Doom what if:90s Doom 3

In this little thread we will talk about a hypothetical Doom 3 in the 90s:
What if Doom 3 came out in 95/96?
What weapons would have been added?
What Monsters would have been added?
What would the story have been like?

So...what do you think?

Story? Lol, no story, its the 90's. Weapons, well thats interesting, we just cant rewrite something, but I would say that something like a Link Rifle or Electric Gun would had been nice, maybe a Multi-Rocket Launcher. Enemies? Probably more melee enemies, something new to join the Pinky in the front lines, a new epic boss, and more epic music.

I'll never know, but thats just my simple idea.

We already have Quake and Doom 64. Probably something along those lines. I doubt they'd go with the same old sprites again, would've been pushing it too far.

2 minutes ago, Da Werecat said:

We already have Quake and Doom 64. Probably something along those lines. I doubt they'd go with the same old sprites again, would've been pushing it too far.

Also TNT and Plutonia -_-......it was a better decision to delay it until 2003...

TNT and Plutonia are more like expansion packs that can run without Doom 2 than actual sequels,also Doom 64 is a spin of and quake isn't a doom game.

2 minutes ago, SOSU said:

Doom 64 is a spin of and quake isn't a doom game.

Well. Duh.

Doom III: Last Rites

The madness on Phobos and Deimos. The infernal terror of Hell on Earth. You stopped the sixth extinction from happening by destroying the nightmare hordes and slaying their Icon of Sin. It was over. You won. You retired to a quiet life of solitude. However you find out that you live a cyclical existence, because the UAC has tracked you down and they need your expertise. Orbiting the planet Venus is UAC's top secret research facility dedicated to investigating the demons and their dimension of chaos. Communication with the floating space station has been lost, at first thought because the solar wind, but the lengthy silence has become obvious. You and a team of highly skilled soldiers armed to the teeth have been sent in to check things out, the UAC representatives think it's most likely nothing. They are dead wrong. You made a vow to the mighty lord of the demons, that if they should ever return, by the strength of your hands they would fall. No matter how long it takes, in other worlds, in another existence they will see your face as they die.

New ability to look up and down, and jump your way through a realistic world.

New weapons include Phase Rifle, Rivet Shotgun, and the Plasma Saw.

New monsters are Nightfliers, Langoliers, Firewalkers, and the dreaded Technofiend. And also a new final boss!

Blast your way through three ten level episodes titled Daylight Station, Burnt Offering, and The Edge of Forever!

Doom 64 is the 90s Doom 3.

Spin-off or not, Doom 64 basically is a third Doom game.

Brutal DOOM is essentially DOOM as a 3D Realms game.

Echoing the "Doom 64 is '90s Doom 3" here.

Technically it is Doom 3, as it takes place after Doom 2.

Funny thing: I once tried heading a community megawad project that'd emulate something like this (with freelook, polyobjects, no visplane overflows, and a few new weapons and edited Realm667 monsters).

In the end I did a shitty job of managing the project, and it died out; but if something like it ever pops up in the future I'd be happy to offer up the edited guns and monsters that I created.

Well Doom 64 has less enemies than Doom 2 and has more of a Doom 1 feel with it's atmosphere it's kinda like a Doom 1.5...
But come on people stop the "what is Doom 3?" debate and start being creative! :D

9 hours ago, Anidrex_1009 said:

Story? Lol, no story, its the 90's.

To be fair: did Doom 3 have any meaningful story to begin with? It was basically a retelling of the first Doom.

9 hours ago, Da Werecat said:

We already have Quake and Doom 64. Probably something along those lines. I doubt they'd go with the same old sprites again, would've been pushing it too far.

That's exactly why they pretty much pulled the plug after Final Doom: it was obvious that they wouldn't work on that engine again, and it wouldn't be until, well, the actual Doom 3 that they would gather the resources to make something completely new. Releasing something with a slightly more capable engine a-la Hexen, but still in the usual 2.5D + sprites flavor and WITHOUT reusing the sprites, essentially repeating all the process from the original games all over again? No way.

I remember reading a DW article from 1998 that speculated what Doom 3 would be like. Does anyone have the link?

Doom had the Shotgun and Barons.

Doom 2 introduced the SSG and Hell Knights.

Following that train of thought, if Doom 3 had come out in the '90s, it may or may not have introduced the Triple Shotgun and Hell Peasants.

