Carmack 'not all that excited' about next-gen

Id Software boss John Carmack can be added to the list of designers who are not particularly enthused over the prospect of next-generation hardware. Speaking to Games Industry International, Carmack said Microsoft and Sony are too focused on boosting technical power, when they should instead be working on building new experiences for future consoles.

"Sony and Microsoft are going to fight over gigaflops and teraflops and GPUs and all this. In the end, it won't make that much difference," he said. "When you get to this, it makes a really big difference in the experience. Nintendo went and brought motion into the gaming sphere and while only having a tenth of the processing power was able to outsell all of them in all of these ways. I think someone has an opportunity to do this here. It takes a whole ecosystem though, but it is almost perfect."

If a recent rumor proves accurate, Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's next Xbox will run on the same graphics card.

Carmack went on to claim that current-generation hardware is capable of supporting anything developers can think up.

"Any creative vision that a designer could come up with, we can do a pretty good job representing on current generation and certainly on PC," he said. "In many ways I am not all that excited about the next generation. It will let us do everything we want to do now, with the knobs turned up."

In March, God of War and Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe said he "couldn't care less" about the next generation of consoles, further explaining that these new platforms will make "ambitious" projects more difficult.

The last release from id Software was Rage, a first-person shooter that was released in October and won generally favorable marks with reviewers. That game went on to become October's fourth-best-selling title in a month that saw the release of high-profile games like Battlefield 3, Forza Motorsport 4, and Batman: Arkham City.

Currently, the developer is working on Doom 4, which id Software denied as being "indefinitely postponed," as an October rumor suggested.