The_Hyphenator

Yeah, Undying was great. I actually have the Covenant family portrait as my wallpaper right now. Pity it never got the sequel they teased at the end. But I think you're right in that there just aren't many horror FPS that nail both the horror and FPS aspects. It is a difficult balancing act to pull off, since most FPS games bank on the player being a walking death engine, which makes it difficult to do horror well. Hobbling the player in some way isn't a satisfactory solution, as Doom 3 illustrates. You have to have developers who can really make the player feel a sense of dread despite being powerful, which requires really smart art design, sound design and a scenario writer who knows how to set up scares without just making loud noises at the player. A lot of people tout F.E.A.R. as a good horror shooter, but I feel like that one also relies too much on jump-scares to be truly effective (though it is at least a solid FPS even if the horror isn't very good).

Looking around, there are some mods out there, but a lot of it is pretty minor tweaking, though there are a few TC type mods that actually look pretty impressive. As for why Doom 3 never became fodder for the modding community the way the first two did, I imagine timing had something to do with it. Doom's source code was released just 4 years after the original game came out. Doom and Doom 2 were still some of the biggest games on the market at the time, so there was a much bigger active player base to take that ball and run with it. Doom 3, on the other hand, had its source code released 8 years after it launched. That's twice as long as the time between launch and release for Doom, nearly a decade. I imagine most people had moved on to other games by then, and I know a lot of people had moved on to modding Half-Life 2 and the Source engine around that time, which is much more versatile from what I understand.

When was Doomguy not a superhero? Dude runs around at the cruising speed of your average sports car, carrying hundreds of pounds of heavy ordinance that he never needs to reload and singlehandedly kills thousands of demons in a single game. If you're looking for a realistic protagonist, Doom is not the series for you.

Which is hilarious because at the time of release, critics couldn't praise it enough. When BFG came out, I did a little googling to see if I could find bad reviews of Doom 3 at the time of its release. I literally only found 2, one of which was written by a Christian gaming site that only bashed it for all the demonic and hell themes. I know hindsight is 20/20, but those monster closets weren't any less annoying at the time of the game's release. Seems like critics have only started to give the game an honest look now that they're no longer being dazzled by the new tech.

I dunno, I saw plenty of people defending the monster closets and flashlight mechanics back when BFG Edition came out. I can't tell you how many people I saw deriding the shoulder flashlight (which still sucks because it's so immersion-breaking that the battery life is so low) and the duct tape mods because it wasn't the way the game was meant to be played and praising the design around the flashlight in vanilla. And I couldn't even venture a guess at all the "but Doom 1 and 2 had monster closets!" posts I saw around that time.

My big gripe with Doom 3 is that it's so unfocused that it doesn't really do any one thing well, leading to what I find to be a very mediocre experience. It tries to appeal to fans of the original two games and their flow, but the maps are too tight and cramped to allow for the fast-paced combat the series is known for. The weapons aren't very satisfying to use (and the sound design for them is awful; the shotgun in particular sounds like someone popping a paper bag when you fire it), constantly switching between the flashlight and a gun slows combat to a crawl, and the whole experience feels more akin to the corridor shooters so popular in the early 00's than Doom. Except it doesn't really appeal to fans of those kinds of shooters very well either, because the game doesn't reward strategy. The enemies almost exclusively teleport in (people analyzing the game's code determined long ago that the ONLY enemies that load with the map are the possessed Marines), meaning that most of the strategies that you would employ in a game like, say, Half-Life are completely pointless in Doom 3. There's no point in clearing the corners of a room when you enter, because nobody will be there until you step into the center of a room and activate a teleport script. Likewise, sound strategies like using grenades or rockets to clear a room and disorient then moving in to mop up are equally pointless. And it ignores some of the most valuable innovations of shooters that came before it, like making grenades an always-on item with a dedicated key. And some of you might say that those design choices are intentional to drive the horror aspect of the game, but frankly, Doom 3 is not a good horror game. It does have nice atmosphere, I have to give it that. But the flashlight is a form of artificial difficulty that only serves to make the player feel less powerful by deliberately hindering them, which is always a poor choice in horror. And while there is some disturbing imagery here and there, most of the "horror" takes the form of jump-scares. The teleporting enemies. The constant use of monster closets. Despite what people who made FNAF the new industry standard for horror might believe, jump-scares are not horror. They're a cheap device used to invoke a reflexive reaction that everyone has. Horror makes you feel dread. It makes you feel tension. It's not about constantly screaming in the audience's ear, it's about invoking a genuine emotion. People who make good horror games understand this. The folks who made Doom 3, not so much. And do I even need to go into what a terrible idea it was to try and do a serious take on the story for Doom? The entire point of the plot in Doom and Doom 2 is that it's a stupid, silly, over-the-top reason to give an excuse for the experience of the game. John Carmack himself famously said that story in a video game is expected, but not important, so I have no idea why id thought it was a good idea to put that narrative front and center and attempt to flesh it out. It's a bad, paper-thin story and when Doom 3 tries to tell it seriously, it really shows. And don't even get me started on the ridiculous plotholes surrounding the "calling in reinforcements" subplot and how Betruger actively tries to stop you from calling in a ship that he wants to arrive so the demons can get off of Mars, or how he tries to stop you from fixing the generator that's threatening to go critical and kill everyone in the complex, including him. The smartest decision Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal made was making it clear that the story was silly and nobody cared about it, including the protagonist. I could go on, but I think I've made my case. Yes, Doom 3 was very technically advanced for the time. Yes, the engine was impressive, and was used to power some awesome games (which are better than Doom 3). But Doom 3 itself is a confused, mediocre mess. It's not a good classic or contemporary FPS, it's not a good horror game, and it's not a good story-driven experience. It's just underwhelming in pretty much every respect.

