[FUDie]

Most won't care, but I thought it'd post my DOOM 3 comments.

- Too dark. If there's not a light shining directly onto an object, chances are you can't see it. No ambient lighting to speak of.

- Too cramped. It's tough to strafe to avoid monsters when the halls are so narrow.

- Can only hold flashlight or a gun. I guess they didn't have duct tape in the year 2135.

- Gameplay is not DOOM. Where are the secret areas? DOOM 3 seems more like Half-life, even the plot! Dimensional rift opens letting demons (aliens) through, you try to escape, you even get to follow a scientist (Mr. Black) around. Painkiller seems more like DOOM than DOOM 3 does, at least from a gameplay perspective.

- Some very low detail textures in the game.

- Outdoor areas may as well be enclosed since they are so small, at least in the levels I have played (I am in Alpha Lab 2 I think).

- Player shadow is off by default. Serious error in my mind.

- Did I mention it was too dark?

DOOM 3 just doesn't feel like DOOM. Where are the hordes of monsters? Where are the secrets?

Overall texture detail is good, but, as we all know, polygon counts are low. I did notice some texture aliasing in the normal maps, which reminded me of some of the aliasing I saw in Far Cry, but it's not bad.

On the plus side, DOOM 3 does have Turkey Puncher 3!

DOOM 3 is a good game, but it's just not a DOOM game.

I did experience one technical difficultly: My Soundblaster Live! kept making this "ticking" noise (in the speakers of course) that sounded kind of like a CD skipping. I swapped in an Audigy and the problem seems to be gone, but I didn't get a chance to really check. I plan on checking that out tonight and also playing around with the 5.1 sound.

-FUDie

[Guden Oden]

Fudie,

Each additional lightsource is a MAJOR performance hit on weaker PCs. That's why there's no flashlight along with guns, because in the spots where there's 2-3 imps shooting it would bring the game to a standstill on many PCs.

There are a FEW secret areas in the game... Typically hidden away in a shadowy corner/under a stair or platform etc, but a few secret walls too. It's more like a real environment now rather than a computer game, which is why the designers didn't put in nearly as many secret areas as in the original game, it just doesn't make sense with secret walls and shit in a real Mars base. You have the code-locked cupboards for that instead.

The added sense of reality is likely why there isn't any count of kills, items etc inbetween levels either, though my wager is someone will put together a mod for that pretty soon.


Now:
My take... I went through the game until the end tonight, and I could have used a LOT more ammo than I did! At least on normal diff it's hard to see how the player can run out really.

The last level is particulary rediculous from that regard - all of you who've reached it knows exactly what I mean!

I want to know where the player stores 560 chaingun rounds, 450 cell rounds, 50 (!) grenades, 91 (!!!) rockets and so on and so on. Not to mention 9 fairly large weapons, plus a pistol.

Anyway, no reason to nitpick...

The later enemies definitely warrants bigger weapons than I used on them. I fed mostly machine gun bullets and boomstick into them, with a fair bit of chaingun towards the end when I noticed my inventory was full of it. I tend to avoid the plasma since it slows down my comp so much.

I bounced some enemies in veery amusing ways with explosives and barrels, and one imp did something quite astonishingly dumb; on, uh, caves 2 I believe, after having gone down the huge cargo elevator towards the end near the second elevator that goes straight down, there's a marsquake and some plates in the floor falls out. Well, this imp came jumping at me, and as I shot him he landed on the plate as it fell out, was pelted with my hot boomstick lead and fell through the hole and rotted away mid-air as he fell.

The physics is quite cool in a novelty kind of way, I've never been able to exploit it properly, but a crate or whatever fell on a badguy as I shot him to death, it leaned against the monster's dead body, and when the monster finished rotting away, the object clattered to the floor...! :P

The game is at its scariest up until the player reaches hell. While hell is, well, HELL, it doesn't try to startle or surprise the player like it does earlier. Monsters attack more overtly and are much more plentiful.

After coming back to the 'real world' again, some suspense remains, but the major part of the mysticism and tenseness is gone after you know what's happened and what the devil's plan is.

