It might not be the content everyone wants or the volume, but there will no doubt be some extra with all the reportedly cut sections to pull from. Mind you I think player feedback will have made them rethink tac rather than repackage more of the same.

Who knows it might surprise us, Carmack seems fixated on display latency and different monitors these days but I've never known them to totally drop something without saying as much.

Is this correct? As far as i know, both Force 1 & 2 are distribued on one single DVD when sold in stores.

Nevertheless: Most internet users have standard connections. Downloading a file this large takes some serious time so this is not really a model for massmarket distribution. At least for now.

Well, I had to download 29 gigs to play it on Steam, so yeah, it is.
I guess there are lots of junk files that are easily compressed, but still.

This is what happened to Rage. From Carmack's twitter feed:

"QuakeArena doesn't translate as well to game controllers, and isn't newbie friendly enough for a big console title"

Right from the horses mouth.

Well they already said the primary target for Rage were the consoles, so obviously it's going to be a game that will work well with the console controlles.

Indeed ... it is "newbie friendly enough" for the controller crowd.

I doubt I will ever buy another id game. Never thought this day would come.

Hi ho. (Kurt Vonnegut's comment on viewing the destruction of Dresden. He was a POW and worked in the corpse mines, air raid shelters, after the raid.)

Hmmm. This is odd.
Maybe this another attempt to stop copies from being distributed illegaly.
Make them so large that only a small minority can download them in reasonable time.

Jokes aside: Size does matter in this case.
I ordered my copy of Rage at Amazon and it took them 2 days to deliver. Downloading it would have been a lot slower for me at my connection speed.

What's the problem with a company making a decision for a certain target platform?

Btw.: I don't share the opinion that console games are easier or console gamers are less "professional".
The most difficult to beat games i played in my life where console titles and not USER FRIENDLY pc titles.

User friendly pc titles? Yes!
Pc games are usually modifiable, easy to use with cheat programs or have the cheats already built in.
And you can always save where you want to.

Most of these factors were and still are absent in console games of the last 3 decades.

I don't cheat. I have played FPS games for a very long time. Rage is ridiculously easy. It is exactly what Carmack referred to as "newbie friendly enough for a big console title".

A toy for kids to feel good about themselves. I don't play those kind of games. As id's games are now all going to be like that I will not play any id games again.

Simple enough for you?

It's a natural progression as the market size and studio sizes have increased, it might feel good but blaming a certain platform for something that has been going on for ages prior to their existance is a bit off.

Quake. Quake 2, Quake 3, Quake 4 - All got progressively slower and featured more newbie friendly mechanics with each iteration
Unreal, Unreal Tournament, UT2004, Unreal Tournament 3 - All got progressively slower and featured more newbie friendly mechanics with each iteration
Doom 1/2, Doom 3 - Doom 1 and 2 were almost the same, Doom 3 got a lot slower

The FPS genre overall has slowed down, become more accessible and catered to the masses.

While I won't pretend consoles don't have an impact, it's more market driven as a whole and that includes PC people and how they've evolved and expanded too. Throwing your toys won't make it anything other than what it is.

Well that's really the only thing wrong with the game, is the huge level of easyness.

But so you know now, it's stupid to blame the consoles.

Making it harder for PC is as easy as spawning more enemies, and lowering the max ammo that you can carry around. Not to mention making the enemies harder, they actually seem easier to kill in Nightmare mode, because not only does the player take in more damage, so do the enemies. That's something they should've left out.

The difficulty is not the consoles' fault, it's the fault of id for lacking the creativity to come up with simple solutions.

I don't agree with that at all. UT3 is amazingly quick and requires absolute perfection in reflexes to win on hardest difficulty, to play through the campaign on Insane is alamost impossible without a coop partner when playing tema based objectives like Warfare and CTF. Play a Deathmatch map with 16 people and tell me it's slow then, compared to UT GOTY, it's almost identicle, that was the way they designed UT3, to go back to the roots with added content and updated graphics.
Doom was relatively quick, Doom 2 was harder again and then Final Doom was ridiculous. Doom 3 however I do agree was a lot slower, but in comparison, most of the enemies were a lot harder and smarter.
And same goes for Quake, though I found putting Quake 2 on Hardest and trying to play through that was quite tricky. Quake 3 is possibly the quickest game I've ever played. Quake 4 again, like Doom 3, featured less enemies, but much more difficult enemies.

RAGE has been the easiest I've found so far, the big challenge is playing Wasteland legends solo, and even then taking cover and timing your shots allows you to win more often than not. The mutants are really what throws cover out the window. You really have to change game play with them, and that really does speed up the feel of the game a lot of the time, everything is hurried, slight panic creeps in if you get surrounded and you're trying to use standard ammo types.

Might be nice to add an option to increase the game speed like there was in the original Dooms, or even the UT series. Kick up game speed to 150% and go nuts.

Please jump onto any UT forum and tell them UT3 is almost identicle, after that go onto any competitive Quake site and tell them Quake 3 was the fastest in the series.

Quake 3 was a good amalgamation of Quake and Q2 but it had elements designed for a broader audience also - armour degradation, spawning with 120 health, slower weapon switiching, lower damage, item/weapon respawning differences and so on. Movement in Q3 was nowhere near as quick as Quake/Quakeworld. Pretty much the same can be said for UT compared to UT3, there's very obvious differences there. I'm not saying any is worse than the other (we all have our favourites), but in these cases the earlier iterations are always the most brutal. Boot them up and play one after the other.

I get the feeling you're coming from an offline vs AI perspective, I'm talking speed and gameplay mechanics (which I did say). Not the amount of creatures it put in SP. But hey, if you still disagree feel free.

Actually my bad, you are quite right, I am comparing to the AI, I have a little experience with UT3 online, but none with GOTY, so I don't think i could state a valid opinion.

I chose bad wording with identicle, I believe. I guess what i meant to say was that they wanted to make it more like the original than they did with 2004. A lot of the feel was there, but there was something certainly different about UT3 compared to GOTY which I can't put my finger on...

Quake 3 i found to be amazingly quick, it actually took me a couple of matches to get used to it. I found the movement speed and the reflexes required for it much quicker and more precise, but again this is with AI. I'll take your word on the fact that it isn't the same online. Icould imagine that all of the original Doom's would be almost identicle online, which now makes a lot more sense. Sorry for my misunderstanding

I didn't say that you cheat. I said it is way easier to cheat on pc than on consoles.
And just because Rage is too easy (i agree on that one) doesn't mean that console titles are easier in general, right?

Isn't the reason so many console shooters went cover based simply because you can't twitch fest, like Quake3 & UT, with a controller?
And they needed a new mechanic to compensate.
I use a controller for most pc games these days, RAGE included, more comfortable & tougher challenge if i switch off aim assist.
Not w/ BF3 though, not a chance!

You're all good. What you said wasn't wrong, we're just coming from different perspectives.

I guess the cover based gameplay was introduced to give games a new, more realistic direction.
Jumping around in a hail of bullets is fun but far from reality.

I know lots of gamers that prefer realism over gameplay.

Btw.: I played Quake 3 on pc and on Dreamcast.
Playing with the mouse/keyboard combination on pc was more accurate but the DC version was an excellent port in both visuals, controls and gameplay.
The pad control is excellent and if you dislike playing with a gamepad, you can also connect keys and mouse to the DC which gives pretty much the same feel as the PC version.