Questions

Hello there.

Anyone here have any idea as to what Doom 3 will be like regarding the number of monsters you get running around at once? I mean, to me this is what still makes Doom 2 one of the most fun games around... the fact that there are a shitload of monsters in each room. Quake/Half-Life were awesome games but they suffered from a lack of monsters.. if Doom 3 only has 5-6 per room I'll be majorly pissed off (Doom had like, over 20 sometimes). I say fuck the polygon count, let's have some old school armageddon going on.

And they'd better not make the corpses blow up too easily either- that's one of the first things people liked about Doom- that the corpses stayed around, making everything look nice and gory. Anyone agree?

Hi

Basically, another question.. what would you prefer in Doom 3? PSX style moody tones for music, or funky PC style tunes?

Doom didn't have that many monsters. It was a survival horror game with a mid-count of monsters. It's not serious sam.

Sorry, but it looks like you might be pissed about monsters on screen.
5 monsters seems to be the total, however, Doom 3 seems to be having more action than the Quakes, simply because they made it so that monsters constantly pop up out of nowhere whenever you enter a new room.
At least that was my impression.

Then on the other side of your questions I've got good news for you: it doesn't seem that the corpses dissolve or are easy gibbable. As far as I know, monsters don't seem to be gibbable at all, but that might change.
So far, I believe the monsters will be harder to gib simply because enemies like zombies would be too easy if you can just gib them the first time you down them - these guys are supposed to be getting back up atcha.
So that would mean that the corpses stick around.

And 5 to 6 monsters per room seems fairly accurate... from the video at least years Quakecon there were about 4 or 5 zombies in one area at the same time, and I doubt that there is room for much more. The levels (from what I have seen, so I could easily be wrong) seem a lot more... 'claustrophobic'. There aren't going to be any huge outdoor areas with tons of monsters. Not a bad thing either. As many hits as these enemies seem to take, it wouldn't be all that great to have a swarm of them coming down on you.

EllipsusD said:

And 5 to 6 monsters per room seems fairly accurate... from the video at least years Quakecon there were about 4 or 5 zombies in one area at the same time, and I doubt that there is room for much more. The levels (from what I have seen, so I could easily be wrong) seem a lot more... 'claustrophobic'. There aren't going to be any huge outdoor areas with tons of monsters.

You're right about the part about outdoor areas, but if you look at the recent "spider" screenshot, you'll see an indoor 'train station' which looks considerably larger than any of the rooms and hallways we've seen so far.

This only serves to strenghten my belief that Doom 3 will be more than pure claustrophobia and narrow hallways. I mean, it has long been my conviction that the idders gotta be too smart to only have narrow hallways - it's pretty much a given that this would mean onerous and almost tedious gameplay.
A good fps needs varying room sizes at the very least. I think we'll get them, though I'm also quite sure that claustrophobic environments will be the main aspect of Doom 3.

The trailer shows off plenty of big, 'bright' areas. Also, the enemies don't take a lot to go down, thankfully.

There's no way I'd be able to take out 20 of the new imps at the same time, even if I had the greatest hardware on Earth. 6 is more than enough.

Zaldron said:

There's no way I'd be able to take out 20 of the new imps at the same time, even if I had the greatest hardware on Earth. 6 is more than enough.

20 imps can be done with decent hardware! The hard part would be surviving the imps.

Regarding the number of monsters, depends how good the weapons/armour are really doesn't it?

And uh, will the enemies still be firing projectiles or will that be changed for something that looks better? I mean, it's kinda hard to make a slow-moving projectile (in comparison to what the enemies shoot in Quake 2 or Half-Life) look as good as say, a shotgun or laser shot, for example. Although even if they don't look that great, I'd still keep 'em, simply because they make the gameplay more fun, because you can have more shit going on at once basically- if you get surrounded by shotgun guys, you're fucked. If you get surrounded by guys lobbing slow (or even fast)-moving projectiles, things are still do-able, if you're good.

