Doom 3 Gets Reviews, Piracy Questions, Exultation 1319
Yeti Von Baseball writes "Now that Doom 3 has officially shipped to stores, Computer Gaming World just posted its Doom 3 review - they also posted about 100 or so new screens." Elsewhere, GameSpy has an in-progress weblog and first-look impressions on the "claustrophobic corridors" of the game, Telefragged posted one of the first reviews, praising "a grand slam of action, story, atmosphere, and pure terror", the BBC reports on how "potential sales could be hit by the extent of online piracy of the game", and Time Magazine has a feature on Doom 3 and id.
four player only (Score:3, Interesting)
Release dates (Score:5, Interesting)
Low Price? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know about the rest of the world but a new release PC game in Australia retails for $100+. Now to me that is not a relatively low price.
In fact the only game I've ever considered worth paying $100 for was half-life and this is only because it is still maintained and I got many (Half-life, Counterstrike, Day of Defeat etc.) games with it. Call me stingy but for me a game is worth at most $20 a year.
Re:I just got it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Until then, Quake3 scene is still alive, especially finely-tweaked competition mods such as CPMA [promode.org].
Re:Buy Directly From Developer (Score:5, Interesting)
Low Price? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Despite the relatively low price of PC games, many gamers are still choosing to resort to piracy rather than pay for legitimate boxed copies," said Matt Pierce, publisher of the computer games magazine, PC Gamer.
Relatively low price? Relative to what? A movie? A CD? A car? Amazon [amazon.com] has it for 54.99. That is anywhere from 25% to 50% of the cost of a brand new console, depending on the platform (and yes, I know it is a PC game). I'm really curious as to what world he is living in that could justify that price as "relatively low".
Re:freakin great (Score:4, Interesting)
The description of this game was right, a remake of the original Doom, with new graphics. That's it. Nothing new in terms of gameplay. Sneak around. Get spooked. Empty your clip into a zombie. Move on to the next room. Ho-hum.
Glad I "tried it before I bought it." I'll be deleting it soon enough.
Re:I hope there's some content (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I bought my copy today (Score:2, Interesting)
AMD Athlon XP 2200+
512MB RAM
GeForce4 Ti4600
And it runs smoooooth on medium setting, and looks awesome, better than anything else I've ever played.
I agree that it is dark, but I think that's just to add to the horror of the game. In most parts of the game, the use of dark spots, light, and shadows, really adds a level of creepiness that you just don't see in any other game. They really pulled off the lighting well in this.
Will the monsters fight? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you could get a monster to shoot at you, and the shot hit a second monster, the second monster would get angry and turn towards the first and start attacking it. The the first would turn towards the second and attack, and they would ignore you and just beat on each other until one was dead. (This only worked for different types of monsters; if a grunt shot another grunt, they wouldn't fight. In fact, I don't believe that same-type monsters could even damage each other at all.)
The new game, with its insane system requirements, will only have a handful of monsters at a time (about three, if I understood the Telefragged review correctly). Still, it would be cool if you could sometimes get them to start fighting each other.
steveha
Piracy doesnt cost sales (Score:2, Interesting)
Few sales were lost.
More were gained by people 'demoing' it before the fork over the cash..
If software had refunds, the need for piracy would be reduced greatly.
Re:55 bucks for 2 days of fun? (Score:2, Interesting)
BUT the single player game is supposed to be incredible. and the benefit of any id game is that the mod community will have a blast with this. so they'll handle your multiplayer aspect i'm sure. trust me though. so far the single player experience is WOW... crap your pants fantastic
Very disappointed (Score:5, Interesting)
And the game does two very annoying things; they like to surprise you with monsters appearing out of nowhere, which has always bugged me, and they like to just turn out all the lights so you can't see anything and just start throwing monsters at you. How is firing blindly in the dark while some monster that can somehow see perfectly is whittling down your health with a machine-gun fun? Yes it is scary, but not in a good way.
Please someone tell me it gets better, because right now I am unsure if I am ever going to bother to play any more and instead go load up one of the more interesting recent FPS games like Farcry or Call Of Duty.
Re:Buy Directly From Developer (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, strong retail sales can make an impression on the publisher, distributor, wholesalers, and retailers, which may make it easier to secure an advance on the next title. That said, id Software isn't exactly strapped for cash or clout, so I don't think they care where you buy Doom 3.
Doom 3 is crap (Spoilers). Go play Far Cry (Score:5, Interesting)
If what you want in a game is basically Doom with shiny surfaces, then you're fine. If you want something new, or even something with a refreshing twist, then aside from the rendering engine you're basically out of luck.