Doom had all monsters pre-placed in maps.

Doom 2 introduced monsters that can spawn or resurrect other monsters.

Doom 3 in the 90s may have introduced monsters that could spawn copies of themselves and each one resurrected itself automatically after death.

Maybe Hell Footmen would make more sense.

23 minutes ago, MFG38 said:

Doom had the Shotgun and Barons.

Doom 2 introduced the SSG and Hell Knights.

 

Following that train of thought, if Doom 3 had come out in the '90s, it may or may not have introduced the Triple Shotgun and Hell Peasants.

Looking at medieval history, the progression after nobles (baron) and knights were a mish-mash of different things, ranging from men-at-arms to archer to foot soldiers (peasant conscripts or mercenaries). Peasant conscripts doesn't sound very interesting (or powerful, they were usually minimally armed and armored). Which leads to the next comment that came in while I was typing this...

1 minute ago, Avoozl said:

Maybe Hell Footmen would make more sense.

Which brings us to my overall point--aren't Imps already kind of Hell's foot soldiers (or even archers)? They could have introduced a less powerful baron/hell knight copy that would be a Hell Soldier.

Or they could've gone the other way and introduced an upgrade to the Baron of Hell called a Hell Duke or Hell Lord or something like that. It would've had to have had other abilities beyond just strength and fireballs, like the ability to fly and throw multiple projectiles and do increased damage.

Alien Trilogy with demons.

12 hours ago, Piper Maru said:

Doom III: Last Rites

 

The madness on Phobos and Deimos. The infernal terror of Hell on Earth. You stopped the sixth extinction from happening by destroying the nightmare hordes and slaying their Icon of Sin. It was over. You won. You retired to a quiet life of solitude. However you find out that you live a cyclical existence, because the UAC has tracked you down and they need your expertise. Orbiting the planet Venus is UAC's top secret research facility dedicated to investigating the demons and their dimension of chaos. Communication with the floating space station has been lost, at first thought because the solar wind, but the lengthy silence has become obvious. You and a team of highly skilled soldiers armed to the teeth have been sent in to check things out, the UAC representatives think it's most likely nothing. They are dead wrong. You made a vow to the mighty lord of the demons, that if they should ever return, by the strength of your hands they would fall. No matter how long it takes, in other worlds, in another existence they will see your face as they die.

 

New ability to look up and down, and jump your way through a realistic world.

 

New weapons include Phase Rifle, Rivet Shotgun, and the Plasma Saw.

 

New monsters are Nightfliers, Langoliers, Firewalkers, and the dreaded Technofiend. And also a new final boss!

 

Blast your way through three ten level episodes titled Daylight Station, Burnt Offering, and The Edge of Forever!

 

 

You put some thought into this. Did you just come up with this off the cuff? Or have you been kicking it around for awhile?

^ The critical aspect is when this would have been released and with what engine. No later than Hexen (30 October 1995) and using the same engine enhancements, sounds about right, but that'd require considerable osmosis between id and Raven, and artwork would remain pretty much the same. Any later, and it would just eat the dust of Duke and Quake, unless official Boom -if not ZDoom-like- enhancements could be produced. Doom 64 was really a special case, with its own merits and praises, and on a completely different platform.

An alternative would've been continuing the Doom franchise on the Quake or Quake II engines, backwards compatibility with the PWAD mapping format would be sweet (essentially, it would be an official 3D source port of Doom with models).

8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Tangent: In some alternate reality somewhere, ID software rode the Wolfenstein wave forever. Quake and Doom never happened - in their place, even more Wolfenstein sequels. They developed the ID tech 1 (classic Doom) engine for Wolfenstein II. It was a total blockbuster, outselling even Wolf3D and SoD by a wide margin. There were several expansions (think doom2, final doom, but done for Wolfy instead) and finally the console-exclusive Wolfenstein 64 which had the interesting spin of BJ fighting space-Nazis in the future. Good game, as I recall.

 

Wolfenstein 4 hit shelves in 2003 and had arguably the best graphics of any game ever made at the time, but many people complained that the Nazis took far too many shots to die. The reliance on realism was also divisive, some preferred the realistic feel of sneaking through a quiet, dreary castle, aware of your every footstep, where Nazis can sneakily ambush you at any time. Real thriller of a game in that sense, but the people who preferred the faster, less realistic 'run and gun' nature of Wolf 2 and Wolf 3 were disappointed with the gameplay. Having to read the tedious, uninteresting Nazi logbooks left around to figure out how to open mandatory locked chests was a real damper on the fun at times too.

