Bethesda shoots down Doom 4 postponement rumors

@batphantom

Is it? Considering even the more straightforward aspects of Rage fell totally flat, I don't think it's unreasonable to think Id might actually have no idea what in the hell it's doing with something supposedly even more basic in premise. Legacy be damned.

@batphantom

"Why would you put one of gaming's most legendary franchises on the back burner because the new property is faltering?"

RAGE had an extensive development time, required a tremendous amount of money to produce (GTA IV levels of financing), John Carmack single handedly wiped out any positive hype around the game, the best it can possibly hope to do between the three platforms it was released on *might be* 1.5 million units in a year, and the much vaunted features of iD Tech 5 don't work well at all compared to what its rivals are capable of; RAGE's texture streaming issues rival that of first-gen UE3 titles on consoles (and are absolutely atrocious on the PC) and the 60 FPS performance target comes with so many caveats that it basically nullifies the advantage of all platforms (most people would have a good looking game at a v-synced 30 FPS than a title which randomly scales down to lower resolutions, particle effects, and assets when it drops from 60 FPS by even a few frames).

It'd make perfect sense for Bethesda to delay Doom 4 until iD's in a position to rectify the issues currently surrounding its technology (since its titles will most likely move from Gamebryo to iD Tech 5 in the coming years); if I lost money hand over fist the first time, I'd be incredibly apprehensive about green lighting and funding a second project for fear that the developers will push out another flop.

@batphantom

They just need to update their drivers.

@shimrra74

Why would they do that? It was developed with Xbox as the lead platform. The entire point of RAGE was to demo the id Tech 5 engine running on consoles.

I don't think id needs to be restricted to PC. Those guys are geniuses at condensing engines for less powerful platforms. Look at Doom 3 on the iPhone.

@shimrra74

Usually, I'm all for simultaneous releases, but in this case you may have a point. If they had tried to release the PC version earlier, than they could have delayed it long enough to make it actually, you know, work and released it at the same time as the xbox and ps3 versions.