Has Carmack ever professed 'godlike' skills? If not, isn't it a bit much to demand such things of him? You can't deny the progress the guy's made in getting a fabulous engine driven by new tech of his invention working across multiple platforms...
The problem is not Carmack professing "godlike skills" its how alot of internet forum posters (on various online forum boards) are implying this belief.
So many people seem to be giving John Carmack these incredibly amazing programing "super powers" despite the fact that his own games have mainly been limited to the PC platform where if you have a faster rig the game is better while not necessarily having real revolutionary features as opposed to on the console the FPS genre has had games like N64 GoldenEye 007, Xbox 1 Halo CE/2 and PS3 Resistance 2 and Killzone 2 where common things like sophisticated A.I., physics, etc have made major advancements in closed spec platforms.
I don't believe at any point he's said he wasn't going to develop on the PS3 or that he wouldn't be pushing the Cell as hard as possible to achieve the results. This makes me curious as to why so many people class his comments as whining.
Are we so used to developers being so diplomatic when they speak that when someone like Carmack speaks so bluntly, everyone thinks he's being so negative?
Lets see, listen to JC around 10:02 minutes where he is asked about other game designers:
"I don't even know who the hot designers are at each of our major competitive companies"
and later (about a minute) the competition's games where he says:
"If I ever look at a... Gears of War or a Halo 3 or any of those things. I can't place myself in the position of enjoying them as much as the consumers would be and I wind up looking at them with more of a critical eye to say ok they are using this technique here, and this is what they are doing here and I didn't think that was as good as it could be"
Personally I would be very interested to know who he considers to be his major game dev competitors but I just fail to give too much respect to someone who does not seem that much aware of other game devs, designers, etc, I mean hell as much as I could find flaws and mediocrety in Assasins Creed the fact that Hideo Kojima likes alot of the elements of that game still leaves me in awe.
is this a joke? oh dear i hope you're not serious, for your own sake. ID has done shit to market their engines after Q3A and nobody cared for D3 as much as people cared for the competitors or proprietary engines by far.
tech 5 has the multi platform thingy going for it which is what they need to compete with UE3, and I hate UE3 believe me. ID's engines just don't have the wide range anymore that they used to and i think the 30% marketshare that they might get will not be as significant as the 50% for UE3 and the 20% proprietary.
What alot of people just do not realize is how much times have changed since Quake II and QIII engines were released:
EA of Medal of Honor fame has their dev teams use their own proprietary game engines for FPS games.
Infiniti Ward of Call of Duty fame have made their own proprietary game engine for their FPS series.
Valve Software of Half Life fame decided to develop their own 3d engine as opposed to paying licensing fees and it paid of amazingly.
Epic Games realized how much profit Halo 2 made on a console and placed their bets and focus on putting the effort to make their 3d engine work on consoles and so far UT3 (full UE3) has been released on both PS360 with a possible Wii version being desired.
Crytek who made Far Cry and Crysis on PC and who have had Far Cry ported to Xbox 1, NWii, and Xb360 and whose engine is their own have expressed interest in making a PS3 (perhaps even a X360) console port of Crysis specially in light of the fact that even with EA as their publisher, Crysis is known to have so far sold 1 million copies with the rest presumed to have been pirated, a far cry from Halo 2 and more recently CoD4 sales.
And then there are console specific FPS game devs like Bungie, Insomniac Games, Guerrilla Games, etc.
Basically three of their former 3d engine customers left to invest in their own talent and then even invested in the console platform in light of the ease of PC piracy cutting away profits (as well as chasing near Halo 2 sales profits) while in the process they become rival companies to Id and John Carmack.
Then you have Epic Games, Id Soft long time PC rival make a name for themselves on the console of all places with Gears of War and this year they are gearing into part 2 and how knows what other game projects they may have but so far they have more real experience as console devs than Id/JC.
Next is Cry Tek who have made two highly graphical and technical 3d games on PC expressing their interest in competing in the console realm.
Finally Bungie, GG, IG, and the rest who have been in the consoles for a long time and are extremely experienced in their respective consoles and where most of John Carmack's comments can be referenced because GG and IG are PS3 game devs who are making competing first person shooters that John Carmack's Rage and Doom 4 will be compared to, so if these game devs already have the games to show for their efforts and while ok KZ2 is Feb 09 there are plenty of gameplay videos showing amazing excecution while there is no actual in game, gameplay of John Carmack's opus.
So before anyone continues to perpetuate the belief that it would take a John Carmack to push a PS3 "if he felt like it" then what is going to be the argument when those mentioned game devs ship their games?
PS I am one of those few that believes that once he completes RAGE/Id Tech5 that they should remake Doom 3+RoE expansion on the current consoles using that new engine so that current gen console users will be much more familiar outside of the limited few who actually bought those games for XBox 1. At the same time I am well aware that even people who played Halo CE will be much more critical at the lack of believable A.I., physics, etc. that circa 2001 game had although considered primitive now.
