I freely admit to not following the tech side of the game very closely but after reading a few interviews I was under the impression that the textures of the PS3 were bottlenecked more by the split memory design and increased OS memory footprint present on the system than by any limitations present due to platform parity.
Textures are held in VRAM, and while 256MB certainly isn't much even at a 720p resolution, they could've been better in the PS3 version. The quality of the textures in the game isn't a matter of resolution or inherent detail, but rather data compression. If you look hard enough, you can find textures with visible compression artefacts!
Agreed on the PC version, though. The fact that the PC version shipped broken for 1/2 of the PC customers didn't help.
On that note, I can't believe it took AMD well over a month to finally get its OGL support in order. The only explanation I can think of is that nvidia hired literally every professional OGL programmer on the planet.
Id's keys to success for both themselves and their parent company. BTW they wont do this.
1.) Doom 4. Make sure to get it right this time. The last game teetered between realism and arcadish gameplay and suffered for it. There is a lot you can do to be loyal to the game and still be modern, but skeletons with rockets on their shoulders and guys that turn into tanks isn't going to work. Imp's, pinkies, and maggots do work. Find what will work and mix in some new enemies.
2.) You have one of the best engine builders on the planet in house. Use him. Between the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series Bethesda needs an engine that is tailor made for what they do. (We swear it's not) Gamebryo has been adequate for them, but they could do so much better with an engine that is custom built for large worlds with lots of objects to keep track of.
3.) Let Zenimax license the engine. There is nothing wrong with licensing your engines out to your competitors. I don't see Epic complaining. And an engine that is built around the concept of large open worlds would sell very well in this day and age. When you consider how many open world games there are nowadays and how attractive this kind of engine would be for them I could see this being a very nice source of income for Zenimax and maybe even a way to ensure that Id gets to keep it's autonomy as long as the money is coming in.
I think it's a good plan. But usually good plans don't happen, and it doesn't seem like the kind of thing Carmack would go for anymore.
I don't think the engine being limited to Zenimax-owned developers (and perhaps also Besthesda partners) was a call made by id. After all, the announcement came
after the acquisition. Surely, if id had planned earlier not to license out the engine, Carmack and co. would've mentioned as much seeing as it flies in the face of previous id Tech iterations.