The game is well produced. The voice acting is good. The facial animation is decent. The textures are all very detailed, but you know, the 'fun' bottleneck is no longer in the graphics. Its in the gameplay.
So the big news is the latest rendering engine from Id, the people who brought us the first widely released FPS. Well, I'm sorry to say that from what I've seen the rendering engine is about on par with the Source (Half Life 2), Crytek (Far Cry) and Unreal 3 (upcoming America's Army and Unreal releases) engines. There are probably purists out there that will say I'm insane for this and that Doom 3 does X that none of those others do, or do as well. Well, if I don't notice it when I'm playing it doesn't really matter does it? The most impressive things I saw were the distortions glass caused in anything beyond the glass, and the 'heat distortion' you could see in items that were extremely hot. The glass distortion was interesting for about 5 seconds the first time I saw it, and then distracting the rest of the time. The heat haze was interesting in one level, and almost completely obscured with smoke effects the rest of the time. Yes, the lighting was very nice, but since its mostly used to create vast areas of darkness to 'freak you out', I began to hate the lighting.
Gameplay was tedious. If you're a huge fan of haunted houses, maybe this will appeal. If you're not, this is just going to drive home why you typically don't see haunted houses year round. It seems like every corridor is filled with false panels. It also seems like hell's minions have absolutely nothing better to do than to go wait behind one of those panels, wait for you to walk past and then pop out behind you. This kind of mechanism should be used at most once or twice in a game. Here it shows up every 5 minutes or so.
Level design is repetitive. Carmack talks about how many levels use up to half a gig of textures. Yet the game comes on 3 CDs. Well the easy explanation for this is that the game has about 4 levels. It has the mars base level repeated ad naseum, the underground caverns level (seen for about 2 levels), Hell (seen in one level and basically the end game) and mars base being overrun by hell (1 level) which really isn't original at all but uses a mixture of textures and design from previous levels. All in all, there are maybe 2 really 'Wow' moments when you're looking around you. This isn't bad, except that the rest of the time, for me anyway, it wasn't so much a lack of 'Wow' but a 'Oh god not this again' feeling.
Sound is well used in the game, but then its only used to try to freak you out.
Overall this is the problem. THe game wants to freak you out. And not just a couple of really good scares, but rather it wants you constantly edgy and terrefied. This isn't really what I want in a game, or at least not what I want the entire game to be about. Think about the most suspenseful movie you've ever watched. Now think about the most suspensful 5 minutes of that movie. Now watch that 5 minutes over and over again. Either you're going to get bored or you're going to need
Too much creep, to little gameplay. (Score:4, Interesting)
After about 6 hours of playing I was ready to smash something good as my blood at that point was pure adrenaline; needless to say, I was really REALLY agitated. Thank god I didn't pay out the ass for those 6 shitty hours of playtime, hence the reason I pirate before I buy. This game is not for your seasoned FPS player but more for the average guy who doesn't spend a lot of time playing games who likes to get freaked out at stuff and then shoot it.
Movie-like mental state changing special effects do NOT belong in videogames; whereas a movie is 2 or 3 hours, a game is 40 or 50, and if you ask any psychiatrist, it isn't healthy to give someone that much of a dose, especially if they're going to play it 500 or 1000 hours. You turn into me.
Frankly, I really was hoping they'd be able to throw in some decent gameplay and actually add something to the FPS market besides an engine that can deliver pretty graphics and a mix n' match version of doom and then mask that with pretty graphics and mind altering "scene" setting sounds. I'll hope that they'll salvage the multiplayer so modders can do their thing and make some really kickass mods. It'd be really kewl to see natural selection on this engine, or when HL2 comes out on that one, since it'd compliment it so nicely. Then again, I won't have to deal with steam if I'm on doom3.
Higher price (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the game itself, all i can say is wow. For once a game has lived up to its hype, so far. good graphics, awesome gameplay and atmosphere.
stupid cumbersome tension building flashlight!
Re:I just got it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Multi-player has it's place, but Doom has for the most part always been a First Person SHooter in the pure sense, AND, I think it's loseing it's focus/direction/attraction by going multi-multi player. Two, three man teams, maybe even TWO two or three man teams. That's it.
Re:I just got it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I vaguely recall an interview with someone at id saying the almost the same thing, that deathmatch FPS games had reached a plateau and most players play with a lot of the graphical settings off anyway (for example using 2d icons), so that was part of the reasoning for making a single player game.
