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Remembering Doom 3
Fun? Many insist that it is. Some will even call you names – nasty internet names, no less – for not jumping on that trigger, diving into the shadows, chomping the ears off those commie bastards and spitting them into the sky. Those with a milder taste for red meat tend to sit on the fence, paying due respect to some very well-manufactured – but manufactured nonetheless – terror. Others, though, find the relentless, mathematical precision of the whole thing annoying, and eventually numbing. Hitchcock said something about anticipation being better than a bang. Whatever your opinion, you have to concede there’s bang by the truckload here.
If it isn’t in your face, throwing the camera every which way with claws or teeth, the game’s behind you, throwing the camera every which way with claws or teeth. Or it’s bowling fireballs, launching homing missiles and diving across the room in less time than it takes to pull the trigger. It has a casual disregard for the time between visual and physical contact – a time in which many of the best horrors enjoy so much of their action. It’s the time in which Resident Evil 4 teaches you to fear its enemies but also admire their cunning. Silent Hill has you marvel at the bizarre and despair at the tools you’ve been given. BioShock lets you watch its society tear itself apart before its eyes turn on you. And Dead Space, this month’s unlikely genre star, makes you do the lot, mixing things up to make a copycat game unique. The biggest issue in Doom 3 isn’t that you’re given too little time to recover and reset before the next big scare – it’s that you’ve too little time to fight.
But consider the circumstances. This was, like id games often are, a leap into darkness in more ways than one. It was a launch title, effectively. John Carmack, who superstitiously clings to the role of deskbound engineer but is actually company president, can never quite know what id’s designers have in mind, just as his own thoughts are communicated largely through science. What emerges from that relationship is a congruence of art, design and technology far more volatile than developers further down the food chain experience. Here, it produced an extraordinary gamble: a lighting system so extreme that anything not immediately adjacent to a light source was plunged into total darkness.
Usually, it’s a modder’s job to do something as crazy as strip almost all the ambient lighting from a game, and at times Doom 3 feels more like an artistic statement than a functioning first-person shooter. But returning to it after years of day/night cycles, incremental naturalism and hollow promises from DirectX 10 – and if Steam’s regular deals on id’s entire back catalogue don’t entice you, the upcoming open source version leaves little excuse – what shines in the dark is the game’s cinematography, a towering balancing act of vision and resources. Not one object has been placed randomly or in haste – because it couldn’t be. Every flickering lamp, touchscreen panel, muzzle-flash, fireball or sweep of the torch demands more triangles from graphics cards which, at the time, didn’t have triangles to spare. Before even a fart emerged from the bowels of Hell, the logistics must have been spine-chilling.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Ok, here comes the doom grunt.
Well, i see that most of people only scratched the surface of this game. Edge retrospective lacks a particular that is mentioned in the recent Left 4 Dead Review, e.g. the times zombies don't pop up from the angle. For the many moments it happens at least half the same number they don't show up. It's a matter of "participation" to the game, driven by atmosphere. There are times where you stare at a ceiling or a gap in the floor thinking the moment the trites will come out. And most of the times they don't come.
Other times you forget some of those amusing guys alive in the level. Well, i was solving the radiation barrels puzzle and i got my back scratched. Then i never relaxed again when playing it.
I think it's worth an 82% for this unusual "participation". The whole game lies on it. But is nothing revolutionary, memorable is more appropriate. The memorability is achieved through the use of technique, yet, IMHO, it's achieved. The maniac balancing of the arsenal is another point to the game: various styles of gameplay allow for various weapons in the same spot. But both the things are subjective, i admit that. It share with Half Life 2 the look for "Love it or hate it" and i don't need to specify which i love and which i hate cause it's evident (thought i don't really hate Half Life 2, it simply don't impress me to the point of saying it's a masterpiece, because i played his better, smarter predecessor).
The last real revolutions i saw are Quake 2 and Half Life 1. The progress then slowed down to a shortcoming i hope we will be able tho break open not too late.
