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Koko Ricky

Thoughts on "Doom 3" after much time has passed

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I've played "Doom 3" several times--although I have yet to beat it--since it came out in 2003. My opinions on it have changed and matured a good deal. I figured I'd share some of my thoughts as I attempt to play through it on veteran (I'm probably about halfway through the game). This is not a bitch-fest, nor an ego stroke. Just some observations, both good and bad.

• The action doesn't begin immediately, and an as impatient gamer I was surprised at how effective this was. "Doom 3" has one of the most immersive opening levels I've ever played in a game.

• The ineffectiveness of the shotgun is inexcusable considering that the weapon is one of the defining elements of the series. You can down an imp with one point blank shot; at a short distance, it can take up to six direct shots.

• In general, the weapons are very slow, either in reloading, rate of fire or rate of speed of projectile. This adds a very superficial challenge.

• Sound design, as in film, is half of the experience of a game. For id to completely ignore reverberation of primary sound effects--a feature even the PSX version of "Doom" had--is embarrassing, not to mention that the majority of the sounds are extremely weak.

• On the other hand, the ambient music and background noises, as well as most of the voie acting, is excellent. Don't know why the menu/theme music sounds like angst-ridden nu metal.

• Enemy designs are odd. They're lovingly crafted and moderately detailed, yet are dull in color schemes and general appearance. Some enemies are difficult to tell apart, something that was never a problem in the old games, even given the use of palette swapping.

• Even a decade later, the light and shadow effects are amazing. They look as good as some modern games and have allowed "Doom 3" to age gracefully.

• Not sure if the bulky, often very contemporary looking technology is a nod to "Alien" and the original game's archaic appearance, or a lack of imagination on the part of the artists. At least it looks pretty.

• The black stencil shadows really get in the way sometimes. I've frequently died from falling to my death or being killed by completely invisible enemies due to heaps of black surrounding everything. I frequently get lost because I instantly lose my bearings in the dark. Like the underpowered weapons, this feels like a superficial challenge.

• I don't mind switching between the flashlight and a weapon, even though the notion of doing that in the future is beyond idiotic. It makes for some fun scares.

• The player's maximum speed is slightly faster than a senior citizen power walking. id didn't have to make it as fast the original, but this is embarrassing.

• I like the minigames, such as disposing of the waste, using the power lift, sifting through emails, etc. It wasn't executed perfectly, but I look forward to more of that sort of detraction from the action in "Doom 4."

• Falling to your death from approximately one story is a bit silly.

• Way too much imp spamming. Not sure why this is so excessive.

• Cutscenes aren't very impressive but they are also non-intrusive and short, and help to prepare the player for new enemies. I like this.

• Armor is unbalanced. It rarely dips below 90. I typically die with nearly all my armor and rarely need to have it replaced. It doesn't absorb more than a fraction of enemy fire.

• Getting shot point blank by a marine with a shotgun has delivered less damage than a slow moving zombie bitch slapping me. This is ridiculous.

• Enemy deaths are a joke. The burn/dissolve effect looks cool and I understand its implementation, but why does it have to be instantaneous? Giving you a good look at the corpse for a few seconds wouldn't hurt resources on older machines. Human corpses will randomly disappear at times. The absurd gibbing effect is a letdown.

That's it for now. Share your thoughts on my observations or feel free to add some of your own.

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GoatLord said:

Don't know why the menu/theme music sounds like angst-ridden nu metal.

I loathe it too, enough to respond to this specifically. It hasn't grown on me in the past 9 years. I think Chris Vrenna is a lesser musician than Trent Reznor in general, and had the latter not quit the project then we would have got a better menu theme, and possibly even better ambient music in the game.

Incidentally, I don't know why whoever took over the job of creating the sound effects had to replace Trent's much superior weapon sounds with the shitty ones that ended up in the final game. They weren't even fixed in the BFG Edition, suggesting that no one at Id finds anything wrong with them.

GoatLord said:

The ineffectiveness of the shotgun is inexcusable considering that the weapon is one of the defining elements of the series. You can down an imp with one point blank shot; at a short distance, it can take up to six direct shots.

