Reasonable said:
I'm pretty pro id and Carmack, but Doom 3 tech was nothing like Crysis. It was great, but designed around relatively small levels that were essentially corridor crawls and a small number of foes with amazing lighting. Crysis was designed around vast, open world levels with many foes, and pretty amazing lighting too. As engines go in terms of design goals, they were pretty different. OT regarding performance, I hope to see this improve, because of id's original comments, but it seems to me, if this holds true, that they have struggled to produce a single engine which is capable of equally supporting each console. Looking at the evidence I'm pretty much of a mind that to get the best out of each you need at least a console specific version - i.e. not two fully seperate engines, but certainly two cuts of code where certain elements are different to exploit the very different PS3/360 architectures.
|
Doom 3 came out around the time FarCry came out. Crysis came out 3 or 4 years later, so of course it looked better. But lets not forget that when it came out it ran like crap. Shortly before I gave up on PC gaming, I built a brand new computer especially for Crysis. Intel Core 2 Quad, 2 GB of DDR2, overclocked Nvidia 8800GTS, and an nForce 4 motherboard (the nicest Nvidia model out at the time). According to Crytek and all the previews and stories I had read on the game, I was pretty much ready to play me some Crysis. When I got the game, I was disappointed to find out that it ran like garbage. To get smooth framerates with no stutter or lag, I pretty much had to run everything on medium. PLUS, even Crytek admitted that the game came out too soon and that they had a lot of optimizing left to do, especially toward the end of the game. That's just my little aside about Crytek. Crysis, for me, was my first step toward realizing that PC gaming was starting to become a pain in the ass. I still have the PC I mentioned above. I'm typing on it right now. But I don't use it for much gaming anymore. It still runs pretty much any game I throw at it just fine, but I only use it for that when my wife won't let me have the HDTV to play Xbox 360.
All that said, Carmack is NOT NOT NOT a lazy developer. Guys, just because a developer says that the PS3 is harder to code for does not mean they're lazy, stupid, or inept. Sometimes it just means that the PS3 is harder to develop for. If iD was lazy, they probably would just release Rage right now. Some of you guys case on some of these developers like Valve and iD as if you have no idea of their history. The two houses I just named are two of the biggest influences in gaming. If you have been playing only consoles all these years, you probably had no idea. But if you ever paid any attention to the PC (which you should) you would know that these guys have earned their due respect. Just because they aren't particularly fond of your favorite console does not mean that they are lazy. You should really think of it more like if Gabe Newell and John Carmack can't optimize for the PS3 very well, there probably aren't that many people out there who CAN.
And in conclusion, stfu about the 4 discs. It's only 2.
