I love Carmack smack-talk. Or Carmack-talk, if I was to unsuccessfully attempt wittiness. Not only is it honest, but often prophetic. I'm not sure the following comment about Crysis will prove itself in the future, but it's good to know the veteran coder still "has game", as the twelve year-old who keeps kicking the crap out of my car would say:

But in terms of first-person shooters, if you look at something like Crysis and say that's the height of what the PC market can manage, I don't think that's necessarily that exciting of a direction for the PC to be going in the future. With Quake Live, we hope that there's an opportunity for people who've never played shooters to give this a try, and with that, the potential of actually growing the PC gaming market.

This is from an interview over at GamesRadar, where Carmack speaks about Quake Zero, the Quake III Arena-based shooter that will play straight from a web browser. The interview also mixes it up with a few general PC gaming questions, from which came the above nugget.

Is there too much of a "cutting edge" focus on PC games development? Should developers turn their efforts to casual markets and the other advantages of the personal computer? Have your say.

Carmack free Quake [GamesRadar, via Blue's News]

Wow, that was a packed keynote!

During today's QuakeCon keynote John Carmack unveiled a flurry of announcements including id Software's newest franchise, Rage, and confirmation of a Return to Castle Wolfenstein movie. They also told the crowd that the new Wolfenstein game is being developed by Raven Software for the PC, 360 and PS3. The mutiplayer portion of the game is being worked on by Threewave Software.

The breakdown after the jump:

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During today's Quake Con keynote the id folks announced that they have a team of developers working on a little pet project called Quake Zero.

QZ will be a free web-based version of Quake 3 multiplayer. Todd Hollenshead told me they decided to kick off this project for several reasons. First and foremost, id hated to see their game, once quite popular for online matches, losing its prominence in the online gaming scene, this will allow virtually anyone with a computer to play matches of their games.

Hollenshead said id also wanted to dip their toe in in-game advertising, and that this seemed like the best way to approach it. So expect ads to be running on the web page when you play Quake Zero,but free games for ads seem absolutely fine to me.