I know we're not here to talk about the nuances of the BFG Edition, but this wasn't fixed either. The effectiveness and likability of the other weapons is debatable, but I don't think anyone could contend that the shotgun in Doom 3 is useful or fun to use. Assuming Id had playtesters, how anyone could not have brought this up is quite baffling. Perhaps the people they hire are too starstruck from going to work at Id motherfucking Software? :/

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I have to say this game still manages to look great today. Somehow, it just never looks bad to me. I think the facial animations is part of it. They just seem so fluid and smooth, the eyes, lips, teeth, everything. Especially Swann, I thought he looked great for animations too, though I'm not a fan of the older looking Swann in BFG. Granted, why anyone wears Sunglasses in the fucking dark of Mars is beyond me, but I like his design. The voice acting is also amazing and great for a game. And I don't even mind the slower pace. But the nerfing of the Shotgun is irritating like it shouldn't be, and the lack of level variety, well, kinda boring.

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DoomUK said:

Incidentally, I don't know why whoever took over the job of creating the sound effects had to replace Trent's much superior weapon sounds with the shitty ones that ended up in the final game. They weren't even fixed in the BFG Edition, suggesting that no one at Id finds anything wrong with them.

Trent quit, so maybe they didn't want to give any credit and opted to replace him entirely, or perhaps he retained ownership of the audio.

Regardless, his contributions to the Doom 3 alpha were great. The pinky cry was spine-chilling with it's organic/metallic reverberating goodness.

In fact, I enjoyed the alpha over the final game ten-fold.

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Id paid for Trent's sounds but then they ran into some nasty issues with the "management" where they couldn't use any of them. They even considered trying to set up a situation where they could use some of them in DOOM 4 but that probably didn't work.

Then again a lot of his sounds were horrible.

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I think there should have been some setting for the EAX effects, so that they could be at 50% level. In my old computer I could do that with my sound card's control panel..

The damage view tilt is a bit too much.

Shotgun and minigun spread was a bit too much.

Plasmagun felt a bit underpowered.

I mostly used Plasmagun and the SMG as they were accurate.

Maybe I would have liked to use Rockets and BFG, but there just weren't that many enemies around.

Grenades were a bit too bouncy and unuseful.

The explosive weapons were a bit more useful in ROE as there were more enemies around.

Overall, there was too much ammo around. Often I have all weapons at max or near max ammo. It is almost possible to play through the game with one weapon. And definitely possible to always have the most optimal weapon. Sometimes it's interesting to need to survive with less than optimal weapons.

There could have been another flying monster with more health than the Cacodemon, since the cacodemons were kinda easy.

Lost souls were annoying with their wobbly flying style and their small size.

Revenants were fun.

Shotgun zombies were annoying.

The cyberdemon was a bit too easy. It was basically a fight against imps and maggots.. with someone shooting rockets in the distance. What if in E2M8 all you needed to do is to kill the lost souls and collect the soul spheres from the little rooms, and then the cyberdemon would die?

The PDA listening and browsing for locker codes is sometimes a bit annoying. I think that fits better for a game like Deus Ex. But Doom is an action game and having to stop often to listen to someone talking is a bit ehh.

Stopping to look at the cutscenes or the few non zombified characters and listening them was ok. That didn't happen so often.

Doom3 is a nice game, but it could have been better.

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over the years i dipped into doom 3 again and again. i loved the engine and my mapping skills really evolved using the integrated doom 3 editor. i also liked the gameplay. sure, it was slow but appropriate given the leveldesign and monster behavior.

but... just yesterday i gave it another shot. i use the sikk mod, so i have better visuals and some other neat things like an attached flashlight, nightvision, random spawns and some other things.

mechanically the game is awful (compared to the original). it's extremely slow, reptetetive and not a real challenge. it's quite boring actually. in the original you had to constantly move and evade fireballs. in doom3 there are maybe two fireballs flying at you at once and even though you're slow as heck, it's easy to evade. generally it's just too freakin' slow and the corridors are too compact.

