So, last day Id announced their new engine and upcoming titles, such as Rage, required to be shipped on Multiple discs on the Xbox 360 and/or decrease visual quality. Sure, new engines and new content, much more data? Right? Not really, and this is why I think Id is bogus:
The new game-engine by Id, called Rage, is making its way to both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and eventually also on the PC out of what I understand. They claim their new engine would consume too much data to fit into the Xbox 360 standard Dual-Layer DVDs at a data-count of around 9,5-12,5GB. They also mentioned it might not even fit into TWO discs. That's up to 25GB of data, around the average BluRay disc (in theory up to 400GB, but those ships for over $120 each, for the disc only). This is simply some either totally crapped out game-engine or some serious business going on with Sony. Have you ever witnessed a application consume even 10GB of data on the PC? Even how much of a terrible engine CryEngine 2 was it only consumed 7GB of data fully installed if we refer to Crysis. How can Id even get close to break that barrier?
Ofcourse they're insisting the textures are the heavy hit here, with their "Megatextures" which was also a great deal of the QuakeWars specificational weapon. But still the textures were horrifying, plain terrible while consuming alot of data. And when it comes to textures outside the boundaries of data-size alone Microsofts machine has always been the top-performer when it comes to texture filters.
And with that said Rage doesn't look all that amazing to justify the hype. Id has been a terrible performer in the past couple of years, they delayed Quake Wars with years and yet insisted to ship it broken from the backbone. For consoles I'd like to see Id minding their own business, they're known for making solid pieces of applications for the PC, that's where they're currently needed - an investor putting the PC on the roadmap again. But when it comes to consoles it required too much optimization and strategy to truly fit their business as it is. Id just appears like a bunch of homebrew programmers compared to Epic with their professionalism when it comes to applications and engines. I'm not saying that becuase I'm a Xbox owner and want to justify my investment, but becuase Epic truly stands for much of the progress on the gaming market overall, their Unreal 3 engine is established on both the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 standing proud with unquestionable optimization and overall quality and it's very few times in history they've launched a unfinished game,
Id should remain on the PC side, to do what they do best. Epic got the console market handeled with their technologies alone.