 

Wolfenstein 2016 (or 5 as I insist on calling it) finally came out last year. Basically a mix of the awesome graphics of 4 and the faster gameplay of 3 but made for modern times. Great game, introduced the Wolf legacy to a whole new wave of gamers. The way the Nazis explode into ammo and health as you kill them is kind of weird but not a deal breaker by any means. Everyone keeps saying it's a ripoff of the Brutal Wolfenstein mod by General Mark III, but other than the assassination animations, I really don't see it.

 

It's just a shame that WolfenSnap is nowhere close to GZWolfBuilder in terms of flexibility. I mean seriously, every "custom map" just feels like a basic boring Castle prefab. Still though, Wolf2016 carried the torch into the new era pretty damn well, imo. I know Wolf mapping has been super flexible since 1994 so it was disappointing in that sense, but as a standalone game, it was still loads of fun.

Interesting alternate reality.

I like the reference to the Brutal mod by "General Mark III." But wouldn't he have been Corporal?

10 minutes ago, Maes said:

^ The critical aspect is when this would have been released and with what engine. No later than Hexen (30 October 1995) and using the same engine enhancements, sounds about right, but that'd require considerable osmosis between id and Raven, and artwork would remain pretty much the same. Any later, and it would just eat the dust of Duke and Quake, unless official Boom -if not ZDoom-like- enhancements could be produced. Doom 64 was really a special case, with its own merits and praises, and on a completely different platform.

 

An alternative would've been continuing the Doom franchise on the Quake or Quake II engines, backwards compatibility with the PWAD mapping format would be sweet (essentially, it would be an official 3D source port of Doom with models).

I think if id had continued with the Doom franchise instead of making Quake, they would've certainly utilized what came to be known as the Quake engine. It would've probably come to be known as id Tech 2 instead of the Quake 2 engine being known as id Tech 2.

For enemies?

Perhaps the dragon that was supposed to be in Quake would've been incorporated into this hypothetical Doom 3--a Hell Dragon, if you will.

A stronger, faster class of imp, a mini-cybderdemon (continuing the miniaturization trend started by the arachnotrons), enemies that could warp in and out at will (going from in front of you to behind you during a fight), some sort of fallen angel type enemy.

There would've been an even larger demon lord at the end, the one that entombed the Icon of Sin and forced the Icon to do its bidding. Hopefully the final battle would've been different from the telefrag Shub-Niggurath end of Quake. Maybe it could've been called Asmodeus.

New weapons?

A handheld rail gun maybe.

I'm torn on whether the "magical" elements that made it into Quake would've fit into the Doom universe.

Doom64, Quake and Quake 2 are all pretty solid continuations of the doom formula. The only doomish thing missing from the first two quakes is the doom "plot".

6 minutes ago, Grain of Salt said:

Doom64, Quake and Quake 2 are all pretty solid continuations of the doom formula. The only doomish thing missing from the first two quakes is the doom "plot".

The enemies and weapons were also much more lame.

From what I've heard John Romero and others say, Quake was originally an NPC in one of their D&D games. He was completely awesome and they wanted to create a game around him, but never had the computer power to really do it right. The game Quake was meant to include him. id ended up buckling under the weight of expectations and scrapped a lot of there plans to make Quake completely different from Doom and made it essentially the same type of game as Doom, just with a different setting, weapons, and enemies. Eventually Romero got disillusioned and left.

So, let's say this alternate universe of 1996 Doom 3 happened. That means Quake didn't get made in 1996. But, Romero and any others who were disillusioned with making the same game would still get disillusioned. However, with Doom 3 having been released, the thirst of the gaming public for a new game would've been slaked. In this world, they would've been allowed to work on Quake and make it into the game that they dreamed it would be, taking advantage of increasing computing power along the way. In this world, Quake comes out in 1998-99, and is a sort of hybrid, borrowing elements and concepts from Quake and Daikatana. It wouldn't replace Doom, but would occupy another FPS niche, being far more D&D-esque as opposed to demons from Hell and space marines-esque.

9 hours ago, Pegleg said:

You put some thought into this. Did you just come up with this off the cuff? Or have you been kicking it around for awhile?

It was just a basic outline for a Doom novella that never materialized.