the gunplay is ok'ish but compared to the original it's not very satisfying and not consistent from time to time. for the shotung to kill in one shot, you really have to shoot from point blank range. when i first played though the game, i used the shotgun 90% of the time. the rest just doesn't feel very satisfying, nor did i ever had to use them. if you kill enemies with your plasma gun, mostly they do some really weired ragdoll stuff (probably the reason why the monsters vaporize after a second).

story? couldn't care less. game would be better with no story at all, like the original. ;)

artistically and technically doom3 is a masterpiece though (technically it's ahead of it's time. even now you get performance issues with a lot of overlapping dynamic, shadow casting lights). both audio and visuals are top of the industry, even now. but gameplay wise it's a huge step backwards. it's just not doom anymore, even though it says so on the box. there are also some smaller things that annoy me, like the screenshake when you get hit. just awfully irritating. but the real downer is doom3's gameplay mechanics that feel like they were developed before the original doom.

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I only noticed how bad the shotgun efficiency really is on D3 recently, even after beating it once before. But now, I can't stop thinking how it isn't useful at all except at point-blank shots.

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I think that Doom 3 is a good game, but it becomes better if you use mods.
Sikkmod and the various HD textures: Does what the BFG edition does (visually) without spending extra cash.
Various shotgun mods: Make it a useful weapon.
Classic Doom 3: Fun remake of Episode 1.

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DoomUK said:

Incidentally, I don't know why whoever took over the job of creating the sound effects had to replace Trent's much superior weapon sounds with the shitty ones that ended up in the final game. They weren't even fixed in the BFG Edition, suggesting that no one at Id finds anything wrong with them.


John Carmack said himself that Sound design is a low priority compared to the visuals and the engine itself, so it's not surprising that the audio department is lacking. But as long as id continues to make their games easily customizable, I'll forgive bad sound effects because they're so easily replaced, although it would be even easier if they were great from the start.

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Lippeth said:

as long as id continues to make their games easily customizable, I'll forgive bad sound effects because they're so easily replaced, although it would be even easier if they were great from the start.

Any flaw in any game can be theoretically overlooked on these grounds, provided you have the inclination, skills and tools at your disposal to modify it to your liking.

So yeah, the fact that Doom 3's sounds are so easily replaced by moving some .wav files around doesn't negate their awfulness. I prefer to judge the game on its own terms and on what decisions Id made from the outset.

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DoomUK said:

Any flaw in any game can be theoretically overlooked on these grounds, provided you have the inclination, skills and tools at your disposal to modify it to your liking.

So yeah, the fact that Doom 3's sounds are so easily replaced by moving some .wav files around doesn't negate their awfulness. I prefer to judge the game on its own terms and on what decisions Id made from the outset.


Good point. In that case, the weapons sound like broken toys. All I can say is that they need Romero back, although times and standards have changed, he would at least try and make them fun.

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as far as i'm concerned id and trent raznor had some legal issues and id had to replace all the sounds raznor has been working on.

you can find the trent raznor soundfiles on the interwebz though. maybe there are some files within the leaked alpha build as well?!

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Hey, thanks for the feedback. Here's some more thoughts:

• Haven't found a single easter egg yet. What's up with that? Do I just suck at finding secrets, or am I just too used to locating them using old-school "Doom" methods? Or are they just really well hidden in "Doom 3"?

• Mancubus battle was excellent. The design for that enemy is a great interpretation of the original.

• Don't understand how the developers didn't notice the poor ammo distribution. I end up barely using the chaingun because I've found so little ammo for it.

• The brief outdoor areas are thrilling, but...brief. I don't know if they play a more substantial role later in the game.

• I'm fighting revenants now, so I'm fairly far into the game, and the only hell stuff I've seen have been a couple ritualistic looking scenes and the infrequent flesh texture. What's up with that?

• Giving you the option to send/cancel the transmission is a bit arbitrary, since it doesn't impact the game in any meaningful way. I'd like to see something like this in "Doom 4," where the path you take will be different depending on some yes/no scenario.

