Straight Jacket Type Fun
Doom 3
Screenshots 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23
Doom 3. It feels good to just say the words, doesn't it my fellow gaming freaks? Just two words, those two little syllables make even the most jaded of gamers raise their voice a little like an anxious puppy waiting for a morsel from the kitchen table. Personally, I have been waiting for this game since I first saw it demonstrated at Quakecon 2002 (my coverage from then is here) by the id software team. Within the past year, as updates and news tidbits came out regarding the game were released to the public, the hype just kept building and building until finally Wired earlier in the year quoted an industry exec as saying, "Doom 3 is the equivalent of the second coming of Jesus in the computer game industry."
Prophecies aside, Doom 3 can not be touched by any other gaming engine right now in terms of details, textures, and an atmospheric game world whose stunning detail drips from the walls and leaves a slimy trail of ectoplasm all over your screen. While much of the grumbling of Doom 3 lacking anything new to the single player experience contains merit, I personally found that I often did not have time while fighting to think much about it until after the battle was over and done.
I know a lot of sites are singing this games high praises, and believe me, in a little bit I will be too but there are just a few things I really do have a problem with Doom 3 so before I turned this article into a drool fest of id lovin' I want to be sure I cover the bad points of the game. First, why can't I lean? Does my armor restrict my movement? Does my Marine have a neck ache and if so do they not have a solution for that? Maybe some UAC issued Tylenol for minor aches, pains, and imp chewing marks. Second, the Soul Cube idea was bad, m'kay. After you grab the Soul Cube, this little thing will allow you to drain life from the bad guys and then absorb that energy, thus serving as a sort of super health pack. It shows up near the end of the game so you don't get to use it much but when you do have it, it makes dispensing the bigger monsters almost too easy. Those big Hell Knights that take a BFG shot? Nope, not anymore. Just pull out my super fancy Rubik Cube, charge it up by killing five other bad guys and now the Hell Knight is dispensed. Archviles (the creatures from Doom 2 that raised all the other creatures from the dead) are also laughably easy to kill once you are armed with the Soul Cube. Therefore, about the last 1/5th of the game becomes a matter of mathematics (three kills, two more to more to go for Soul Cube).
Next, I really got tired of imps. Now, don't get me wrong here though. Being a fan of original Doom games, there's nothing like dispensing buckshot justice to hordes of imps. Heck, fill up a room with 50 imps, give me 100 rounds of 12-gauge and I'm ready to party! But honestly would a few more Pinky Demons hurt?
Finally, during development of the game and when it was shown at Quakecon, they talked about some features that now appear to be absent. Dynamic lighting is there but you can not "shoot out every light." Some lights still can not be damaged, and some objects which should by all logic explode when shot by a pistol do not. Televisions as one example, or terminal interfaces. Also, the original demo of Doom 3 that I saw showed a zombie getting shot, falling to the ground and then you could stand on him while still shooting him. In fact, the zombie would appear to struggle to stand. I didn't see that in the final product either. When a zombie would die, he'd fall to the ground and I could run right through him or disintegrate his body. A performance issue perhaps? Or maybe a problem with the engine handling it?
"Damn Sphinx" you must be thinking by now, "That's a lot of problems with this game." Well, they are problems for sure. The real question for me though is, "Are they showstoppers?" And to me, they are not.
First, let's be clear that the graphics in this game are what make the show. Websites have been putting out hundreds if not thousands of screenshots for this game, but seeing these graphics in a still format only convey about one half of one percent about what this graphics engine can do.
I tried to get some in-battle graphics to demonstrate exactly how good this game looks but I'm not sure if even that's enough. By far the best visual/auditory experience came about half way through the game and I will try to describe it. You come up to this terminal which allows you to activate these sentry droids which seem to be invulnerable. As I'm following it to the next checkpoint in the game, the lights go out in the room and the familiar sound of imps teleporting into the room come from behind me.
Immediately, the droid and I get to work. It's pumping out machine gun rounds, the dynamic lighting effect of the machine gun giving me subtle glimpses of the imps who in turn are casting the room in a hellish color from their fireballs. Seeing one, I lean on the plasma gun trigger, sending streams of blue plasma across the small room. Screams from the imps as the blue color mixes with the red from the imps and the yellow flashes from the droid. Shadows dance across the walls and then we get some sort of Studio 54 strobe effect in the room and I think I heard the Aliens theme start pumping through the intercom. Or maybe that was me just humming along. Damn hell remake Aliens v. Predator 2 with this engine, NOW!
