of hardware that costs a cool half million per unit. I specifically work with hardware and as such spend a great deal of my time reverse engineering products to ensure they comply with internal and external specifications and meet customer use requirements. I am the support organization and the customer's advocate when it comes to if a product is 'good enough' for release, and I get paid *specifically* to argue with PD to make sure we release the right product at the right time. Many businesses build major software launches around our offerings, and therefore we get tied into the success or failure of their operations.... so yeah, frankly, I am qualified to talk about launch issues.

Therefore I give ****-all about Irrational games. If you want, go ask the design director if his MBO is tied to meeting quarterly expectations and if that sometimes forces a developer to cut corners. That would be an interesting thing to hear.

The reason it went gold was so it could do it before the end of the year and Id/Bethesda could take on some revenue to their of their annual report. End of story. It was an executive decision made with full knowledge of the risks they were taking. They got nailed and now suddenly they're arguing it's AMD's fault.

Well looky here...
6 days later after new drivers from AMD/Nvidia and a PATCH from id and the game is finally working and I don't even see snow on the ground yet.
I don't know if everyone's problems are solved but I'm guessing a hell of a lot more people can actually enjoy it now. (Rage is running great now for me.)

They are contractually obligated with the publisher to get the game out on that date (of course you should know this), developers always want more time.
Sometimes the publishers play nice and grant that time needed, sometimes they are just suits that just don't get it or care.
They just want the numbers.

Case in point, 6 DAYS later and the game is running the way it should have launched. (At least if they got AMD and Nvidia in line and id released a day 1 patch.)
It did not take them beyond the holidays to complete this task, it took six days.

Carmack himself also said that consoles were the main focus and not the PC.
So yea, between poor testing, horrible communication and cooperation with the graphic card companies, as well as openly admitting their focus was on the consoles, the PC had a "cluster-$%&^!" of a launch. (As stated by John Carmack.)
It did not go gold to meet any such demands or requirements that you mentioned.

Now, End of Story...

» Tue May 15, 2012 1:21 am

Since the next gen consoles came out, i must say i have had more and more pain playing PC games. There are just so much more issues with these horrible ports. And for me atleast this is the first game from Id that have given me such problems. Before consoles, there was problems with some games yes, but that was more of a surprise. And it is sad that i almost have to expect issues with the PC version for games.
Don't get me wrong, i like the consoles and i have nothing against them, I have both PS3 and Xbox. But they are just to old for me compared to the quality a PC can bring. And then i stress the "can bring" as more and more i notice developers neglecting PC over consoles. And now i despise the fact that developers do this. But I think people are angry about the issues because they come from a company like ID. A company I atleast expected to release a very polished game concidering their reputation and the long development cycle for Rage. I dont expect PC games to be prioritized more than consoles. I expect them to get the same amount of attention.

» Tue May 15, 2012 12:37 pm

It's an experimental game relying on ever more diverse hardware profiles and distant software support.

That the launch didn't go well... almost expected. That it went this badly - very surprising and unfortunate.

As far as most users are concerned you'd have a 'better game' [compatibility] off the bat using more standard techniques. However, with an eye to the future, I'm more than happy to put my money into this and see what it turns into.

Was it one technical experiment too far? Probably... especially without warnings... it would have been better to delay the game.

But yes, this is [the ever more diverse] pc gaming... the more dice you roll, the more ones you're going to get.

» Tue May 15, 2012 2:56 am

I have been gaming for 30 years and I have never experienced a new title that was as bad as this one. I understand making games is difficult and I certainly expect a fix from PC gaming’s most lauded developers, but it certainly is frustrating.

» Tue May 15, 2012 8:37 am

Whether or not this game was more intended for consoles it doesn't even matter. As long as they decided to release it on PC as well they have to deliver a working product. I can say i'm lucky that the game runs pretty well for me , but i still had to resort to a cfg to get rid of the texture streaming issue.

Indeed they were quick in releasing a patch but as far as i read there are people that actually got the game broken after it was patched. And my personal experience is getting a couple of really basic in game graphics settings and broken brightness and vsync settings ( it doesn't remember the changes ).

It's also quite unacceptable that there wasn't any official response to all this. People are paying money for this game.

I love Id and Bethesda games, and i'm quite aware that Rage introduced a quite revolutionary technology that could have an impact on the future of games, but that's not an excuse for releasing such a broken product and just pretend it didn't happen after.

» Tue May 15, 2012 4:23 am

So it's ok because everyone else is doing it?

Let me introduce you to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_fallacy.

» Tue May 15, 2012 1:13 am

agreeing with Nezumi.

For me, the game is playable, the only bug I had was the popping textures, which was fixed with patch, but even before the patch, the game was totaly playable.
So, for me RAGE has nearly no bugs, it works fine on my machine, there were many other pc games in the past with much more bugs than rage.

» Mon May 14, 2012 11:38 pm

Don't go too far back when considering how bad this is compared to previous releases, Commodore 64 games svcked ass out of the box fairly often.
I think of it like this... I paid for iD Tech 5 and got a free game & what ever else the modding community can make out of it.

» Tue May 15, 2012 5:11 am

I can understand bugs in a game, but glitches so terrible that about half of PC players can't even run it? For me its so bad that i get about 20 seconds of freezing for a second or 2 running, and I'm not really good a messing around with the coding, so I won't be able to play the 60 dollar game I got until they release a patch, or more likely, several patches that solve the problem, if they ever do. They may not, as they were pretty much saying they don't really care about PC much anymore and will focus on consoles a hell of a lot more.

» Tue May 15, 2012 7:31 am

The OP is utter nonsense. In a 20 year history of PC game buying, I've never encountered a game that didn't run out of the box before Rage. I've rarely encountered one that crashed often, and for the most part never experienced any glitches at all in most games. I don't think this is just good luck either. Back in the day before fixed line internet connections were all that common, the only way to deal with showstopper issues would be to do a recall, and that would probably bankrupt most developers. They shipped stuff that worked first time from necessity.

I'm a software developer with a lot of experience shipping software to consumers, though I don't write games. I know that the issues Rage has are exactly the sort that would be caught in QA, they're big meaty issues that are always reproducible. My feeling is that the QA process for this product was extremely flawed, or perhaps more likely they caught the issues but shipped anyway to have a unified launch with the console version. It's a shoddy product of which the developers ought to be ashamed, it ought to have been delayed until it was of reasonable quality.

» Tue May 15, 2012 5:33 am

...In a 20 year history of PC game buying, I've never encountered a game that didn't run out of the box before Rage...

Gold

» Tue May 15, 2012 2:06 pm

While some times it happens,and PC games did came out unplayable at first day (like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky) it's not something we are used to expect from id software.
Most of id software's games before Rage came out working perfectly at day 1,and probably they had 1 or 2 patches because people who really like to search for bugs found something in a place on the map they shouldn't even supposed to get at.
If you ask me,I believe they should do more testing before letting the game out.

Nintendo who is considered among the best developers spend 1/3 of development time in testing and bug fixing..
At least half of that time (1/6) would be O.K. for Rage. (But this would mean they would spend 1 year testing since they develop the game for 6 years)

» Tue May 15, 2012 8:57 am

DOOM3 was buggy for you ? It wasn't for me. Not all Games are buggy at release.

RAGE is/was buggy for YOU?

I have absolutely NO problems with RAGE (no freezes, no texture streaming problems, ...) since day one and 6 friends who also bought the game have no problems as well.
You can't say a game is not buggy because you have no problems, there are so many configurations that almost every game has problems on at least a few of them.

» Tue May 15, 2012 7:53 am

Bringing pitchforks, burning torches and storm the id's office