The Merits of Doom 3

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SouthernLion
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by SouthernLion »

I think I'm going to go fire up Doom 3 tomorrow, because you guys made me remember how awesome it fucking was. Although with a few mods (higher resolution textures, and no disappearing corpses.)
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Chris
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

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I found the biggest problem with Doom 3 was that it felt like it just kept dragging on. Different maps had very little distinction between them, and while you can see various design and aesthetic differences when looking at the maps altogether, when you're going through them one at a time it feels very repetitive. Compare that to the original where, even though each episode had a consistent feel, each level was distinctive enough to separate it from what came before or after it. The over-reliance on monsters that teleport in or jump in via some trigger doesn't make for very tactical gameplay either. It also doesn't help that there doesn't seem to be much to discover through exploration, few secrets feel truly rewarding.

The horror also didn't seem to know what it wanted to be. Most often it seemed to want to have B-movie gore style horror, while at other times it wanted to be more psychological with disembodied voices and a fear of the unseen. But these don't really work together when haphazardly mixed. You're going to be less susceptible to hearing a whispered "come here..." from an empty open elevator shaft after blasting through a group of demons, or an unseen cry of "they took my baby." when you know it's not something that will hurt you. A menacing cackle echoing through the halls won't put you on edge when you've taken down everything it has thrown at you so far.
RexS wrote:And then of course, we have Doom 4 (2016) that I think blended both classic Doom and Doom 3 perfectly.
Funny enough, I consider Doom 3 and Doom 2016 to be on opposite ends of the spectrum, where the original Doom sits comfortably in between. Doom 3 tries to be high on horror, Doom 2016 tries to be high on action, while the original has a nice mix of action and horror. Doom 2016 was firmly tongue-in-cheek, being a counter-message to the super-serious story and mood driven shooters of the time. Its goal was to subvert the shooter formula that had taken root. The original Doom was camp played straight. It wasn't subversive in the least, it was conceptualized around the Aliens style of action-horror that was popular at the time; it just wasn't something you'd expect possible in a real-time game at the time.
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Graf Zahl »

The only way in which Doom 3 was awesome was how snooze-inducing it was. Dull, repetetive and boring. :twisted:
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Viscra Maelstrom
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Viscra Maelstrom »

another thing regarding enemies teleporting in is that it's extremely exploitable. typically it's just a single Imp that appears, and once you know it's an Imp, you can fire off a killing blow before it fully materializes, sometimes even a shotgun blast to the head was enough to instantly take it out.

i still like the concept of Doom 3, and there's still aspects of it that i enjoy. it's just overall not that fun to play anymore. if i want my Doom 3 fix again, i'll probably just pull up the Doom 3 mod for Doom and play it instead, or Classic Doom 3, which i remember was pretty fun as well, even if it's just a remake of Doom's Episode 1.

edit: i will admit though that the mods for Doom 3 that i saw was pretty cool. i mentioned Classic Doom 3 before, but then there's Edge of Chaos, The Dark Mod, various graphics and sound enhancements to the base game, and the upcoming Phobos mod looks like it's going in a direction that Doom 3 should have gone in the first place. i didn't play any of them aside from Classic Doom 3, but seeing screenshots of them back at Newdoom, i believe, was always fascinating to me.
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Enjay »

There was quite a cool Quake themed single map for Doom3 that I quite liked. To be fair, it was little more than a demo really, because it wasn't that big, but it was pretty good.

[edit] https://www.moddb.com/mods/shamblers-castle [/edit]

As for the "kept dragging on" comment - oh my goodness, yes. Every time I've played, if I could stomach getting through any real distance, I eventually get consumed by an overwhelming feeling of "oh dear lord, when will it end". The latter part of the game just seems to drag massively, bringing very little new to the table and just doing the same thing over and over in dark metalic grey corridors. And, when it did try something new, it wasn't done so in a good way. e.g. that area where you need to ride around on platforms, or having teleports around the base just meant bigger, more confusing versions of the earlier gameplay with all the faults just magnified by the area being, well, bigger and more confusing. And the fact that both riding platforms and taking teleports took longer than was fun (e.g. the teleport effect made it a slow process, during which you could do nothing except wait and the platforms were sloooow, with very little going on during the ride) and if you'd made a mistake and ended up in the wrong place, it was a chore to go back and try again.
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Chris »