Got it here in New Zealand (Score:4, Interesting)
Even worse, on my Hitachi 17" LCD screen, it was so dark I could not see what I was doing - literally. There's no gamma correction (only brightness), and the gamma correction that you can use from the ATI control panel seems to be over-ridden by Doom 3. Also, the ATI keys you can in theory use to change gamma in-game (I tried alt-f1, alt-f2), were also ignored.
So I took the game home to my gaming rig. P4, 2.8Ghz, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9700, 19" CRT, Hercules GameTheater XP surround sound. It reproducibly crashed only 2 minutes into the game. My ATI drivers were about 6 weeks old which I hoped would be late enough - but they weren't. Updated the drivers and I was away, no problems.
The game was perfectly playable at 800x600, including 2x anti-aliasing. The gamma was also not a problem (it just had the right balance, I didn't need to adjust anything). But the surround sound was broken; I heard only very, very feint noises from the rear speakers (perhaps 1/10th volume of front speakers?) and even then it seemed to be almost an echo of the front speakers, rather than positional audio. Very disappointed.
And the game play ? Well, the previous paragraphs are fact, this one is just my take. Honestly, I felt like I was playing the original half life, with a twist of System Shock. The 'plot' is just like half life, so is the atmosphere. It just not, well, as much *fun* as I was hoping :-( Sure, graphically it is superb. And it *is* well done, don't get me wrong. It's just that it's all been done before, just not with the same graphics.
Overall, I'd give it an 8 out of 10. 10 for gfx, but marked down for originality. I should add the caveat that I've only played about 2 1/2 hours of the game - but frankly I would rather be playing Far Cry.
Re:piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would you want to? The only reason I can see is to perpetuate a class/caste system of haves and have-nots.
If everyone can copy anything, including the boxes that themselves make the copies, how is anyone the poorer?
Movable type put monks out of business. Horseless carriages put buggy-whip manufacturers out of business. Digital copiers (computers) are working towards putting record and movie comglomerates out of business--but not creative types who would create whether they were being paid or not, because they have a spark in them that will still be there once we're a cashless society.
However, with all my examples we still have a thriving industry of book publishing, transportation, and entertainment. Some bubbles burst; the entertainment one is about to go the way of the dot-com and tulip bubbles, which were generating far more money than they were actually worth.
My main point, though, is this: what is your plan to deal with matter copiers, if you're so vehemently against digital copiers?
Eh...Piracy... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doom 3 is crap (Spoilers). Go play Far Cry (Score:3, Interesting)
-Dan
Re:Very disappointed (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest problems I have is firstly there is no originality whatsoever (half-life + system shock with better graphics), and having to listen to the complete audio logs over and over just to get a code to the cabinets.
It is well put together though, and has enough 'tops' moments for me.
Re:The amount of piracy going on (Score:3, Interesting)
I also agree a demo would have helped, and in fact you have to wonder if the time-tested Id method of shareware would have prevented this too. You get a third of the game for free with the shareware method Id have always used. Would the 30,000 member torrent be for the shareware package rather than the full game if a shareware version was released first?
I couldn't guess.
Re:I agreed with you... (Score:4, Interesting)
Vehicles (land and water). A sniper rifle. Wide open maps where vehicles and sniper rifles come in handy. Good multiplayer modes. Diverse level design. Indoor and outdoor regions (sorry, 30 seconds in some crater on mars going from airlock a to airlock b while suffering apoxia doesn't count).
What Far Cry doesn't have is:
The same level over and over again. A need for monsters to CONSTANTLY pop out of hidden rooms. A fixation with hell imagery that most of us grew out of after junior high.
What bizarre alternate world are you living in? The grunts in Doom 3 ran directly into my shotgun all the time. Even the ones armed with guns themselves. And in Far Cry, I'd frequently curse the AI enemies for not showing themselves long enough for me to take a shot. Since the AI in Far Cry can auto balance maybe they were particularly stupid just for you. No offense.
Re:Low Price? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:freakin great (Score:4, Interesting)
Kudos need to go to id for milking everything out of a video card to give a great presentation. I do plan on upgrading my video card when ATIs latest and greatest becomes ubiquitos in Australia but there isn't a need for me to go running out right now to do it.
Re:piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:piracy (touché) (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, okay. I was trying to make a distinction between the legal "label" and the common usage of the word...
Grrr.
But you're right, and I'm wrong.
(The "legal" and "moral" meanings are certainly not identical. That was what I had hoped to say by using the word "theft"... uh... imprecisely. Apologies all 'round.)
Again, though, don't make the mistake of assuming that the author of a work has some natural right to control the work.
Agreed, and understood - I intended to refer only to the "legal fiction" of such a right, not any "natural right."
