does doom 3's shot gun make the game better?

In doom 3 the shotgun is VERY BAD because of the GIANT SPREAD and  VERY LOW DAMAGE. So any mind would put this as a down side for the entire game but for any other doom game the shotgun is overpowered due to all of them doing INSANE DAMAGE and VERY LOW SPREAD and people mostly don't care about it being op as hell. So this is a discussion on how the shotgun in doom3 could have been made to make the game harder and more fun.

14 minutes ago, battlescroll said:

So this is a discussion on how the shotgun in doom3 could have been made to make the game harder

Existing.

On 1/10/2021 at 4:07 PM, Lippeth said:

The best way to balance the shotgun is to think of it as a melee weapon. Because of the level design in Doom 3 it works out brilliantly. Similar to how the new Doom games require you to get up close with fists and chainsaw if you want health and ammo, Doom 3 asks you to get close and personal with the shotgun. Sure it's not how an actual shotgun works, but I've never gotten ammo while cutting down a tree, either. It was designed that way from a pure game mechanic standpoint. You risk taking damage up close in exchange for a possible one hit kill, depending on the enemy. Even taking on a hell knight with the shotgun is a lot of fun because of how it switches between its melee and projectile attacks depending on your distance to it.

 

If the levels were more open and long range, the shotgun wouldn't be as viable, but neither would the slower movement and stamina. And if the shotgun was more like a rifle, then the other weapons wouldn't be as viable at longer distances. All that being said, it's easy to change the spread and damage, but I don't think anyone has ever agreed on the best numbers. Making the spread about 6 seems to make the most people happy, and changing the damage to about 10 seems to somewhat balance it out. But if you do that, what's the point of the machine gun?

14 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Existing.

???

I think many of the issues with Doom 3's shotgun are really a product of its horrible model and sound causing people to attribute other bad qualities to it that may not exist/be relevant because of how utterly uncomfortable-feeling of a weapon it is. 

If you write in ALL CAPS it makes the things you say MORE DEFINITE and ENTIRELY FACTUAL.

(Also I would not say the classic shotgun does "INSANE DAMAGE". Have you ever tried taking down a Cyberdemon down with it? Takes a while. thanks Plutonia)

This should probably be in the Doom 3 subforum, but I'll bite.

Doom 3's shotgun was designed for close range encounters, since *most* of the encounters in Doom 3 were fairly claustrophobic, usually confined to one area. The main problems many many people have with the shotgun, besides the ugly model, is that it is unreliable. The massive spread makes it entirely possible to not hit something( or do significant damage) at close range, almost entirely defeating the point of the weapons design. The second chief reason many people don't like the shotgun, is that the RNG is really odd. I played through Doom 3 recently, and I went from one-shotting a revenant( I had to go in close enough to see his pores) to firing three shots(at close range) to kill an imp.

To say the classic Doom shotgun is overpowered is a bit of a stretch. That shotgun was reliable, you could make an approximate calculation as to how many shots could down an imp ( provided your aim isn't blocked by anything, or the angle was off). It wasn't extremely powerful or broke the game's balancing in any way ( the definition of overpowered).

To answer the OP's question, reducing the spread ( not to the extent that it becomes a longer range weapon) fixing the shoddy RNG and updating the weapon model( if I remember correctly, the Beta shotgun model looked nicer than the final model) would be the best way to fix this weapon.

The classic shotgun didn't do INSANE DAMAGE or was op, it was pretty reliable even at long range, if you didn't have the chaingun or the rocket launcher, the supershotgun did more damage but it was more close range type weapon, still pretty reliable at a mid-range, at long range, however, it isn't as useful. 

The shotgun wasn't op by any means in classic Doom, because the maps had really big outside areas and the tougher enemies weren't as easy to kill with the shotgun, when Doom 2 came out with the SSG the mid-tier enemies were much easier taken down by it the the regular shotgun. The shotgun might be the workhorse of Doom 1 but it wasn't overpowered.

The thing about Doom 3's shotgun is that it fills its purpose, a powerful close range weapon, but awful at mid or long range but it could've used tweaks like sound, RNG, the model itself, etc.

As i said in the other Thread:

You can kill many Enemies with one Shot, you only have to get close.

I see no Problem with it.

2 hours ago, Azuris said:

As i said in the other Thread:

You can kill many Enemies with one Shot, you only have to get close.