I feel Doom64 was a better Doom 3. Like Doom 3, Doom64 amped up the horror mood, with darker textures and generally dimmer lighting, but mixing it up with a wider color palette. The music was made much more ambient, though not completely removing melodic riffs. Textures, sounds, and enemies also got overhauled, with new visual and audio designs for a more otherworldly look. Gameplay did slow down a bit, but I'd put that more as a consequence of controller input being less responsive than as a design goal.

Of course it's not completely fair to do a direct comparison of Doom64 and Doom 3. The latter had a few more years of hardware and software improvements to work with, and the former was dealing with funky hardware architecture and cartridge space limitations. Doom64 was, at its core, an enhancement of the original Doom engine, while Doom 3 was a generational leap beyond the Quake3 engine. But with a goal of being a more moody and horror-focused Doom, Doom64 had better design ethos than Doom 3.
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by SouthernLion »

Doom 64 is my favorite Doom game, so agreed there. But all you guys hating on Doom 3 just reminds me of old men shaking their canes at people with loud music. Doom 3 was very well praised and loved by many many people and fans* and was a huge success both in reviews and sales. A shame my favorite Doom community seems to hate it. That's not to say its without flaws, but I'm just amused at some of these posts. You would think Doom 3 kicked your dog. lol But, you are all of course entitled to your opinion.

Whoever mentioned Classic Doom 3, that was pretty fun, but I was super sad when they said they wouldn't do Shores of Hell or Inferno. I understand why (both legal and real-life reasons), but the creativity they put in to making Knee Deep in the Dead feel new would have been awesome with the rest of classic Doom.

*
Spoiler:
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Enjay »

RexS wrote:Doom 64 is my favorite Doom game, so agreed there. But all you guys hating on Doom 3 just reminds me of old men shaking their canes at people with loud music. Doom 3 was very well praised and loved by many many people and fans* and was a huge success both in reviews and sales. A shame my favorite Doom community seems to hate it. That's not to say its without flaws, but I'm just amused at some of these posts. You would think Doom 3 kicked your dog. lol But, you are all of course entitled to your opinion.
Image

For me, it's not a hatred of anything new. Dear Lord I really, really wanted Doom3 to be good - but, as a game, it wasn't. From what I understand, Doom 2016 was much better and Doom Eternal looks like it's going to be better again. I've played much better, much newer games since Doom3. Doom3 promised so much; Todd Hollenshead, the mouth of Sauron id software at the time personally promised so much for it and it just fell flat. And it's not just that it was less than promised; it was less than it should have been. They took one of the greatest games of all time and made a wet fart out of it. Actually, a wet fart would have been more exciting. :P

And while sales and reception were good (could they have been better?), Doom3's reception was not as rosy as you suggest. Sure, there are lots of positive reviews from paid reviewers (as per the article you linked to) - but those kind of reviews have always been regarded as unreliable (how often does a game, any game, get less than 5 out of 10 for example (it's almost always 7-10 out of 10) and how many games are thoroughly played before the review is written?), possibly open to corruption and "encouragement" from distributors and editors alike, and definitely suffer from Emperor's New Clothes syndrome (everyone says it's good, so I'm on that bandwagon). I'm not even going to suggest that fans didn't like it because, clearly, many did. However, it's really not hard to find many people ragging on it too - right from first release back on '04 - criticising it heavily and, for example, posting "screenshots of Doom3" (i.e. a completely black image). And let's not forget the huge sales of other games/franchises and fan devotion of them when some of them aren't necessarily particularly good either.

So, I'm glad that you really like the game and, yeah, it is my loss that I don't enjoy Doom3 but I genuinely think - for good, considered reasons that I can back up with logical reasoned arguments - Doom3 is not a particularly good game and it's not just because I want those damned kids off my lawn.