<grrr>
I cannot tell a lie. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not one to run around screaming "This game roxors!", and I do understand what many of the complaints here are about. No, there really isn't anything groundbreaking going on (graphics and sound excluded). However, having scarred my lungs from chainsmoking through the original Doom back in the 90's I think id has done a damn good job at recreating Doom for the modern PC.
If you had asked me to justify my usenet leeching Saturday night, I would have responded that I would buy a copy as soon as the linux binaries were released and I knew that it would run acceptably on my box. Truth be told, I'll be picking the box up tomorrow, filing the CD's away for safe keeping, reinstalling my downloaded copy with a legit serial and re-applying the patch.
Why? Because id made a kick ass game and I'll support it.
Something I think that the BBC (and so many in the market) are not considering is this... yes, there's going to be more than the usual amount of piracy going on with D3. Simply speaking, there are a lot of people who just are not sure if their hardware can take it... I wasn't. Now that I am (and that I know linux binaries are on the way), I'll happily throw down my change for the legal copy.
All of that being said... I was damn pleased to see [H]ard|OCP was playing it (mostly) straight. My AMD XP 2500+, 768 Mb, PNY Gefrorce 5600 Ultra, with XP Pro runs this just fine at 800x600 with medium detail. In a few places, I've turned it up to 1024x768 with fully glory effects and just stood still to examine the screen. Usually, if I do this I'm damned disappointed when I go back to playable settings... this time, I wasn't.
Anyway... longwided and sounding a bit like a fanboy, I know. But I just wanted to add my two cents in. Heavy piracy won't surprise me. Neither will users buying the game after they've tested it out, either.
The big reasons for going legit will be Coop mode. Whether it's a really well done user created mod, or an id add-on... that'll be the biggest reason for many to drop their burned CD's and pickup a serial.
Quake3 engine open-source? When? (Score:3, Interesting)
A-Fucking-Men (Score:1, Interesting)
I said it before and I'll say it again: If ID was serious about making a really scary game they should have hired or contracted some ex-Looking Glass alums (like the ones involved with Thief over at Ion Storm). "Shalebridge Cradle" is a prime example of what the medium of the video game can create--sheer, horrifying atmosphere. That one level made the hair on the back of my neck stand up--I had to stop playing because it SERIOUSLY creeped me out (and I was jumping at every creek my house made afterwards). And that part of the mission was empty! It was all done with pure visual atmosphere and sound! When the "residents" of The Cradle showed up...well, play the damn game. Seriously.
Doom 3 is a carnival haunted house compared to "Shalebridge Cradle".
And you are correct sir. (Score:5, Interesting)
The single player starts out tense and atmospheric, and quickly gets dull. A lot of people will try comparing this game to System Shock 2, but outside of the audio/video logs and oddly designed facilities, the scares never really change.
Idiots will probably respond to this with, "ZOMG ITS ANN FPS WAT D U EXPCT", but the scares almost never change. Enemies bust out of strangely hidden compartments in the walls and cealing behind and in front of you, and you'll be able to guess exactly where the lights will mysteriously go out after about an hour of playing.
Comparing Doom 3 to Half Life is just stupid. The grunts in HL actually try to flank you and use grenades to drive you out of cover. The zombie marines in Doom 3 either run up and empty their clip at you, or find a single spot of cover and pop out every couple seconds to shoot. Pretty much everything demonic just rushes you from whatever wall compartment you walked by.
Did I mention that your flashlight is separate from your guns, and you can't even have a pistol and flashlight out at the same time? Combine that with how freaking dark Doom 3 is (and it is VERY dark), and you'll either be getting chewed up switching back and forth from flashlight to gun, or just firing blindly in the dark. Yeah, that's fun alright.
Doom 3 makes an awesome first impression, but in the end the whole experience is just shallow. The engine is incredible and no doubt the mod scene will do some amazing stuff with it, but Doom 3 isn't revolutionary. Hell, it's barely evolutionary.
Pick it up now if you're starved for a passable singleplayer FPS, or if you're looking to impress all the l33t kiddies with your framerate counts.
For everyone else, wait until Id comes to their senses and drops the price to $45-50.
Gamma/brightness won't help (Score:4, Interesting)
In layman's terms, what they have done is set black 0,0,0 as absolute darkenss, and then set anything in shadow to that same colour. So unless something is actually lit up by a proper light source, YOU WON'T SEE IT even if you bump your brightness etc to max. That's the beauty of using a real lighting engine instead of fake lighting as every other game before it has done. Now you NEED to use the flashlight to get around. Yes, it freaks you out when a creature jumps out at you and you need to fumble for your shotgun etc. But that's the point! It's a fear factor game. Enjoy it for what it is, don't try to game the system (which you can't do anyway).
really dumb question... (Score:3, Interesting)
Did we play the same game? I spent most of my time quick saving and reloading.