So more imps come in and we continue the death dance of fireballs, chain guns, and plasma guns. This goes on for at least a solid minute and by the end I was completely sold on this game and was considering whether Carmack would want my marriage proposal in iambic pentameter or haiku:
Doom three owns my
face
Graphics made PC orgasm
I need a mop now.
Also on the graphics, for the first time, as I navigated around the Mars base, I felt like the base and it's surrounding areas had real depth to them. Most of the time in a shooter when you look at a wall you see just a flat wall or the pipe on a wall is clearly just a flat 2D image. In this game though, there are walls, and in front of those walls are pipes and in front of those pipes are wiring. This gives the Doom 3 world real depth and not just textured bitmaps. Oddly, this feeling of weight and substance in the rooms became the one thing that stuck out the most for me when playing the game.
A lot of people have been complaining about how dark the game is and how you have to switch between flashlight and weapon. Personally, I feel this just adds to the atmosphere. Yes, it's not realistic and yes it's not quite fair, but guess what? It's a COMPUTER GAME and not the real thing. You may be a guy and may be FROM MARS (and girls are from Venus of course), but you aren't actually there. Well, you might be in which case I for one welcome our new martian overlords. id has stated from almost day one that they were trying to make a horror themed game where the scare factor was just as important as the actual game play. Having to use my ears as well as my eyes to find the imp crouching in the corner honestly did get my heart beating a little faster and make me a little more trigger happy than normal. The biggest scare for me was near the end of the game. I approached a terminal and as I began navigating the menus one of those spider creatures came down to my left on it's web. While not a tough creature to beat, it definitely made me jump which I think was the objective of the single player game anyway.
A HUGE surprise is the story in Doom 3. It's not going to make Stephen King or Danielle Steele worried or anything like that but considering that most storylines for id games are two sentences ("You are here. Kill everything") the story in Doom 3 approaches Steinbeck or Dickens for id software. The addition of a PDA system which contain emails, videos, and audio logs greatly increases the immersion effect. The fact that the interface for this is easy and intuitive, and many of the logs are highly entertaining ensures that players will need to read them.
Finally, there are a LOT of scripted sequences from creatures warping in, lights going off and on, and even the mechanical motion of a lot of the components of Mars Base which makes the base feel more alive (possessed?) than other game world I've played in during my time as a gamer. Engines doing who knows what visibly show pistons cycling on their drive shafts while animated computer displays on the wall present the appearance of a industrial base performing it's regular routine. Any modder or developer designing a game based on this engine needs to keep this in mind when designing new levels: exploit the scripting and do lots of it if possible. Even something as simple as turning the lights on or off (as can be done in some of the multiplayer levels that come with the game) really adds to the experience and it appears that since id has included the designer toolsets for Doom 3 with the game (and not a separate download later), modders should be able to exploit the scripts and level design to it's fullest in a timely fashion.
There had been rumblings for a while that id had lost it's touch, that Carmack couldn't keep up with competing engines and id's programmers were not up to snuff. Play this game for about five minutes and you'll see how wrong those naysayers are now. The Doom 3 engine presents the best engine out there and re-establishes id at the forefront of gaming. While some small problems persist, these problems do little to distract from the quality, intensity, and beauty of Doom 3.
Obviously, she didn't like the house warming gift I brought. Ungrateful chick.
"Damn. I'm looking good." Woops wrong game.
Not these bastards again. I hated them in Doom 2 as well
Those long load times between levels got you down? Get Serial ATA next time!
All right, we definitely don't need to see detailed graphics of Pam Anderson's birth canal! Thanks Jon C. but that's TOO much detail
Once I get on that rail car, I'm watching for head crabs. Wait! Wrong game again! Damn!
Note to Server Admins:
As a server admin, the out of the box instructions for setting up a dedicated server strike me as being borked in a way I haven't seen in some time. First, there are zero instructions in the instruction book or on the CD about how to setup a dedicated server using a command line interface. Yes, the in-game interface gets it done but a lot of people (including myself) run servers which don't have 3D graphics cards. Second, if you want to run a dedicated server you must leave the CD in the drive? That's just wrong if you ask me. Basically, when the mod community starts tweaking this game big time (to support more than four players for example or make a CTF mode like ThreeWave used to do) it means that if someone wants to host the game on a dedicated server they have to go to the server, put the CD in, start the server, then come back and put their CD back into their client PC to play the game on their dedicated server. This logic makes zero sense and I blame Activision for this one. I believe they are using SafeDisc to stop or deter copying but I don't think that's worked out too well anyway so why punish server admins who just want to host the game for their buddies? Do you expect me to buy two copies of the game just to run a dedicated server? That's not going to happen.
My server's IP is 65.247.172.55. It's called Come Get Some.