My take on the BFG Edition.

Well MY take on the BFG edition is that the lighting and gameplay changes made the game excessively easy. It wasn't that hard to begin with when myself, whom I consider an average gamer, can complete it on veteran only dying 2 or 3 times. But now it was just crazy easy because the gameplay "improvements" were to water down the only challenging parts.

Still, it was fun playing through it on ps3 and the Lost Mission was fun. 3D looked cool for a few minutes but after I watch 3D for a bit I kind of adjust to it and don't even notice, same thing happens with movies. Lost Mission contained a few too many copied areas for my taste, although some of them actually made sense. For example, the new labs having a similar layout to Delta Labs, especially in the entrance/reception areas, makes perfect sense in the real world. I also enjoyed the more varied fights. My only real complaint with the Lost Mission:

***********SPOILER ALERT*************
At the end you give us a boss that doesn't require any special tricks to kill, just good old fashioned shoot-em-up, and it's NOT the cyberdemon? What the fuck? One of the biggest complaints from fans about D3 was that you couldn't kill the cyberdemon with conventional weapons. Throw us a bone here! I mean for story continuity, since the soul cube claims only it can destroy "hell's mightiest warrior", I can see the decision, but c'mon man! I wasn't expecting to go to hell, and when I saw the size of that arena, I thought for sure they were gonna throw a cyberdemon at us.

***********END SPOILER*************

All in all, as a Doom fan, it was worth the investment. Makes me very uneasy about Doom 4 though. They watered down Doom 3 too much to cater to all the whiners. Seriously who thought the game was too hard? But the Lost Mission gives me a glimmer of hope.

Face23785 said:

At the end you give us a boss that doesn't require any special tricks to kill, just good old fashioned shoot-em-up, and it's NOT the cyberdemon?

Not only that, but it's a typical case of "spam the player with spawning monsters before an even bigger monster appears on the screen".

The beauty of the boss fights in Doom and Doom 2 (discounting MAP30) is that they flow well with the rest of the game and don't have "this is a boss fight" written all over them. They just feel like regular levels which happen to have monsters with high HP roaming around. Though I can praise id for not resorting to a stupid gimmick like only being able to win with the soul cube, I've never been fond of this kind of boss fight in games.

Face23785 said:

Well MY take on the BFG edition is that the lighting and gameplay changes made the game excessively easy.

At least the game flows a lot better now. It's actually enjoyable, now, in my opinion. I just couldn't get into the original version, but this one just feels better somehow.

Sodaholic said:

At least the game flows a lot better now.

In what way?

DoomUK said:

In what way?

The player moves a good amount quicker now, and the weapons feel tweaked, making it much more fun to run around shooting things than being slow with clunky weapons.

Sodaholic said:

The player moves a good amount quicker now, and the weapons feel tweaked, making it much more fun to run around shooting things than being slow with clunky weapons.

Fair enough.

Personally I find shooting things to be just as boring and clunky as ever. And id didn't even do something about those horrible weapon sounds; the shotgun sounds like it's blowing salt out of the barrel, the pistol and machinegun sound like they're out of ammo or something.

What I don't get is why the npc firing sounds are better than the player firing sounds of both the pistol and submachinegun.

Because Tim Willits.

DoomUK said:

Fair enough.

Personally I find shooting things to be just as boring and clunky as ever. And id didn't even do something about those horrible weapon sounds; the shotgun sounds like it's blowing salt out of the barrel, the pistol and machinegun sound like they're out of ammo or something.

I'm pretty sure the shotgun sound was changed somehow... it sounds more... metallic, I guess?

But yeah, the others are the same.

Caffeine Freak said:

I'm pretty sure the shotgun sound was changed somehow... it sounds more... metallic, I guess?

Yeah, I did think of that.

But it still sounds pretty pathetic imo.

The shotgun is terrible, it's a melee weapon lol. It's actually outclassed by the chainsaw :O

Once you hit the halfway mark Doom 3 improves considerably, they stop using those silly soldiers and focus on the cool monsters instead. Plus you get to use the plasma rifle almost constantly and rocket launcher.

I've actually always been really fond of the Z-Secs. If they are used properly, they become tactical threats in ways most other monsters can't be.

Caffeine Freak said:

I've actually always been really fond of the Z-Secs. If they are used properly, they become tactical threats in ways most other monsters can't be.