Btw, this game's voice acting friggin rocks. The plot isn't all that complicated, it's very linear and there isn't much in the way of innovation as far as gameplay goes. Well, as id pretty much single-handedly invented the FPS genre, one might argue they're entitled to do stuff like that. After all, don't fix what isn't broken. D3 develops upon Doom2 and Quake 2 in a major way though with the PDA system and the few guys one meets along the way.

...Which brings me to another point... Where are all the WOMEN at this installation, huh? There's one doing weapons research (guess she got some darn mighty PMS symptoms! Especially considering she turns into a lost soul monster! ) Then there's one other one only meets through PDAs. That seems to pretty much be IT as far as female staff goes on Mars... Guess a lot of guys are taking a LOT of cold showers, hee hee!

(Still, that's 2 more than at the Black Mesa research facility... )

It's late, so I need to save & exit & get to bed now.

[CosmoKramer]

I find that the lodbias is too aggressive, at least on my R300. Setting it to 0.2 (image_lodbias) makes it look peachy to me, even without aniso.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by FUDie

- Too dark. If there's not a light shining directly onto an object, chances are you can't see it. No ambient lighting to speak of.

- Too cramped. It's tough to strafe to avoid monsters when the halls are so narrow.

Um, what did you expect, serously? And it's not that tough to avoid monsters in the narrow hallways.

- Can only hold flashlight or a gun. I guess they didn't have duct tape in the year 2135.

This one definitely doesn't make sense. But then again, who said chainsaws on Mars made sense, either?

- Gameplay is not DOOM. Where are the secret areas? DOOM 3 seems more like Half-life, even the plot! Dimensional rift opens letting demons (aliens) through, you try to escape, you even get to follow a scientist (Mr. Black) around. Painkiller seems more like DOOM than DOOM 3 does, at least from a gameplay perspective.

I don't know. I definitely thought it was there. The storyline was exactly what I would expect from a modernized DOOM game (though the medical stations were a bit too much of a nod to Half-Life): Experiments conducted, they go wrong, hell invades.

As far as the gameplay, there's still a decent amount of wading through the minions of Hell. You don't get to search for hours for the way to get to that yellow key card, of course, but who really misses that?

- Some very low detail textures in the game.

Yeah, this one was annoying, and is probably an artifact of the game taking so long to develop. It would have been really nice if some of the textures were higher in detail (particularly the tablets...those were just plain bad).

- Outdoor areas may as well be enclosed since they are so small, at least in the levels I have played (I am in Alpha Lab 2 I think).

There are a couple that are larger, but just keep in mind that with limited air, you're not thinking about wide open spaces when you're outside: you're thinking about getting back inside, fast.

[london-boy]

Originally Posted by Chalnoth

This one definitely doesn't make sense. But then again, who said chainsaws on Mars made sense, either?

To cut the trees!! The beautiful martian trees!!

[Bambers]

Originally Posted by london-boy

To cut the trees!! The beautiful martian trees!!

They were actually explained in on the pda emails.

some stores guy ordered a shipment of jackhammers from mixom and got a crate load of chainsaws by mistake :P

[Diplo]

I think all the people who are saying Doom III has ripped-off Half Life's plot need to go back and play the original Doom.

[london-boy]

Originally Posted by Bambers

They were actually explained in on the pda emails.

some stores guy ordered a shipment of jackhammers from mixom and got a crate load of chainsaws by mistake :P

SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SPOILER alert!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[BoddoZerg]

My comments about DooM3:

I've been playing on Veteran (the equivalent of "Ultra-Violent" i guess) difficulty so far, and it's not much more difficult than the original DOOM. I guess Nightmare difficulty will be much worse, but I haven't unlocked that yet. ^^

The flashlight/gun thing is annoying, but I can see why ID put it into the game. It is a big part of the "scary" factor of DooM3 - you can never feel completely safe. Either you have a gun, and monsters can sneak up on you in the dark, or you use the flashlight and risk coming face to face with an angry Revenant with no weapon to shoot at him. Monsters aren't 100% invisible in the dark; most monsters have glowing eyes that you can see them by when they are close - way too close.