Re:The Doom 3 piracy troll... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, my friend...I feel sorry for you (Score:3, Interesting)
Then I found the scientist and the enemies came and the lights went out.
Congratulations on discovering the other 19 hours and 40 minutes of the game--entering pitch black rooms with things in the corners! Then, after that, you get to enter a semi pitch black room with things in the corners! All that detail seems to disappear except for the random PDAs you find.
Huge disappointment for me. I was actually so bored, I quit the game just to post here on Slashdot!
Re:I just got it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Low Price? (Score:4, Interesting)
- a dozen roses
- four hours of legally purchased music
- dinner for one at Morton's
- 2% ownership of a RealDoll
- a leatherman
- two tanks of gas
- a copy of the complete far side
- the lord of the rings trilogy on dvd
- three cans of baby formula
- one bad beat playing 5/10 texas holdem
- tickets to the Celine Dion show in Vegas
- a bartab for two at a trendy bar
- a nail gun
- a round of golf
- a PC that is capable of running doom 3
The world he is living in is called the real world. Maybe someday you'll escape your mom's basement and join us.A response from a disappointed gamer (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought Doom 3 was the greatest game ever for the first 20-30 minutes. Checking out the news channel and viewing UAC's promo vids was sheer heaven. After hell took over and all the lights went out, suddenly I picked up the formula. After a while, I was guessing every corner something would be in. Sure enough. It got to the point where for every new room I entered, I would run in to hit the trigger than backgrack and just wait for whatever it was to appear so I could kill it and move on. I didn't feel like I had any real room to fight the monsters, and it was too dark for me to get any good shots, so that's how it mostly was for me. Run in, run out, wait for baddies to come to me so I could pick them off.
It just got stale. Believe me, I wanted to enjoy it as much as you clearly want me to. I'm not bashing id's efforts or the engine itself (even if it is way too dark). I can appreciate id's hard work while still criticizing the final product's shortcomings.
20 hours of black, silver, and red? No thanks!
Re:The Doom 3 piracy troll... (Score:1, Interesting)
Sorry buddy, that would be sweet and all but unfourtunatly this is the real world. Just because they don't have to charge that much doesn't mean they won't. I guess I could be wrong, but to my knowlege there is'nt a single company on this planet that would willingly sell thier product for any less than they can get. If enough people would pay $300 for doom3 then it would cost $300. I'm sure most major companies don't set thier prices by rolling dice either. Don't belive me? well you think Windows would cost your soul if it was only available separatley from your PC. Exept for a very small percent, every person whose used a PC, no matter how much free software you've ripped off, has paid ALOT of money for a product with high enough profit margins to have perfectly capable free alternatives. I,m not even saying winblows sucks, but if they are ever forced to allow true cross-platform compatiblility there would mo way windows would cost any more then 20 bucks.
Writer's workshop (Score:1, Interesting)
"...a little boy's wish, a grown man's hope..." - nice one there.
"frag-laden joyness" - 'frag-laden' makes me cringe a bit but making up words like joyness I like.
"hunger gnawing" - hunger always gnaws. Try something else.
"my unblinked eyes drying out as mosquito after mosquito lay filthy eggs on my unmoving door-focused corneas" - bad attempt at Fight-Club-esque gross-out narrative. Unblinked/unmoving is clumsy and redundant.
"setting paws" - a bit cliche.
"I shall then flee home..." - shifting into future tense, nice touch there, but you aren't consistent with your tenses.
"demented air conditioner" - demented: cliche.
"struggles... shared SDRAM that it so tenuously controls..." - the anthropomorphic sense is great here. We can almost personally experience the struggle.
"megabyte after megabyte" - remember 'mosquito after mosquito'? Let's find other ways of saying 'a lot'.
"another flow of hot piss" - The reader hasn't forgotton that you piss yourself. There's no need to allude to it 3 times in a paragraph.
"Suddenly, " - Make the reader feel the suddenness with you, instead of simply stating, "it was sudden." The previous paragraph gives the game away.
"sucking, pumping and routing" - recalls "punching, kicking and gouging"
"Then, it hits me." - unfunny pun. And trim the next sentence down a bit.
The conclusion: after finally installing Doom3, you are thwarted at the last moment. Tell us how you feel about that!
Good effort, some genuinely interesting writing in parts - B+
Re:Maybe...just maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm proud of it. (Score:5, Interesting)
We think a lot of people will like it.