Doom3 remains, possibly until I begin Dead Space on 360 later today, my favourite video game. Not because it's clever, or complex or even too imaginative, but because it completely immersed me in its dark corners, it's claustrophobic ghost-train of a ride and because it looked, for the time (and even today) absolutely stunning.
I also liked the story - you know, the story that was told via the PDAs. I found Dr Betruger's seduction by the forces of pure evil fascinating; I wanted to know how that happened, what was the deal too good to refuse that finally convinced this brilliant scientist to trade all humanity for whatever lay beyond the portal?
And I admired the game's design. It's a pure-breed, a thoroughbred FPS. It does what it says on the tin: it's a glorious bug-hunt with no delusions, no complications, no squad to manage, no inventory to housekeep. I liked that. I knew where I stood with the game, right from the start. And that allowed me to develop a meaningful relationship with my shotgun throughout the adventure.
It's a shame Doom3 has never really enjoyed the kind of recognition I feel it deserved: even now, as reviews of Dead Space spill out all over the place, very few reviewers seem to be able to spot in the game what to me are blatant references to Doom3. Oh well. I still regularly play Doom3 and it's sequel, Resurrection of Evil. I love them both. Like beautiful museums of exquisite FPS game design and technology from a more uncomplicated time, I'm still very glad to own them both.
Now I'm off to play Dead Space and unlike most, as I pick my careful way through the darkened corridors of the Ishimura, I'll be half-expecting a 'lights out' moment to signal the sudden teleporting-in of a Hell-Knight or an Imp or two. If only.
Awesome article.
I got my first job as a tester bad-mouthing Doom 3: I submitted a writing sample where I complained about the narrative, not knowing that Activision was the publisher(!). I still got the job, though, working for them on Quake 4 and Call of Duty 3.
What's really funny is that my current employer -- I work in PR -- had id as a client around the same time(!!)
For the record, I do like the game. The atmosphere is great and the monsters are styled in the proper way -- nauseatingly. I played through the whole thing and once I got the craving again, Dead Space was the perfect fix.
The schoolbus sequence (not sure if it was in Doom 3 itself or the addon) was truly haunting. There's a few other gems, too - the first time you encounter one of those big beasts, or where it tears down the railings. Over time, it does get predictable, which is a pity - and I think it was one of those games where I constantly hammered the quick save button, despite it taking so long.
But it was honestly good, one of the last single player shooters I actually played through. And a great reminescence of what Doom used to be, back in the days, when we abused school networks and computers for our fragfests.
The schoolbus sequence was in Prey, not Doom. It's easy to get confused since they use the same engine.
Doom 3 did have a lot of good moments though, like when you see the first Pinky Demon, that chainsaw zombie in one of the later levels that charges into you, and when you get dropped down into hell for the first time to fight the Mancubi.
I don't recall Doom 3 being infamous for any hardware failures. Being 4 years ago, I can't quite recall my setup, but it certainly couldn't of been 'top-of-the-line' (I'm by no means well off), but it was enough for me to run Doom 3 at a silky smooth framerate without any hitches. It was no Crysis.
That said, the game was mediocre at best.
No, I'm not some old school Doom fanatic that thinks Doom 3 failed to be loyal to its namesake. Rather, I'm a Valve-fan. Half-Life 2 came out around the same time, and was simply stellar for reasons that the Doom 3 development team didn't understand. It had the technology, it had the premise, it had the selling points...it just didn't have the imagination or the design. Doom 3 essentially ground down to clearing enemies, one dark room by one dark room...aesthetically, there was an extremely limited palette, and in terms of gameplay, it was downright repetitive.
Now, sure, the game had some legitimate scares. But then, anything as disfigured (and sometimes laughable) as the creatures in Doom 3 creeping out of dramtic shadows can cause a scream at the right moment (and if you throw enough of them, that moment will come by the law of probability). The problem is that, after the first room, you knew what to expect in every successive room. The game was over after thirty minutes.