The sound in DooM3 is amazing. I am wearing some not-too-good headphones, but it's still one of the best parts of DooM3. Alot of times, when your in the dark, you rely on sound to tell you where monsters are coming from... but with all the ambient noise you may not be able to hear everything coming at you! In fact, I found myself using the flashlight instead of the chainsaw at times, because with the chainsaw I can't hear something sneak up behind me.

I'm playing on a setting in between "low" and "medium" quality - I edited the doom3cfg to turn on muzzle flashes and projectile lights; without them it is impossible to fight Imps in a dark room; and I also turned on player shadow. (I don't know WTF id was thinking by leaving player shadow off by default. Being scared by your own shadow adds even more coolness to the game.)

I too am surprised by how much ammo is lying around everywhere. As a "horror" type game, you'd expect DooM3 to keep you on the bleeding edge of running out of ammo. Instead, it gives you ammo like DooM; you often find yourself with 120 shotgun shells, 600 assault rifle rounds, 450 plasma cells, etc. There's no reason to ever use the pistol; by the time you face anything that you can't kill with the flashlight you have the assault rifle and enough ammo to use it for everything. (why is pistol ammo different from AR ammo? they should have kept it like original DOOM. Same with BFG ammo and plasma ammo.)

The AI in DooM3 is not much different than AI in DooM and DooM2. That is, it is practically nonexistent. Every monster in the game just charges straight toward you while shooting, exactly like the original DooM. This is perfectly acceptable for zombies, revenants and mancubus, but it's really lame for Imps and Wraiths (the teleporting crawling guys). In prescripted sequences, imps and wraiths are incredibly sneaky and intelligent. But when you actually fight them, they charge straight at you just like anything else. I would have liked to see imps taking cover under objects, crawling on walls, camping behind corners... and Wraiths could have used their teleporting abilities to a much scarier effect.

[Guden Oden]

Boddo,

The ammo is different for different weapons because the clip size and calibre between a machinegun and a pistol is different. :P Original DOOM back in the dawn of time didn't even need to reload guns, somehow it was all chain-fed from the clips you pick up, even into the pistol. Dunno how one expects the hero to stand there in the dark and eject pistol cartridges out of the clip and by hand load 'em into machine-gun clips.

Same with plasma rifle vs BFG, if the BFG ran on cells you'd have way too many BFG rounds. It's quite possible to kill everything without ever even using plasma, so that would have enabled the player to BFG pretty much every machine gun grunt and above.

And enemies DO have AI. Ok, it's not as advanced as one might have wanted perhaps, but imps have three basic behaviors: stand back and fire from afar; jump at the player, and finally; claw the player at close range. Grunts do try to take cover sometimes. They crouch behind boxes; stand back behind corners, they even roll out through doorways every once in a blue moon. Yes, I saw one do that. He rolled and got up in a knee-stand and started shooting. :P

Also, monsters can be made to fight each other, though it's not nearly as easy as in the original DOOM, since most monsters don't fire when they haven't a clear line of sight and thus won't hit their buddies. I've made grunts and imps get mad at each other though, hehe.

Weird observation: imp shots move in a parabolic arc, but rockets (and BFG rounds) go in a straight line... Would have been fun if one had to aim up to compensate for longer distances.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Diplo

I think all the people who are saying Doom III has ripped-off Half Life's plot need to go back and play the original Doom.

Right, if anything, the original Half-Life ripped off the plot of the original DOOM. Granted, they integrated the plot a heck of a lot more into the storyline, but it's still the same basic plot.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Guden Oden

And enemies DO have AI. Ok, it's not as advanced as one might have wanted perhaps, but imps have three basic behaviors: stand back and fire from afar; jump at the player, and finally; claw the player at close range. Grunts do try to take cover sometimes. They crouch behind boxes; stand back behind corners, they even roll out through doorways every once in a blue moon. Yes, I saw one do that. He rolled and got up in a knee-stand and started shooting. :P

Sometimes they'll even run for cover while I'm charging at them with the boomstick out. That still cracks me up: a zombie running from a marine.

