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Rock Lobstah

Are you kidding me? ID is definitely no longer the same company

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So I played all of DooM 3: BFG's content back in Novermeber and into early December. Pretty disappointed by the game. Too much health, ammo, and armor. I'm 28 years old, started playing DooM with the 1993 shareware version and I still play old DooM to this day. But, I totally understand their intentions for DooM 3, they wanted to make a more survival/horror shooter than pure run 'n gun. That's fine and I'm cool with that, so that's what I expected coming into DooM 3: BFG. Yeah, I'm late to the party, first time playing DooM 3 and I picked the BFG on sale.

Damn was I wrong. The sheer abundance of health, armor, and ammo contradicts the survival/horror theme of DooM 3. My maiden voyage through all of DooM 3: BFG was on veteran and... holy fuck, who was this game designed for? Part of what makes games like this engaging, atmospheric, and effective are things like ammo conservation and health rationing. They add to the intended experience of the game. Instead, ID decided to chuck ammo, armor, and health at the player to the point where I stopped giving a shit about any damage taken or ammo reserves. Armor is pointless, by the way. If it blocks hardly anything, then why is there freakin' armor in every god damn room in the game? I swear my armor was 100+ at all times.

Now my last and more important gripe... Shortly after completing DooM 3 I decided it was time for a fresh re-installation of Windows, been too long and system was acting sluggish. I wanted to get back to the game to play Nightmare mode so I could get a real gaming experience. But, I can't select nightmare mode now because my former campaigns were lost. I foolishly assumed Steam Cloud would back that data up. Thanks, ID, for the completely fucking stupid difficulty system. Why not just have nightmare mode unlocked to begin with? I guess now if I want to play nightmare mode I'll have to do a speedrun on recruit or something. Since I'm trying to play the game for atmosphere and gaming experience, where's the fun in that?

Yeah, bit of an unorganized and impetuous rant, but holy fuck I'm both disappointed and mad, especially at what a formerly PC-first developer has become. How can a developer who prides themselves on being a cornerstone of PC gaming implement such a stupid design?

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Rock Lobstah said:

I guess now if I want to play nightmare mode I'll have to do a speedrun on recruit or something.

Find D3BFGConfig.cfg and set g_nightmare to 1. There are also separate lines for both expansions.

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One of the original reasons why I was not pleased with original Doom 3 on PC, it was way to easy. I actually like it better on the original Xbox, it was more challenging without the mouse and keyboard.

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Da Werecat said:

Find D3BFGConfig.cfg and set g_nightmare to 1. There are also separate lines for both expansions.


I just don't understand why it's locked in the first place. Was ID afraid that some first-time kid might accidentally select nightmare mode and get their feelings hurt by an imp?

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it out. Lol, probably going to screw up the achievements, but then again, those didn't seem to work properly either as I occasionally got in-game messages saying they were disabled due to the console or some-such. But, I can live without them. Starting to regret not buying the original DooM 3, especially after I've seen mods like wulfen and sikk.

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Rock Lobstah said:

I just don't understand why it's locked in the first place. Was ID afraid that some first-time kid might accidentally select nightmare mode and get their feelings hurt by an imp?

Nightmare has some spoilers, that's why you're only supposed to visit it after you finish the game on normal.

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Rock Lobstah said:

I just don't understand why it's locked in the first place. Was ID afraid that some first-time kid might accidentally select nightmare mode and get their feelings hurt by an imp?

It's not just a skill level, it's more like a separate mode. Any first-timer would be confused to start with a strange artifact and draining health. These things mess with the atmosphere, because there isn't any explanation for them story-wise.

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printz said:

Nightmare has some spoilers, that's why you're only supposed to visit it after you finish the game on normal.


Yeah, the soul cube, good point, forgot about that.

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Well what did you expect from Doom 3. The BFG trailer basically showed that the game was totally different than the originals.

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doomguy93 said:

Well what did you expect from Doom 3. The BFG trailer basically showed that the game was totally different than the originals.


Not really. It has more Doom in it than a lot of shooters.

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DooM_RO said:

Not really. It has more Doom in it than a lot of shooters.


I beg to differ. The game lost the concept of mowing down dozens of demons at a time. Doom 3 focused on a horror style of 1 or a few demons stalking you or popping out of nowhere. I lost interest in it in a matter of a couple of weeks. Doom 1 and 2 I still play since '97 and I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I played the levels.

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doomguy93 said:

I beg to differ. The game lost the concept of mowing down dozens of demons at a time.

Serious Sam/Painkiller hate post in 3... 2... 1...

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Da Werecat said:

Serious Sam/Painkiller hate post in 3... 2... 1...


Hate post? Lol if anything it's just an opinion....

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What's this, things change? My whole perception of the world is destroyed. I can't carry on here.

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i'm pretty sure that the original Doom was supposed to be dark and atmospheric, and hell, wasn't it advertised as such? therefor it makes perfect sense for Doom 3 to focus on horror more. it was Doom 2 that was the action sequel.

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Doomhuntress said:

i'm pretty sure that the original Doom was supposed to be dark and atmospheric, and hell, wasn't it advertised as such? therefor it makes perfect sense for Doom 3 to focus on horror more. it was Doom 2 that was the action sequel.



Yes it was dark and atmospheric and it is an integral and often overlooked aspect of Doom (by non-Doomworlders at least) however the action of the game was also intense and this is where Doom 3 failed to deliver. All other parts of it were more or less Doom: in terms of gameplay, some nonlinearity, being able to carry all weapons, the health system, the tons of secrets...to bad they were mostly just serviceable but I think it got the atmosphere mostly right. Especially in the CPU Complex level and Hell.

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I can't even being to imagine what the original poster is going through. The anger, the frustrations over Doom 3! And I'm sure id Software has lost countless nights of sleep over this, crying into their pillows.

"Guy's were not the same company we were 20 years ago! Doom 3 is not DOOOOOM! We should just cancel Doom 4 and shut the company down. Let's go make Call of Duty games!"

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Rock Lobstah said:

Damn was I wrong. The sheer abundance of health, armor, and ammo contradicts the survival/horror theme of DooM 3.


It should be noted that the BFG edition WAS tweaked to make it more fast paced and "classic-like". The original Doom 3 is a much better by due to better atmosphere and is generally harder.

Granted besides Nightmare it's still a pretty easy game, but BFG tweaked a lot to make it more like the classic games. In doing so, however, they lost the main focus of Doom 3 and instead we get an awkward mix-match of both the classic series and Doom 3, and it doesn't really work out.

Hell, Doom 64 is more scary than Doom 3 BFG. At least that one is eerie as fuck.

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But even the original Doom didn't overdo the medical kits and ammo at least on the harder skill modes, and while they increased that in BFG edition they didn't complement it with more monsters like they should have.

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They probably knew, like the creators of the new X-COM: Enemy Unknown, that nobody would want to play the linear, heavily scripted campaign again, so id might have decided to force the issue by locking Nightmare mode.

My issues with Doom 3 are legion, starting with: why is the Doom Marine such a ponce? He gets a limited stamina bar which I used once, during the turret evasion. I couldn't be bothered with it for the rest of the game and simply walked everywhere, rather than hold my keyboard in a perpetual Vulcan neck grip.

This is a common complaint among modern FPS games. Are American soldiers too busy lifting their shirts to train properly? What happens if they need to escape a burning building, do they jog for three metres then slow to a ramble until they get their breath back?

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With the thin, recycled air on a Mars base? Yeah probably. Even then, professional sprinters only go a couple hundred metres at a time with no equipment strapped to them. Considering how Doom3guy's stamina bar refills after only like three seconds, he's still pretty badass.

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