Fighting the z-sects is annoying. Its the normal zombies (the slow shambling ones) that I love. I don't know why, but I just find it so much fun to blast them with my shotgun.

Avoozl said:

What I don't get is why the npc firing sounds are better than the player firing sounds of both the pistol and submachinegun.

I know, right? Weird thing is, they did it in Wolf 3D as well, which I can't understand why.

I like the player's new footstep sounds loads better than the Vanilla Doom 3 footstep sounds, it's more subtle and isn't that annoying 'clickety-clackity' kinda sound it had. But then the NPCs still use the old sounds. Wtf?

I think it'd be fun to make a little sound mod that makes all the security and military humanoid NPCs use the new player footsteps, since it sounds like you're carrying a bunch of equipment in the new one, and the civilians would still use the old ones due to wearing jumpsuits without weapons and security supplies on them, as well as normal shoes instead of combat boots. Then, the player's weapons would use the same sounds as the NPC firing sounds.


What I don't understand is why they made zombies not get back up after killing them like they did in the alpha. Clearly the concept was inherited from Quake 1, and it's really easy to gib things anyway in Doom 3, so it would've been nice, but then again, this has nothing to do with BFG edition, so never mind.

Sodaholic said:

I know, right? Weird thing is, they did it in Wolf 3D as well, which I can't understand why.

I think they want player weapons to have a rather subdued sound, so that they do not become too annoying or stressful after a while.

Enemies, on the other hand, get to have more powerful-sounding attacks to seem more threatening and intimidating. Enemies are varied, so you will avoid too much repetition of a given aggressive sound simply by moving on to a different area. The player will hear the player weapons a lot more than any of the enemy weapons. (And enemy weapons have their sounds attenuated by distance anyway.)

Am I the only one that likes the motion blur? When the frame is at a standstill, it's quite blurry, but in motion it doesn't get in the way and is pretty subtle in my opinion.

Gez said:

I think they want player weapons to have a rather subdued sound, so that they do not become too annoying or stressful after a while.

I think you're grasping at straws. There's plenty of games where the player's weapon sound effects are louder and more aggressive and it only has a positive effect on the gameplay.

A beautiful sound effect gives your virtual gun the appropriate "feedback" it needs to make it feel like you're actually shooting something (even if it's not at all like what a real gun sounds like, it's an established trope in both games and movies that all guns except silenced weapons should sound as cool and ferocious as possible). The chainsaw, SSG and BFG in Doom 3 are the only weapons that feel like they're doing something in my opinion.

Sodaholic said:

What I don't understand is why they made zombies not get back up after killing them like they did in the alpha. Clearly the concept was inherited from Quake 1, and it's really easy to gib things anyway in Doom 3, so it would've been nice, but then again, this has nothing to do with BFG edition, so never mind.

The zombies that stand back up* in the leaked Doom 3 alpha don't have ragdoll physics, they fall down the same way each time. I guess iD decided to use ragdolls instead, since they were starting to be used in games around the time and they were all the rage. Today, some games blend ragdolls and animations so they can have enemies get back up when knocked down (yet use ragdoll physics when they die), but in 2004, iD probably had other priorities.


Oh, there's the Realistic Weapons mod (video at link) which changes the weapon sounds for regular Doom 3, but it also changes their accuracy and damage values a fair bit. Might be worth looking at and see if you could just use the sounds for your own Doom 3 use.


* If you stand on them after they fall down, they try to sit up, but can't due to your weight, so they just struggle until you step off :p

Livo said:

in 2004, iD probably had other priorities.

Either that or they were changing things which didn't need to be changed. Personally I preferred the death animations over exaggerated ragdoll physics, as well as preferring various other little details in the alpha.

Though the gibbing is easy the gore also disappears instantly which is a problem if you'd ask me, I'd like to see the gore scattered on the floor for a little before disppearing.

Livo said:

Oh, there's the Realistic Weapons mod (video at link) which changes the weapon sounds for regular Doom 3, but it also changes their accuracy and damage values a fair bit. Might be worth looking at and see if you could just use the sounds for your own Doom 3 use.

That mods looks very unbalanced. The shotgun can kill a monster across a whole room. Why use the machinegun then?

I'm VERY glad they didn't go with death animations. True, the ragdoll physics are over-exaggerated, but at least they're dynamic. Having death animations and seeing the same ones hundreds of times throughout the course of the game would take a lot of the thrill out of killing enemies.