I see no Problem with it.

my problem with it is exactely that

in my opnion doom shotguns should be mid range and then the super shotgun should be close range

7 minutes ago, omalefico32x said:

my problem with it is exactely that

in my opnion doom shotguns should be mid range and then the super shotgun should be close range

But it was a really clever Design (and remember, there was no Super Shotgun in Doom 3, only in RoE), to be effective, you had to overcome the Fear and go ahead to your Enemy.

They rewarded Bravery within a Moment of Horror.

For Midrange you had the Machinegun and later Chaingun and Plasmagun.

2 minutes ago, Azuris said:

to be effective, you had to overcome the Fear and go ahead to your Enemy.

I see your point, but it's the RNG being so wonky that bothers me. A close range weapon not being good at close range eliminates the point of the weapon. It's the same as a sniper rifle not being good at long range.

39 minutes ago, Azuris said:

 

But it was a really clever Design (and remember, there was no Super Shotgun in Doom 3, only in RoE), to be effective, you had to overcome the Fear and go ahead to your Enemy.

They rewarded Bravery within a Moment of Horror.

For Midrange you had the Machinegun and later Chaingun and Plasmagun.

thing is you need to be at the demons face for it to work

if you are half a meter away the rng spread can still fuck you over

i get what they were going for but it was too much

Reduce the ammo pickups, make it reload one shell at a time, add a double-shot altfire that resembles that of HL's shotgun, or all of the above.

That Doom3 shotgun to me serves one purpose:

When you find the SSG in resurrection of evil it's THAT much sweeter.

The spread on it is atrocious. Unforgivable. Fix that and it's fine.

Reduce the spread, and the amount of pellets to compensate.

I've found that reducing the spread and damage does two main things: Makes the machine gun pointless and makes you take more damage more early on because so much time is spent reloading in the middle of a fight. My only issue with the shotgun (other than the odd design and sfx) is that it reloads and cocks so slowly. Reloading two shells at a time is fine, but the rate is so much slower than any other weapon in the game. Rage also reloaded two shells at a time but a lot more quickly and the animation made more sense, plus I guess no one played that game so it went unnoticed.

It reminds me of the Mage's frost shards from Hexen, another misunderstood weapon. That thing is devastating at point blank range but has a reputation for being weak. Doom 3's shotgun is borderline OP if used properly, being able to take down anything in the game with only a few well placed shots. If the RNG is too R on the first two shots, you've still got six more tries to get it right before needing to reload.

It's by no means realistic, but from a gameplay mechanic standpoint I think it works really well in combination with the level design. Disliking it is totally valid though, I just find it particularly fun to use the way it is.

I've been playing Doom 3 again because I haven't played it much and fancied seeing another side of the series, and the question of the shotgun did occur to me as I was playing. I've reached the point where I usually have enough SMG ammo that I can forget about the shotgun, because it's frankly not reliable enough to use at anything other than point blank range. Trying to use it even at short ranges is always a gamble, and makes me feel like I'm being swindled out of my hard-earned shotgun shells.

The problem I have with the "shotgun as melee weapon" argument is that getting into melee feels like a stupid idea in Doom 3. Which pretty much relegates the shotgun to being a more situational weapon, when you can afford to wait around a corner and stick it right up their nose when they poke their heads out.

It deals good damage, and can kill most common enemies in one well placed shot. The only change i'd make is reducing the spread a little, not by a huge amount but enough to make the damage more consistent. I like that you have to get up close in combat, but the spread is just so high that if you get unlucky or some enemy staggers you, a lot of the pellets miss even in point blank range. It's really unpleasant when you're face to face with an imp or wraith and end up needing 3 shots to kill it.

I'm gonna answer this as a veteran doom 3 player, since I'm playing it since 2005.
I've played the story mod in every difficulty (with the added difficulty settings from the LMS 4 mod), I've played every major singleplayer mod, expansions etc., so I did for the multiplayer and I can say 1 thing: the shotgun is the most powerful weapon in the entire game.

I'm not joking and I can't really tell why you all think it's terrible, it's completely broken, you can win the singleplayer of the main game and expansion using only that weapon and you can smash every dude in multiplayer as well.

