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Foodles

why not phobos?

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Why wasn't doom 3 set on phobos? I understand that doom 3 was meant to be some kind of remake or reimagining of doom and so why did they change the location to mars?

I think it could have worked if, for the first part of the game you were on phobos, then went in to hell, then when you returned you were on deimos or maybe just back on phobos. This way they wouldn't have had to change any of the design of levels or texturing.

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They were trying to go realistic and Phobos has very little gravity. Mars is a more likely candidate for an off-Earth base. Makes more sense.

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What Primeval says. In addition to that, Mars has a much more atmospheric and interesting setting. Stormy deserts, bizarre and impressive montains, gloomy reddish colours. And Mars already has a rich fictional mythology (Face of Mars, alien Pyramids, movies like Total Recall).

In comparison, Phobos is just a boring grey rock floating in space.

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I have been wondering if it'd be possible to induce DOOM's gravity (which is significantly weaker than even the moon's, however hard that may be to believe) by causing Phobos to spin.

The main question is whether the rate of spin required would overcome inertia and spin everything right off the surface of the moon like some kind of centrifuge :P

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Doom's gravity is caused by invisible, greedy demons grabbing you and pulling you down to hell. That's why the acceleration is double strength when you just start falling, to simulate being suddenly grabbed and pulled down.

:p

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Phobos is grey with no atmosphere at all. And no gravity. Plus then people wouldn't feel like its a retread of Doom 1.

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Tetzlaff said:

What Primeval says. In addition to that, Mars has a much more atmospheric and interesting setting. Stormy deserts, bizarre and impressive montains, gloomy reddish colours. And Mars already has a rich fictional mythology (Face of Mars, alien Pyramids, movies like Total Recall).

In comparison, Phobos is just a boring grey rock floating in space.

Yeah, not like you really went out that much to experience this phenomenon your talking about, though. :)

I'll take the Knee deep in the dead episodic sky over a boring red desert anyday though.

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Quasar said:

I have been wondering if it'd be possible to induce DOOM's gravity (which is significantly weaker than even the moon's, however hard that may be to believe)

What? Doom's gravity feels like Earth's. Also, Mars's gravity is higher than Moon's I presume. And I doubt that low gravity would be healthy for humans anyway.

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I still say they didn't do phobos because its grey with no atmosphere. That's gotta be very dull.


Plussssssssssss. Phobos is so close to Mars that the sky is Mars. The sky isn't red... the sky is Mars. That's all you can see. So grey surface, little gravity and a red sky would look very strange.

I've read how the surface of phobos is like 10 meters of dust.

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DeathevokatioN said:

I'll take the Knee deep in the dead episodic sky over a boring red desert anyday though.


But that sky has nothing to do with how the sky on Phobos would actually look like. Instead it is some beautiful vista from Indochina.

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While I do agree that the Ep1 sky is best fitting for the game, it is not realistic at all, which is what D3 was trying to do. Phobos doesn't have mountains, or a sky for that matter. All you'll see is a bumpy gray (grey?) surface with a black, starry sky and a gigantic red planet. Heck, it doesn't really have gravity. I'm not sure how strong the asteroid moons' gravities are but I would think you could easily float off. At least with Mars, there's enough gravity to keep a human healthy, let alone from floating off.

Also, I believe it is Phobos that will eventually crash into Mars and I'm sure no corporation wants one of their bases to crash into a planet (or float away in Deimos' case).

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geo said:

Plussssssssssss. Phobos is so close to Mars that the sky is Mars. The sky isn't red... the sky is Mars. That's all you can see.

Did you draw the two rocks at scale and measure how much of the 90-degree FOV is covered by Mars?

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And that's another reason why I hate modern fps shooters: "realism". I play games for the escapism, and as soon as I see a scene which looks life like, I can't help but get bored. It might suit simulator fps games like CoD. But what about a game where your fighting against hell? Makes me wonder if Doom 4 is going to jump on the same attention to realism mediocre trend of modern shooters. Judging by Mr Ass Face Willits' recent statements defending CoD I'm pretty sure Doom 4 will, although I hope deep down inside it won't.

I do agree with Tetzlaff that Mars is more interesting than the moon by all means, but the E1 backround is still more interesting than the surrounding landscape that Doom 3 had. Realistic or not. And as he said, it looks beautiful. :P

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But you didnt see much of Mars in Doom 3 anyway... Thats what made it so appealing. You could only see small bits of the landscape out of windows now & then or by walking short stints outside, with eyes fixed on your dropping oxygen level. It fit the atmosphere of the game. Phobos would have been cool, maybe even better.

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I suppose its better that Doom3 was set on mars, it makes more sense, as discussed here. A more apropriate question perhaps is why did they set Doom on phobos and not mars

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Captain Toenail said:

The buildings would probably have to be glued down to the surface of Phobos somehow, or they would float away.


I always imagined that the buildings has support beams drilled into the inner bit of the moon, holding the buildings there in place.

I like E1's sky alot, and thought it fit somewhat with what I thought it was (which was....our moon, but that was long ago)
I still remember playing doom in 5th grade admiring that sky.

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DeathevokatioN said:

And that's another reason why I hate modern fps shooters: "realism". I play games for the escapism, and as soon as I see a scene which looks life like, I can't help but get bored.


I can totally understand that, I feel the same. I hate it when fun gameplay mechanics are ditched in favour of a dumb concept of realism.

But you can't really accuse Doom3 of doing that! It has surreal monsters, you can carry all the weapons arround with you (instead of only being able to carry just 2), there are monster closets and even crazy oldschool berserker powerups.
Doom 3 isn't trying to be overly "realistic" like that typical military FPS boring shit. But it tries to be somehwat plausible and coherent in its environments. A dreamy Asian landscape on Phobos (aka e1 sky) would just feel plane weird.

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I don't see why the game couldn't have combined Mars, Phobos AND Deimos. That would have resulted in a lot of environmental diversity.

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Why not just convert the entirety of Phobos and Deimos into orbiting base-asteroids, rather than construct seperate buildings upon its surface? Both moons are plenty small enough to become Mars's own solarnational space stations.

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