Oh and Shaviro, dude, okay, Doom 1 maybe didn't have that many monsters, but Doom 2, which everyone knows is The Shit for SP, did (and that's basically a new episode for Doom really, so I class it as 'Doom'). Try loading up The Courtyard or Suburbs in Doom 2 if you want to see what I'm talking about. Fucking awesome stuff. Err... but yeah, if your point is that you don't need to have that 20+ monsters per room to have a good, old school Doom game, then yeah, you're right, but even Doom 1 had plenty of times with 10 per room- still a shitload more than Quake 2 or Half-Life. Plus it wasn't just the number of monsters per room, it was the number of areas with monsters in... they were absolutely everywhere. I mean, it was basically a reflex action.. Open door, shoot enemy. Turn Corridor, shoot enemy. Go up lift, shoot enemy.

Shaviro said:
The trailer shows off plenty of big, 'bright' areas. Also, the enemies don't take a lot to go down, thankfully.

Those areas are a fair size... but I was more reffering to some of the huge areas (several of the rooms in E1M1, the courtyard areas in E1 and E2 and several of the levels in E3 along with the urban levels in Doom2) in the older games. The thing is, even some of the large areas in the new game seems somewhat claustrophobic, but then again that's just an opinion.

As far as how many hits enemies can take, all I'm going by is what I saw at the demonstrations at the last Quakecon... the imps seemed especially beefed up over their older counterparts. I'm sure it probably evens out, but from a glace that's what it seemed like.

revenant_fister said:

Oh and Shaviro, dude, okay, Doom 1 maybe didn't have that many monsters, but Doom 2, which everyone knows is The Shit for SP, did (and that's basically a new episode for Doom really, so I class it as 'Doom'). Try loading up The Courtyard or Suburbs in Doom 2 if you want to see what I'm talking about. Fucking awesome stuff. Err... but yeah, if your point is that you don't need to have that 20+ monsters per room to have a good, old school Doom game, then yeah, you're right, but even Doom 1 had plenty of times with 10 per room- still a shitload more than Quake 2 or Half-Life. Plus it wasn't just the number of monsters per room, it was the number of areas with monsters in... they were absolutely everywhere. I mean, it was basically a reflex action.. Open door, shoot enemy. Turn Corridor, shoot enemy. Go up lift, shoot enemy.

Agree with you there, courtyard was perhaps the most memorable level in doom2 purely because there were a shitload of demons to handle. They were everywhere, which got the adrenaline pumping. Doom 1 had its fair share of long spatial areas. Personally, I really enjoyed the masses of monsters in large spacious areas cause it gave the feeling of true armageddon. However, Doom 1 was more about narrow corridors and constrictive areas and Doom 3 seems to suggest that this trend will continue. As far as having more than 5 monsters in one room, that will eat your pc hardware and the level of difficulty to frag all of them would increase exponentially. Lets face it, Doom 2 learning curve was very low and even masses of demons would be relatively easy to frag (If you knew how to strafe). I get the feeling that a lot of monsters like Doom3 (Judging by their movements and AI) will be almost impossible to overcome, and it will eat the hardware to bits.

On a side note, I do hope doom 3 has its fair share of large spacious rooms.

EllipsusD said:

As far as how many hits enemies can take, all I'm going by is what I saw at the demonstrations at the last Quakecon... the imps seemed especially beefed up over their older counterparts. I'm sure it probably evens out, but from a glace that's what it seemed like.

As far as I've been told by people who have played the Alpha (and based on my own observations on watching the leak video from last year), the imps are just as weak as the old ones - they're just a helluva lot faster so it's that much harder to hit them where it really hurts.
I noticed in the leak vid that it often took the player two shotgun shots to kill an imp (there was one situation where it took three) and in both cases the first shot fired at the imp was fired while the bastard was moving VERY fast.

I believe that a machine would not be able to handle the corpses in the ground for very long... I hope that they can add something to keep the gore feeling in.

They should have it as an option, in the display options thing - "corpses stay?".

On a side note, maybe they could make it so that the corpses on the ground kinda leak blood, that would be damned cool. Like, after they've been gunned down, they end up lying in like a massive puddle of blood that's been seeping out of the holes in them. Hasn't that already been done in a few games?

Well maybe if you optimize the game somehow (turn off certain options and scale down graphics) you could maybe have more than 5 or 6 monsters but that's a maybe. It's still going to be a bit slower because the game needs the PC's horsepower to work on the physics and other shiznit.