What makes it really OP is a bug (I keep calling it a bug even if I'm not yet sure) where you can deal absurd amount of damage with a single hit if you aim at the neck's base from a higher position of any demon/player, so damn OP it can kill players on your same team (true story).
It won't work with pinky demons, bosses or some custom demons for models reasons (or lost souls, lol), but you can bring down a hellknight with a couple of shoots.
With the kinda broken strafe jumping and high movement speed, you can close the distance needed against anything, due also to the slowness of the demons reactions.

Anyhow, from medium range, it's unreliable, like others said, you can deal real damage or just a scratch, but it never really bothered me too much, cause I was expecting this by a shotgun, when the damage depends on how many pellets hit the target.
What really bothered me was when I was still inexperienced in multiplayer and get one-shot by random jumping guys despite me having 200 hp and 150 armor.

What really needed the weapon was a sound upgrade, cause it's quite lame, but I'd never aim to boost any of its stats, maybe a balance to the spread, reducing then a bit the damage, just to give it a bit more consistency 
 

Its my favorite shotgun.

On 3/29/2021 at 3:20 AM, battlescroll said:

In doom 3 the shotgun is VERY BAD because of the GIANT SPREAD and  VERY LOW DAMAGE

You can one shot many Enemies, in that Case, it makes enough Damage.

Hi, someone can help me please? I want to know how to change the spread of the Super Shotgun in the Doom 3 expansion (ROE). I search the line for the spread in the def files, but i dont find nothing, maybe there is a chance to change it in the script files, but I dont know, Im not a professional with this things of the internal files of the game. And sorry for my bad english.

5 hours ago, O.N.U said:

Hi, someone can help me please? I want to know how to change the spread of the Super Shotgun in the Doom 3 expansion (ROE). I search the line for the spread in the def files, but i dont find nothing, maybe there is a chance to change it in the script files, but I dont know, Im not a professional with this things of the internal files of the game. And sorry for my bad english.

The double shotgun spread info is only in its script file from lines 32 to 37, and defines both the height and width of each projectile group. The lines starting with "//" are ignored by the game.

#define SHOTGUN_CENTER_WIDTH            5
#define SHOTGUN_CENTER_HEIGHT           10
//#define SHOTGUN_CENTER_HEIGHT 12
#define SHOTGUN_BIG_WIDTH               22
//#define SHOTGUN_BIG_WIDTH 25
#define SHOTGUN_BIG_HEIGHT              15

The Doom 3 shotgun just suffers from not having any feeling to it at all. It pails in comparison to the absolute bad ass BANG of classic Doom's SSG. It just lacks substance.

After Doom 2 they absolutely should have made a double barrelled shotgun in D3.  It also has a problem that it feels very flimsy.  The way after a shot it is cocked and reloaded it's like the marine is using a toy rather than something punchy and badass.

On 3/29/2021 at 4:20 AM, battlescroll said:

In doom 3 the shotgun is VERY BAD because of the GIANT SPREAD and  VERY LOW DAMAGE. So any mind would put this as a down side for the entire game but for any other doom game the shotgun is overpowered due to all of them doing INSANE DAMAGE and VERY LOW SPREAD and people mostly don't care about it being op as hell. So this is a discussion on how the shotgun in doom3 could have been made to make the game harder and more fun.

Its the best looking weapon in DOOM3 if you ask me. Concerning the discussion itself, I think a small balance between the spread and damage could make it a legit weapon. Not necessarily harder but definitely more fun. I remember using it like a melee weapon at some point in DOOM3.

The shotgun is terrible, and they should feel bad for making it as useless as it is. 

The shotgun in Doom actually functioned like a real shotgun, the spread and damage was believable. The double barrel was a sawed off shotgun, so it's spread was believable. The shotgun in Doom 3 was ridiculous. It has a spread of eight feet vertical and four feet horizontal, with eight projectiles, from a distance of six feet. So I'm assuming you're using 00 buck shot if it has eight projectiles. The last time I checked, using a 12ga shotgun, I could get a pattern of about six inches from 20 feet away using 00 buck with a full choke. It was just a bad design decision. The shotgun from Doom was an iconic weapon, and one that you could always rely on. To completely destroy it's accuracy was a bad decision. If their intent was really to make it a melee weapon, that's an even worse decision. Carmack loved the Doom shotgun, that's why he made the shotgun the starting weapon in Quake.

I really don't know what went through their heads when they were making Doom 3, but they really fucked up the shotgun.

It suffers from the worst thing possible in an FPS game: it is unsatisfying and isn't fun to use.