The fake E2M6 exit is legendary. Doom 2 had a couple of decent ones; though it's not a trap specifically and more of a gimmick room, I love the room with the Cyberdemon and the Barons having a "meeting" in Tricks and Traps. It's just so much fun to try and get them to wipe each other out through infighting. I try to see if I can get one side to kill the other off before I have to grab the invincibility sphere and go to work. Another one I love is the room in Spirit World where you collect a key and the demons suddenly rise up from beneath the floor. That was such a clever way to do an enemy ambush, and it really ramps up the paranoia since you can't really hear them beforehand like you often can with the false wall ambushes, so the first time I encountered it I was approaching that key like Indiana Jones trying to steal the golden idol in Raiders, just trying to figure out how the game was going to kill me when I grabbed the thing.

It just makes me think of the moment that killed Doom 3 for me. I was already not having much fun with the game, but I hit one of the rooms where you have to wander around in pitch darkness, and I stumbled upon a hidden spawn point and saw a Maggot just appear out of nothingness right before my eyes. It just immediately drove home for me what a monotonous "haunted house" experience I was in for. I did push on for a while after that, but I distinctly remember that being the moment where I completely turned on the game, so seeing it while playing a Doom 2 WAD just invokes bad memories.

That just makes me think that the game is going to start complaining about the kids these days spending all their time on their phones.

Ah, I see. Yeah, that's kind of an obnoxious way to do it. I mean, I expect to get ambushed while playing Doom. It's just part of the game. But the way this is handled honestly looks like a bug or an engine limitation rather than a stylistic choice. I get that people are still trying to find ways to surprise players in WADs in a game that's more than 25 years old at this point, but it just lacks panache. I'm enjoying the WAD otherwise, and it's good to know that it's not a problem with my setup, but still, kinda disappointing.

I've been playing through Illuminatus lately, and while I've been enjoying it, I noticed something odd. In a few places on the maps, I've approached a location and monsters have just...popped in. They didn't come from compartments or teleport in or rise from the floor like in Spirit World, they just...appeared. One second I'm looking at empty space, and the next there's a Baron or some zombies standing there. It's literally like what happens with early 3D engines where you approach an object and it just materializes as soon as it falls within the game's draw distance. I haven't seen anything like this before in Doom. Is this a known bug? Anyone else experience this? I'm running the game in GZDoom, if that helps.

Doom 3 is a bad game. Maybe that's not as controversial an opinion as it used to be--I've certainly seen more people expressing it in recent years--but the general consensus still seems to be that it's a great, classic title. It's really not. Doom 3 tries to be all things to all people and fails miserably. It tries to be an action game appealing to fans of the franchise, but its cramped corridor design, unsatisfying weapons and reliance on teleporting enemies and monster closets fail to deliver. It tries to be a horror game, but the "horror" relies entirely on repetitive jumpscares and a flashlight mechanic that (whether you're playing vanilla or BFG) only makes sense if you accept that people in the future figured out interplanetary travel and directed energy weapons but somehow forgot how to make a functional portable light source. It tries to capitalize on the innovations that games like Duke 3D, Half-Life, System Shock and Deus Ex brought to the genre, but the puzzles are gimmicky and annoying and the plot is laughably bad. Best thing I can say about it is that the engine was a huge technical advancement and gave other developers the opportunity to make some good games. I'm just glad that id ditched it and decided to make the recent games closer to the originals in tone and feel, even though mod support has been piss-poor under Bethesda.

No, the SNES had its own renditions of the original MIDI soundtrack. They're not bad at all; certainly a hell of a lot better than the 32x port's bleeps and farts. Still not as good as the original, but a solid effort using the SNES sound chip.

I feel like that's how most people utilize the plasma rifle. There's kind of a newbie impulse to treat the BFG as your "panic button" weapon, but experience shows that it's really best utilized strategically as a room-clearer and against enemies you MUST kill immediately like the Arch-Vile. The plasma rifle is more of a "oh crap, I forgot about this ambush" kind of gun.

Personally, I feel that pistol-starts are just a holdover from the shareware origins of the original Doom. That is to say, they were a technical limitation of the format and not an intrinsic part of the Doom experience. I feel like that's supported by the fact that, from Doom 2 onward, the officially-released games and WADs were continuous and let you keep and carry over your inventory. That being said, if someone says that their WAD is designed around pistol-starts, I'd try playing it that way to get the intended experience before playing around with it and doing other things.