I don't follow gaming message boards, because, at its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior. This slashdot story is about as close as I want to go...
Amidst all the various Doom ports and expansions, we are starting up on our next game. It will have a new rendering engine, which will be keeping me busy for a while, but the only other thing we are saying for now is that it won't be a sequel to any of our previous work. We have a really solid team that did a lot of maturing through Doom's development, so I have high hopes that it won't be another four year odyssey.
John Carmack
Here's a review I baked earlier... (Score:5, Interesting)
The middle of these three titles in terms of release date, Doom III has perhaps the most impressive pedigree. iD software created the first modern fps with Doom, over 10 years ago. Since then, their Quake series, while often felt to be lacking in terms of gameplay, has given us the technical milestones that have marked the progression of the genre. Doom 3 has been in development for four years and from the very beginning of its development, we've been told to expect something groundbreaking.
Some retailers jumped the gun slightly on iD's release date. This meant I had a chance to play the game early and was coming to the end of it just as most players were getting started. I'm writing this review on the basis of a single playthrough on the "normal" difficulty setting and I've not yet really touched on the multiplayer, so I won't be factoring that in.
iD have made it clear from the beginning that we'd be needing an absolutely monster PC to play this game well. I don't really have one. The system used for the purpose of this review was:
Pentium 4 2.0ghz Northwood
512 mb RDRAM
Geforce 4 Ti4200
Sound Blaster AWE 32.
Not exactly obsolete, but hardly cutting edge.
So, with the preliminaries out of the way, how does the game shape up?
Pretty well, all things considered. On loading up, I'm confronted with the normal array of options. I customise my controls to my liking and then decide on some graphics settings. I'm a sucker for detail and will generally put up with a bit of framerate loss in return for an extra touch of "wow factor". First of all, I try the "ultra" detail settings in 1024x768 resolution. It takes me 30 seconds to find this is completely unplayable. No real surprise there. So I change the detail level down to "high", which, annoyingly, requires me to quit and restart the game. To my surprise, things now run fairly well. Although I experiment a bit further, I end up playing through the game with these settings. By and large, it's pretty good, although a couple of the bigger areas do cause fairly severe slowdown,
The opening sections of the game are very much reminiscent of Half-Life. You wander through the colony while people go about their lives and work around you. Expect to spend several minutes more than is strictly necessary here, just gawping at the level of detail. The visuals really are like nothing we've seen before. Farcry's outdoor sections were stunning, but the effect broke down indoors. Here, the indoor areas look almost photorealistic at times. There's a solid, gritty feeling to everything and it all fits together very well.
You're given a few "go to point A then point B" objectives and then, predictably, all hell quite literally breaks loose. It's hard to get over in a review just how terrifying it is when everything goes wrong. My reaction as the people around me started deforming into hideous monsters was verging on outright panic. I stayed in a pretty much constant state of fear for about the next 5 hours of the game, with occasional resurgences right through to the end.
Once the shooting starts, the nature of the game stays pretty much constant. You get an objective, usually to go to a location or find a way of opening a door, over your communicator. Accomplishing the objective involves moving through a sequence of rooms and corridors, dealing with any enemies you come across with extreme prejudice. As I've already said, this is extremely scary at first. Everywhere is very dark (more on this later) and the enemies really are quite unpleasant. Expect
Re:freakin great (Score:5, Interesting)
With Doom 3, that's not the case.
The first thing that strikes you about the game is how cohesive everything is. The attention to detail is fantastic, from the UAC propoganda films, to the video discs, emails and audio logs, there's been a whole wealth of production value been heaped on incidentals, making the station feel more alive and really making you feel more like you're actually on Mars.
There are a number of different enemies, each with their unique abilities. The enemy AI is not non-existent, the zombie soliders hide behind walls and crates, ducking down to get a better shot. They chase you around corners before barrel rolling and ducking down to get you. They bunch themselves right up against pillars so you can't see them, they path-find through doors and other rooms to get you, I even saw one soldier try and climb through the railing that seperated him and me. Combined with the fact that things happen on all 4 sides since imps and spiders climb out of the ceiling and walls and scuttle down them with perfect animation and timing... means this is not a dumb or easy game.
Massive machinery, using grappling hooks to lift toxic barrels, using the relative safety of the roving sentry guns to aid your progress, listening to the radio chatter from your dying soldiers, following the scientist with the electric lamp as he leads you through the dark corridors (his shadow stretching up every wall with perfect accuracy), being scared by your own shadow, seeing enemies bend doors and rip them off their hinges before lunging at you, or crashing through glass windows... I could go on. There are plenty of scripted sequences, small and large indoor areas, you get out onto the surface of Mars, some enemies require you to just get in there and shoot, others require a bit more care. And slowly you descend into Hell, where the real fun begins.