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;)
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Dr_Cosmobyte »

I don't know if anyone said this before but, i feel D3 was the natural course the franchise would follow eventually. After all, we had Doom 64, PSX Doom and, hell, even the lack of music on the Jaguar port could be a eventual inspiration for a more atmospheric approach.

D3 was also one of the first "next-gen" gaming experiences i had back then, so, maybe i am letting the nostalgia talk. I personally like it.
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Viscra Maelstrom »

i find it funny to be compared to an old man shaking his fist at the youngins, when i'm not even 24 years old. :P
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Dancso »

I don't like repeating what has already been said but the feeling of Doom 3 dragging on forever was a major problem i was experiencing even as a kid who was otherwise easy to impress.
I actually found the game scary even into the midgame due to my age but it was not actually FUN. I felt like the only weapons that had any power to them were the rocket launcher and BFG. The shotgun especially felt like it had a crazy amount of spread, it was driving me insane!
I didn't play Resurrection of Evil until a couple years ago, and it was a commitment I sort of regret having taken.

Compared to HL2 which I have replayed recently (and had tons of fun with), it really comes down to how many mistakes a game makes. As long as a game keeps giving you an interesting challenge and a variety of scenes, it won't feel like it's dragging on.

If there is one thing Doom 2016 has suffered from that Doom 3 also had, was the rather bland tech-base look that failed to create many interesting scenes. I honestly wouldn't know how to address this type of problem when they're breaking new ground on graphical realism but I feel like there is a significant loss of unique level design due to it. Doom Eternal looks promising regarding that so far.
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Matt »

D3 was a milestone in my departure from mainstream gaming too, but it was just because my computer couldn't run it. (UT2003 being the "real" beginning of that departure when it downplayed everything I loved about UT and played up everything that annoyed me about it - mainstream FPS gaming has pretty much continued that ever since including with the recent Doom games)

I only briefly played D3 at the university arcade. There were way too many cutscenes and the doomguy was That One Generic Short-Cropped Dark-Haired Thirty-Something Dude that was the protagonist of literally every AAA game for those years.

(Now that I think about how bland the protagonist in D3 was, I'm starting to have a whole new appreciation for the direction they took the doomguy in '16 and E...)

I remember the gameplay being pretty half-ass, with the player in tight quarters moving slowly but not quite enough to actually feel realistic, the guns and enemies seemingly designed for high-movement run-and-gun but no space to do it, and basically you just went around shooting things as fast as you could when they appeared.

I liked the imp fireballs because they really felt like a physical object being thrown at you, but gameplay-wise it didn't really add anything.

Making the attack button be the generic interaction button never sat quite right, though intellectually I felt like it was in the right direction?
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by JadedLexi »

RexS wrote:That's not to say its without flaws, but I'm just amused at some of these posts. You would think Doom 3 kicked your dog. lol But, you are all of course entitled to your opinion.
This is how I feel about a lot of the posts in this thread and in off-topic in particular in general. People are taking their hate for Doom 3 way too seriously and need to chill. I'm echoing Rex that while it does have its flaws, it wasn't an absolutely horrible game. I liked it myself.
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Graf Zahl »

I tend to disagree here. Doom 3 holds some very special memories for me - and not of the good kind.
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Re: The Merits of Doom 3

Post by Scripten »

I'm of two minds here. On the one hand, pretty much all of the flaws that people are mentioning regarding Doom 3 (the uninspired art direction, the lackluster sounds, the forgettable map flow and location design) are all totally valid. I've played through the game at least three or four times, which is quite a lot for me, and I notice these issues every time. Doom 3 just isn't *that* great of a game.

But on the other hand, I've played through the game three to four times and I enjoy it when I do. It might have something to do with nostalgia, or maybe it's just the general setting is compelling even with all the missteps, but I come back to it every so often and generally don't mind it. Maybe it's just that the game is set on my 155th birthday. :P

If nothing else, it's held its own against a large portion of games that came after it for me. The levels are linear but you can at least tell that you are moving around a real place rather than walking down a light gun track. And the expansion was actually fairly good, too.
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