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Remember that it was John Carmack himself who said that the PC was no longer the leading platform for them. id Tech 5 was built specifically with last gen consoles in mind.
Beyond that, the game itself was not made by id, but a developer called MachineGames.
... and...
I still play games for fun. It's what I expect from a game when I buy it or I would not have bought it in the first place. This is why I like that there are demos, alpha and beta testing offered for certain games. Try it out before you buy it, and a lot of games have ended up in my gaming library because of that. A lot of the games I've bought in the past three years until now, though, have been from smaller developers. Many don't have the greatest graphics out there or all the bells and whistles of the latest API. They're still fun to play in the end.
My sentiments, exactly.
I play for fun. I enjoyed Rage, despite the technical issues at launch, and I even enjoyed Duke Nukem Forever, despite the game getting horrible reviews and being extremely linear. I suppose I'm easy to please there as long as I have a gun and something to shoot with it.
What I don't like is that, as people have been saying, lessons were not learned. Things that could have been fixed that everyone complained about, such as the texture popping, were not fixed, and the 60FPS limit is a joke. It wasn't necessary with Doom 3. It's never been necessary, and I'll explain why.
Remember the 125FPS "sweet spot" in Quake 3 Arena?* Well, using code derived from a fellow named Haste, and then modified by myself and a fellow named Fourier, and tested extensively, we found a way to FIX that problem. There's two solutions - one is to remove the decimal truncation on player movement variables that was only necessary when dialup connections were still common. That fixed the rounding errors and unified the physics so that it was the same independent of client-side frame rate. The second solution was to forcibly introduce the same rounding precision errors that would naturally occur at 125 FPS across simulated movement frames over whatever the real client-side framerate is. The result was that running ANY frame rate from 20FPS up to unlimited generated the same exact movement physics, even if the frame rate was inconsistent. This also fixed a disparity in movement physics between local listen servers and dedicated servers. This kind of physics correction could easily be applied to level objects that involve any client-side prediction as well.
So in short, the 60 Hz limit is and has been complete bullshit from the start. If the old 125FPS behavior could be coded around by a couple of amateur mod makers then Carmack should have been able to code the physics system in Doom 3 to run independent of client-side render frames and movement prediction. This could have been done if Id tech 4 (and now 5) were coded to be PC-centric and then ported to consoles, and someone actually gave a damn about people that want to run at faster speeds. That's the problem though. PC enthusiasts have been shoved to the back of the digital bus. The only one out there that's pushing forward on the PC is as a primary platform is Chris Roberts. To say there's no market in PC games is stupid as well, considering he's raised almost $44 million on a game that's only still in development with basic alpha testing - and every single dime of that $44 million has been crowd funded. No publisher, no backing company, no assets from a previous game.... just us gamers wanting something awesome to play.
I think what's got everyone so miffed is that we PC gamers deserve better than this. We've payed thousands over the years on our hardware to get the best performance, and the game developers just aren't delivering. I would have easily plunked down $60 on Wolf if it had solved the problems plaguing Rage. Since the devs don't seem to care about fixing them, why should I throw money their way and encourage that behavior? No. If they patch these issues - texture popping, lack of graphics control (no aspect ratio? Seriously?), etc, I'll look into it. For now, I'm holding off until stuff gets fixed and the price comes down. Show me that PC gamers matter to you, and I'll buy your game at full price. Hand us a half-broken program and don't fix what's some pretty basic stuff and I'll wait for it to hit the bargain bin.
*For those unfamiliar with it, running at 125FPS allowed maximum jump height and lateral acceleration physics due to how the rounding of movement variables worked. It allowed you to jump onto platforms that were normally just a tad too high, and to strafe jump farther and faster. Pretty much all hard-core players ran at this frame rate.
Yeah, $60 for a broken game is asking for a bit much. I think that can be said for a lot of games lately released in the past two years or so.