Don't just dismiss Doom 3 as a simple blaster, it's an experience to be enjoyed and repeated. People's expectations are clouding their judgements, when id should be congratulated for doing exactly what they said they would do, create a scary, chilling re-imagining of the original Doom.
Stills look too artificial (Score:1, Interesting)
I have no doubt Doom 3 is a blast, but when I look at the stills I find them overly clinical and slightly jarring when compared to less advanced graphics engines. I guess its different once you see it *moving*. Not much chance of that on my 1.4Ghz PC.
I have the same feeling with some CG animation. To be honest, I'd rather go for an abstract representation (not that I have a choice with my PC) that my tiny brain can fill in the gaps with, than an an attempt to create this type of photo-realism.
Hey Valve, are you listening? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:freakin great (Score:3, Interesting)
They chase you around corners before barrel rolling and ducking down to get you. They bunch themselves right up against pillars so you can't see them, they path-find through doors and other rooms to get you..
Absoloutely. I had a bunch of spider demons follow me from three "areas" away. I hesitate to say rooms, because they weren't. They had to navagate areas that were inaccessable to me on foot, go through multiple doors, and each spider had to follow the the one in the lead. When I blasted them all, the spiders in the back who hadn't orginally seen me gave up, because they couldn't follow the leader anymore.
While following the leader isn't the height of AI, it at least is a good illustration that they gameplay is at least "realistic", at least as far as demons-in-space can be. To dismiss the AI as "dumb" is a bit of an oversimplification. Though you can't expect amzing things from your average spider-demon or headless zombie. The "higher ups" are alot more clever, though.
My post over at gamerankings was deleted - twice. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm proud of it. (Score:2, Interesting)
From Wolf and on, your games have always been the best of the best.
I don't know if you remember this, but I remember finding a BBS (MCI Worldcom?) where you and Abrash would go back and forth. I also remember you sharing bits of the source for DOOM as you developed it. At the time, I was an aspiring game developer (and kid) and your posts and sharing your ideas was so unbelievably helpful. Even though I took a different direction, your shared insight defintely made me a much better programmer than I would have been without. Can't wait to hit DOOM3
Somewhere, I still have a copy of that voxel editor you were toying around with for Doom.
Thanks,
-Lee
Machinima? (Score:3, Interesting)
Any chance you guys are planning some add-ons to specifically support machinima type activities (character/sprite editing, etc.), lighting editors, etc?
So basically what you're saying... (Score:3, Interesting)
It was, however, an excellent backdrop for environments that get increasingly weird. It's good as far as FPSs go, but I think Myst had a bit more weight to it's "story".
Re:Experiences thus far: (Score:3, Interesting)
But you're on a space station, filled with monsters... what else is there to do?
I find this logic very strage. The game designers chose to set the game there. If the setting limited what they could do, they should have changed or expanded the setting. If someone made a game set in one room with nothing in it, and people complained there was nothing to do, would you reply "well you are in empty room, what else is there to do?"
Can't have the flashlight out with the gun? That adds to the fear...
Or the frustration. Not to mention detracting from the realism and immersion when you're character can't do something they really should be able to. It's like those games that don't let you jump, and you can't get passed 1ft walls in them.
People who complain about that stuff, as far as I'm concerned are "spoiled" by shit like that...
Yeah, I'm spoiled by playing these games that have things I enjoy. I really should stop it and play more things I don't.
if you're in a riot situation are you gonna bitch that the pistol you grabbed and the maglight you found can't be one unit? No. You use what you have and deal with it.
Oh, so you hold the light in your off arm, and use that formarm to support the arm with pistol. Like police are trained to do, and you see in movies and TV all the time. Except your marine can't, so much for immersion.
Thats call "immersion" you stop thinking like a spoiled little person with unlimited resources and start thinking like a marine stuck out in space with only a few tools at his disposal...
That would be why Doom 3 limits the weapons you can carry at a time, right? And has scarce ammo. Oh wait...
Instead of realizing the amount of work and study that went into this, people are brats.
Well, if games were graded on effort, A+. It's results that count though, not the effort going into it. I don't care if the game was made by God and the hosts of heaven, it has to be fun to play. You can respect the person and still think the game sucks.
I'm looking forward to a generation of games built on this tech, that will look stunning and offer some great gameplay and new ideas. Not yet another corridor shooter.
