Weekend Confirmed Episode 47

Steve Gibson quote, at about 15 minutes in: "The Gearbox approach is that whatever platform you get the game on, you get the same game."

Sigh. Nick Breckon Borderlands sigh. (For those who don't know, check out Idle Thumbs 46: 32 minutes 30 seconds, and then Idle Thumbs 47: 37 minutes 30 seconds).

The last Gearbox game I bought was Halo PC, back in 2004 or whatever, and it was a straight port of the 360 version, with crappy performance. At that point, I wrote off Gearbox, didn't even bother with their Brothers In Arms series. And then I hear about Borderlands, about how the PC version doesn't support the mouse wheel for scrolling quest text, about the terrible FOV, etc., etc. Randy Pitchford later made a post on the Gearbox forums basically acting as an apology, but to my knowledge (I didn't buy or play Borderlands), this stuff hasn't been fixed, and has only been worked around by community-made patches and config changes. So that "whatever platform you get the game on, you get the same game" statement is apparently engraved in a giant stone tablet at Gearbox, and has been for a few years.

To correct Jeff Mattas, Id Software didn't make the same kind of statement in the Rage development leadup, but heavily marketed their focus on tailoring the game to a console controller, and were downplaying and arguably insulting the PC platform as a result of their self-promotion as a company focused on developing an oustanding 360 / PS3 game. From those statements, a lot of us panicked that Id was going to let the PC version fester and deteriorate, almost to the point that it would be a bad port from the 360 version. Id reacted very late to this, but eventually did start to show that this was not the case (Tim Willits moving the mouse in the Rage demo at QuakeCon 2009 was probably the first outreach to the PC community that Id made; they should've started sooner than that).

Additionally, you have Irrational's Chris Kline making this statement: http://www.joystiq.com/2010/11/21/bioshock-infinite-wont-be-a-port-on-ps3-all-versions-developed/ "We have a much larger team than we did on the original BioShock, so we're doing simultaneous in-house development on the PS3, 360, and PC versions of the game."

When the development of the different versions of a game gets shoved down to the level of "localization", quality suffers. Hearing that statement from Steve makes me even more disappointed in Gearbox, and even more afraid of the PC version of DNF having technical problems that will get in the way of full enjoyment of the game. And Gearbox doesn't appear to have learned from their mistakes in Borderlands or Halo PC.