• The robot helper is cool. I enjoy fighting alongside it, even though it shoots at me sometimes.

• id got the barrels down. They come in handy from time to time and I like that the yellow ones don't immediately explode, allowing for some strategic moments.

• The variety of human enemies is admirable, but it's odd that the marine zombies have decent AI (at times) and are quick to the draw, but the engineer/scientist zombies exhibit the typical derp-derp, outstretched arms, moaning and groaning bullshit. It's corny.

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GoatLord said:

• Haven't found a single easter egg yet. What's up with that? Do I just suck at finding secrets, or am I just too used to locating them using old-school "Doom" methods? Or are they just really well hidden in "Doom 3"?

• I'm fighting revenants now, so I'm fairly far into the game, and the only hell stuff I've seen have been a couple ritualistic looking scenes and the infrequent flesh texture. What's up with that?


there is a doomguy head picture on one of the textures. the pentagram texture to be precise. and there's billy goat burger. dunno if you can call it easter egg but it's head is formed like a pentagram as well.

there's some more flesh, hell'ish theme later in the game and .... don't want to spoil but at least one area got a LOT of hell, if you know what i mean.

you want to check out the expansion as well. some really great leveldesign there. partly even better than the original. the gravity gun is fun as well.

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The slowness and emphasis on close quarters is the game's biggest flaw. The game's pacing seems deliberately slow, like a half-hearted attempt at survival horror (a genre I loathe), which wrecks everything for me. The player's sprint speed should be the default move speed, the weapons take too long to reload, the shotgun is useless outside of point blank, there are almost no open spaces... Every one of these things comes together to make the gameplay feel absolutely lethargic most of the time. It doesn't need to be as fast as the original, it probably shouldn't be, but it doesn't have to be as glacial as it is. If it were faster paced, with some space to move around more often than once a level, it might've actually been fun.

In terms of visuals, the texturing is okay but gets repetitive really fast, and you're stuck staring at the same textures for the entire game. Giving different areas of the base different schemes, making certain sections look older or newer, really could've helped here. The lighting/shadows, when they're used well, are excellent but the whole near-constant darkness thing isn't scary, it's annoying. The characters look like they're made out of plastic (everything does, really, but it's most jarring on characters).

The visual design on monsters is okay, I neither really like or dislike them, but some are too similar. That monster with a monitor attached to it, with teeth on the monitor, is fucking idiotic and I can't believe anyone thought it was a good design. Seriously, I hope whoever came up with that concept is ridiculed on a daily basis, it is just terrible.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

The slowness and emphasis on close quarters is the game's biggest flaw. The game's pacing seems deliberately slow, like a half-hearted attempt at survival horror

the whole near-constant darkness thing isn't scary, it's annoying.


Bingo. It wasn't Doom, but it wasn't a survival horror game either -- just a dilution of both. If they had to have the whole switching-from-flashlight-to-gun thing (hint: they didn't), it should have been a VERY brief sequence for variety, not the defining aspect of the game. It was unbelievably tedious, especially if you're not a huge pussy who falls for the same jump scares 50 times in a row.

Incidentally, what did id (i.e. John Carmack) think of the finished product? Did it accomplish what they set out to do?

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I think I agree with almost all of the negative points in this thread. I have played the game to its conclusion a few times over the years and each time I enjoyed it less.

Funny how some of the models now look very low-poly. The drinks can especially. And Swan has a pointy head. :P

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Enjay said:

And Swan has a pointy head. :P

Even back in 2004 the character heads looked horribly low-poly, compared to the characters in technologically-competing games like Far Cry and HL2. I think they stood out from the otherwise good-looking visuals and environments.

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I remember a video of Carmack showing off the actor models at a (Mac?) convention of some sort before the release of Doom 3 and he was enthusing about how many triangles they were now[then] able to have in an model's face versus their older games. True, I suppose, but it didn't stop Swan (etc) having pointy heads. I think that the lost souls are the most obvious enemy with this "problem". I mean, they are only a head and yet it is still pointy.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

Giving different areas of the base different schemes, making certain sections look older or newer, really could've helped here.