Re:Quake3 engine open-source? When? (Score:1, Interesting)
Are you insane? How can you actually compare Doom 3 with Quake 3. Those are two absolutely genres. Yes they are FPS, granted, but one is a Multiplayer specific design, Quake 3, and the other is a Single player focused game, Doom 3. Q3 had a sucky single player experience because there really was none. It was basically to practice your deathmatching skill. Doom 3 is a single player experience from the get go that adheres to that the whole time. It is a very good title and probably one of iD's best releases to date. The atmosphere is spooky the graphics are the best out there bar none. The story is good and the game follows the story and the scripted events help carry the story.
Don't compare D3 with Q3.. that is the most asinine thing I've ever heard.
Re:Meanwhile (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm holding off on D3 and HL2 until the hardware to play them is more affordable. The gut-punch with the price isn't the $50 game, it's the extra $600 I need to play them properly. If I need a proc, mobo, ram, and a video card to play it, I'm going to try to sit on my gaming urge for a while and make do with C&C:Generals, BF1942, and the other previous-generation games that turned out great. NOLF 2, Max Payne, etc...
Now, if only I could find a copy of System Shock 2...
not for you (Score:2, Interesting)
That being said I'm enjoying Doom3, about 12 hours into it on Normal difficulty. Anyone complaining about stupid AI is probably playing it on easy so they can breeze through it and say they've played it.
Here's a thought. Maybe they don't make games for people who play them 10 hours a day & see the lack of secondary fire as a fatal game destroying flaw. Maybe they make games for people who play them for fun. You know, fun, sit down for a few hours & have a bash after work.
Re:The Doom 3 piracy troll... (Score:3, Interesting)
The only revolutionary thing about Doom 3 is that the rendering features span a plethora of platforms. Unfortunately, Activision has decided not to release a demo yet (OBVIOUSLY to increase sales), and gamers are left with the opinions of a few online reviewers to decide if they should pre-order/buy on release.
There are ALWAYS going to be people pirating, but I have a feeling that a lot of the increased pirate activity is gamers who are cautious about spening $55 on a game that may overtax their system, because they DON'T have the money around for $200-500 of upgrades...and don't want to be out $55 if that is the case.
NORMALLY, this problem would be solved by a demo, but Activision is obviously trying to squeeze the market as much as they can, since a certain percentage of gamers would not enjoy the demo enough to shell out for the game.
Activision thinks that by not releasing a demo, they can somehow squeeze more money out of these fairly dry markets...and it's blowing up in their face. The community has provided a demo, and I don't feel particularly sorry for Activision...they'll make TONS of dough, even though this is just a tired Doom game with fancy graphics.
Re:I'm proud of it. (Score:2, Interesting)
I especially liked the mars surface parts, which reminded me of the marathon series by bungie. The spider like things on the surface, while you're running out of air was an excellent touch. The ambient music was quite original too.
I don't know if this is the best game you guys have ever made, because I'm so attached to the older ones, but it's the best game I've played in a long time. It's pretty much the only game that a fellow physicists where I work were talking about. (big Doom fans I take it)
Thank you and everyone else at id software for the effort involved in bringing this fantastic game to us. I'm sure there's a lot of people wishing you luck on your next project. But not me
Re:The Doom 3 piracy troll... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now I have money but no time so I never pirate games. I do tend to buy the games I enjoyed way back when where available. Doom somehow I never liked that much, but I look forward to Space Quest 93.
Re:Get rid of all ambient light (Score:3, Interesting)
Playing Diablo 2 with my backlit PowerBook keyboard while on the toilet is one of life's simple pleasures.
Re:What makes the engine unique? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm proud of it. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I'm proud of it. (Score:1, Interesting)
I want to play with Doom 3 but i'm not going to buy it if can't test the game on my computer (performonances and hardware/driver issues).
Is this guy really John Carmack? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm proud of it. (Score:1, Interesting)
Also the sound and lightning effects are amazing.
I hope there will be a Doom IV
Re:I'm proud of it. (Score:3, Interesting)
I obliged though, I wanted to play your game. I even went as far as uninstalling daemon tools, and it still wouldnt start?
Why do I have to download a no cd patch to play the retail version of the game? Why would you do that? Why are you proud of that?
At liest you made pretty shadows. You did a really good job there at liest. But in about 20 years of gaming, I havent seen such complete crap ever, when trying to run a game. Never, ever, ever ever. I guess that's something to be proud of...
Re:I'm proud of it. (Score:2, Interesting)
I ask because can't decide if I should stick with my AMD-XP upgrade path from (1500+ to 2500+) or take the plung and switch to Intel's P4 HT or true Duel CPU mobo before I buy the game!