[london-boy]

I just think that anyone bitching about storylines needs to turn their PC off and read a book or maybe if your brain is connected to your PC, play a RPG or kinds of games where there is a REAL story. Even Half Life's "storyline" was worthy of a Z-movie, so why bitch about who copied who, there is so little "story" there, you can hardly complain if 2 games are kinda similar. In the end it's always the "one guy to save them all among thousands of monsters, and somehow he singlehandedly manages to kill them all and not get killed himself" kind of crap...

[Chalnoth]

Sure, but there are only two game franchises (well, that I've played, at least) that rely upon baddies teleporting in from a different dimension and taking over the bodies of people in this dimension....there are many other FPS's out there that take a completely different tilt.

[K.I.L.E.R]

Originally Posted by Chalnoth

Sure, but there are only two game franchises (well, that I've played, at least) that rely upon baddies teleporting in from a different dimension and taking over the bodies of people in this dimension....there are many other FPS's out there that take a completely different tilt.

What one person prefers may not be the same as what the next one prefers.

I love the Doom storyline, if you don't like it then why not make a whole slew of maps and write a story of your own?

I'm actually looking forward to what mappers do with Doom 3. This is the first game I felt this way about as well.

[london-boy]

Originally Posted by Chalnoth

Sure, but there are only two game franchises (well, that I've played, at least) that rely upon baddies teleporting in from a different dimension and taking over the bodies of people in this dimension....there are many other FPS's out there that take a completely different tilt.

Sure, but as i said, people don't buy Doom3 because of the storyline. They buy it because of the pretty graphics, to shoot zombies, for the graphics, and to shoot more zombies. So they're in no position to bitch about the storyline when they notice it's not there...

People buy Xenosaga or Final Fantasy's because of the storyline. They buy Doom, Quake or Unreal games to (mindlessly, according to the game and the player) shoot people.

[breez]

I guess I suck at Doom3 since I'm running very low on ammo on Veteran :? Alpha labs 3.

[Chalnoth]

Heh. I wasn't complaining about the storyline of DOOM3. I thought it was pretty good. I was stating that if anything, it's Half-Life that copied the DOOM franchise, not DOOM3 that copied Half-Life (as far as storyline goes).

[Ostsol]

Originally Posted by Chalnoth

Heh. I wasn't complaining about the storyline of DOOM3. I thought it was pretty good. I was stating that if anything, it's Half-Life that copied the DOOM franchise, not DOOM3 that copied Half-Life (as far as storyline goes).

Indeed! I remember back when I first saw Half-Life. People were raving about the story and I admit that the integration of the story with FPS gameplay was quite decent. . . Honestly, though, right away when stuff went wrong in that experiment chamber my first thought was: "Heh! Just like Doom!"

[SteveC]

About the lack of replayability that almost all of the reviews keep mentioning. I can't tell you how many times I played the single player version of Doom and Doom2 over and over again. Maybe I'm in a minority on that but is Doom3 that much different than the previous games? Also some of the best multiplayer matches that I had were with 2 players in Doom. Granted Quake 1-3 were also fun, I still think there is something to be said about low player count multiplayer games. It's just a different gaming style. Also the lack of a rail gun should keep camping to a minimum.

Steve

[Guden Oden]

Originally Posted by london-boy

it's always the "one guy to save them all among thousands of monsters, and somehow he singlehandedly manages to kill them all and not get killed himself" kind of crap...

Did you ever watch "Rambo III" in cinemas?

[Scott_Arm]

Originally Posted by Guden Oden

Did you ever watch "Rambo III" in cinemas?

When they finally make that Doom movie they can call it Rambo IV

[AlStrong]

no no no....

Rambo X...like Jason X...

[thop]

Just checked it out, way too dark. And way to shiny. I thought D3 would get rid of the FC shinyness but apparently not. Didn't know that all Mars Research Facilities are built out of solid metal. It appears we need to wait for the UE3 engine to get rid of that. And why they couldn't spare a few polygons for the coneheads is beyond me. Textures are ok, but i expected better. The atmosphere is very good though, and i'm probably not gonna survive the game

Another thing, is it just me or do FC and D3 feel kinda heavy, while games like Painkiller/UT2004 feel kinda light. Difficult to explain.

Oh and IMO there is not enough masskilling (like in Painkiller) to justify the lousy AI.