There are quite a lot of different schemes across the base, actually. It's the lighting that makes it all look the same.

Dragonsbrethren said:

That monster with a monitor attached to it, with teeth on the monitor, is fucking idiotic and I can't believe anyone thought it was a good design.

Personally, I'd shape the body slightly differently. The mouth is grotesque, but I wouldn't call it a flaw. It's a matter of taste, I guess.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

That monster with a monitor attached to it, with teeth on the monitor, is fucking idiotic and I can't believe anyone thought it was a good design. Seriously, I hope whoever came up with that concept is ridiculed on a daily basis, it is just terrible.

The bruiser. I must disagree.

If you want to talk about horrible monster design, let's talk about what was done to the cyberdemon - both aesthetically and how it can only be killed with the retarded soul cube gadget.

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DoomUK said:

The bruiser. I must disagree.

If you want to talk about horrible monster design, let's talk about what was done to the cyberdemon - both aesthetically and how it can only be killed with the retarded soul cube gadget.

The bruiser is okay I guess. Other than the monitor pressed into its mouth, it really looks like a classic Doom demon.

The Cyberdemon, like many other Doom 3 monsters, looks like a big thing with non-descript details. If you look carefully, it does have typical cyberdemon features, but also seems to wear military gear (so it looks like a huge evil Doomguy), which is odd compared to classic Cyberdemon's more frugal wiring.

Regarding gameplay, I'd suggest you find a mod/level where the Cyberdemon can be killed traditionally, and its rockets are the exact same as yours. That's where its size becomes a definite advantage.

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Yes, I know there are mods which let you kill the cyberdemon any way you please. But like I said, I prefer to judge the game that Id released in a thread where we share opinions about Doom 3.

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DoomUK said:

Yes, I know there are mods which let you kill the cyberdemon any way you please. But like I said, I prefer to judge the game that Id released in a thread where we share opinions about Doom 3.

Mods are part of the base game experience, you know this so well from Doom 1 and 2 too. And fuck, I was talking partially about the Cyberdemon's graphic design.

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DoomUK said:

The bruiser. I must disagree.

If you want to talk about horrible monster design, let's talk about what was done to the cyberdemon - both aesthetically and how it can only be killed with the retarded soul cube gadget.


I disagree, I really liked the Cyberdemon.

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printz said:

Mods are part of the base game experience, you know this so well from Doom 1 and 2 too.

Certainly, Doom modding has become such a vital component of the Doom community that it's difficult to think about Doom without thinking about the extraordinary amount of custom content people have crafted over the past two decades. But they're not inseparable topics of discussion.

If there was a fresh review of Doom/2/Final Doom, wouldn't it bug you if someone completely unfamiliar to the game judged it on the grounds of whatever source port they were running and that particular port's idiosyncrasies, or whatever custom WADs or mods they were using which changed they way the game looks/functions?

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I think the "there will be mods to fix it" is a bit of an empty solution. Taken to it's extreme, what it says is "OK devs, you can make the biggest pile of shit you like because we'll fix it once it's out". I'd rather the devs made the best game they could, with as few flaws as possible. Modders can still build on a great foundation.

The bruiser was a decent enemy except for the TV screen IMO. In fact, I actually laughed when I saw it. I get the whole painful, tortuous melding of flesh and technology but a TV for a mouth just looked funny, silly and very contrived IMO. Although it was a defining feature of the enemy, I found it depersonalised it. Perhaps that was an intended goal but I always felt like I couldn't see the enemy because there was a TV in the way.

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This is getting super nerdy, but I not only thought it was stupid to slap a monitor on a demon in a vague attempt at suggesting the merging of monster/machine, but it was a CRT monitor. I mean, come on. Even at the time of ROE's release, CRTs had been out of phase for several years. If they really wanted to go for some horrific melding of technology and biology, take a cue from H. R. Giger, or perhaps Jeff Goldblum's transformation in "The Fly."

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