The original Doom set the bar for all shooters to follow, a bar that was not raised until 1998 when Half-Life was released. Since then, all shooters were to meet *that* bar, and it's arguable if any have. Doom 3, however, only came half-way -- it picked up scripted scenes and world immersion, but utterly failed in gameplay and flow. Whereas Valve spends significant amount of time play-testing and using feedback to determine when to tweak encounters, create aesthetic rewards, and implement creative combat scenarios and ingenius puzzles, and always in a seemingly alive and non-contrived world, Doom 3 settled for boring maps with oddly stark lighting and relentless hordes of dreary enemies. The only way such a design could work is if the combat itself is particularly enjoyable (for example, Halo, which suffers from atrocious level design, but would delight a player even if here stuck in a empty box with a few enemies), but Doom 3 paired very sluggish movement with lame-duck weapons for a spectacular explosion of ho-hum proportions. There was little reason to be excited.
Even now, thinking back to Doom 3, I cannot pick out any specific memorable moment. It is all mostly a blur, each moment being so similar to the other that there is no reason to differentiate. The game is thus, only a moment long....but a game is no one moment. It is a series, and id forgets that. They may do well in tech, but they were never one for design, and Doom 3 hardly moved beyond the color-key mechanic of the original.
I am glad to see id doing something different from their past projects with Rage, however. I am not too excited, as id has never proven itself in teh design department, only tech, but I expect a better result than Doom 3.
Doom 3 was awesome!
I suppose I enjoyed Doom 3 because I had a closed-circuit experience. I missed that initial hickup after its launch when no hardware could play the game within reason and the burp of negative press the game got. I bought Doom 3 in March of this year after upgrading my PC to a veritable powerhouse, capable of even playing Crysis at reasonable framerates. Of course, Doom 3 ran perfectly, it still looked great (if low-poly), and I genuinely had a lot of fun with it. No, it's not similar in pace to Doom or Doom 2. Apart from the monsters, Doom 3 is its own beast -- for better or worse.
I was actually surprised to go back and read all the jaded reviews it got, most of which cited issues with the game I never really had problems with. The darkness never bothered me -- it added to the mood and quite honestly, the game would have been a cake walk if it were in full-blown porn lighting.
I encouraged a few of my friends to replay the game, but they were all so jaded from the initial bad exposure they'd received to appreciate it, which I believe may unfortunately be forever its legacy. So here's to Doom 3, you were the scrappy, misunderstood step-child between Quake and Rage.
nolim ... it's not stealing ... its evolution :) few games have new and unique concepts ... though portal comes to mind...
No, the problem with Doom 3 was not Doom 3, it was that it was not what people expected. The "no duct tape" issue cited is the prime example. id wanted us to choose gun or flashlight, have the gun and shoot as soon as something comes at you, have the light and see where you're going. It was a design choice and if you accepted what they had decided it was a great feel.
The game itself was not overly long but it was fun. I don't believe it was a bad game so much as people wanted something simpler, and that was the problem for the vast majority. Maybe not group think but once it was given voice that "i want to see where i'm going while carrying a gun" people dissented, but it was not because the game was flawed.
There was a lot of new stuff in it, like the User Interfaces in the environment itself. Granted this could have been done differently, but it was something that aided immersion. The environment was rich and scary and although the story was not Shakespeare, who would have hoped for that from an FPS?
id aimed high and succeeded well. People bought the game, and now having just played Dead Space, i was thinking "everything Doom 3 should have been" ... but that's because Dead Space "copied" so much from Doom 3 (though not the story) and really Doom 3 was great then, and Dead Space is great now. And maybe that's an unfair comparison.
As for carg0 ... yeah ... i agree, i don't think any game ever has been worth upgrading a computer for.
I still have it installed, though mostly for The Dark Mod these days. The atmosphere was great, the lighting and use of shadow, especially with all that moving machinery, really created a great sense of tension and, though the audio logs idea was stolen from System Shock 2, you can't fault the great voice work.
the only thing i remember about doom 3 is how quickly i had it uninstalled upon completion. i felt sorry for those who actually bought or built new computers just for that game.
it's the perfect example of what happens when you focus solely on graphics.