Quake Live, Electronic Arts, and id Tech 6

TG: If Quake Live becomes as successful as you want it to be, do you see id releasing major graphical updates for it?

JOHN CARMACK: We haven't really laid out firm plans for what we want to do on there, but I can imagine that happening maybe two years down the road, perhaps releasing an id Tech 5 client. However by that time there will hopefully be 50 or so maps that people are playing, and there's a limit to what you can do programmatically with a fixed data set to make it look better. However, if Quake Live goes gangbusters and we get five million users, I think that will make the publishers think about doing a big budget version sometime down the road. I'd be thrilled to see that happen, but right now the publishers aren't interested in that kind of a high-end arena tournament game.

Quake Live is currently in beta and is scheduled for release later this year. But what will the future hold for the free multiplayer game?

TG: Looking beyond id Tech 5, what would be the first title based on id Tech 6?

JOHN CARMACK: In a perfect world we would have an id Tech 6 based Doom title for launch of a next generation console. Historically, the odds are against us having things line up that well, but ideally that's what we want to do. What we would prefer is to have Doom 4 come out before this generation knows that the next generation is coming in a finite amount of time while working on another Doom title that will be a new game aimed at the new consoles. If we catastrophically screw up our game development on Doom 4, which is not impossible, we could end up having that one come out late enough that the new consoles are approaching. If that's the case, we would probably have a graphics engine and media update and leave the rest of the game alone, making it a cross-generational title for the PS3, PS4, the Xbox 360 and the 720 or whatever they'll call it.

TG: Are there any big plans for id Tech 6? Any new technologies you are going to introduce?

JOHN CARMACK: We have a lot of great stuff in id Tech 5 that we're a long way from maxing out. This means we could add one new component to the engine, like infinite geometry or voxel ray tracing, while everything else could be derived from stable id Tech 5 technology and not take four years to build from the ground up, basically id Tech 5 with a new graphics engine. If Doom 4 is a great game and we can keep all of that and add one thing that gives you something you've never seen before, then that will be great.

It's hard to say how it will work out. There are significant challenges as we look toward trying to completely paralyze all of the game logic. And that's one of the big things we've been talking about for years now. Different architecture and ways to accomplish that. And there's a broad spectrum of possibilities there, because it's one thing if we're talking about an eight-core x86 processor; how do we take advantage of all of that? But it's a completely different thing if we're looking at the equivalent of a Larrabee where you have to have a thousand threads of execution or maybe more threads than you have entities in the game. And that becomes a big change in how we think about things and develop stuff. And I'm hoping that the next generation of console comes out in such a way that we can still run the rest of the stuff conventionally like we're doing now and just use the flexible media stuff for the graphics primitive rather than running the entire base of the game. But all of that is still unknown. We have some sense from most of the vendors about what version is being pitched for the next generation console.

TG: How has your experience with Electronic Arts been so far?

JOHN CARMACK: It really is too early to say. There's nothing negative to say, but we're still in a honeymoon phase. The real question is a year from now when we are looking at publishers for Doom, will EA still be in our good graces? It gives them every incentive because we know Doom will be a bigger game than Rage; it has the franchise name behind it. So they need to do an excellent job on Rage. We haven't burned any bridges with Activision and there are many other publishers who are willing to stick their necks out and work with us on Doom 4.

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