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Single-Player Doom 3 Details Discussed
MohitKhanna writes "GameSpy has posted a new preview of Doom 3, along with a couple of new screenshots from the game. The article gives an insight into what the single-player story mode of Doom 3 will be like, and also introduces a few new monsters." Blue's News has a good round-up of the other Doom 3 articles released today, also including a new Tim Willits and Todd Hollenshead interview at GameArena, and this 2004-due FPS is also previewed at Eurogamer and checked out via GameSpot.
For me, personally, it's really the atmosphere of the original Doom. Particularly Knee-Deep in the Dead (the first episode), with its brilliantly laid out levels, the suggestive misty sky (its impact is more important than you might think :), hunting for secret areas, and the awesome surreal design in general.
Besides, the gameplay is top notch. And you can make levels for the game.
doom was 'really something else' when it came, the '3d' of it all was quite something. even though it was basically just a rehash of wolfenstein 3d, it had enough new things to be really cool(area lighting for example, blinking lights and stuff). also the gameplay was quite good, dodging fireballs and shooting demons, you could choose a tactic in most places too.
(though, ultima underworld does have more elegant engine for most parts, doom is still so arcade in it's approach(no friendly npc's, no story to talk about, most levels being honest 'get 3 keys' missions) that it works for far bigger audience and is quite excellent for short gaming sessions as for longer sessions as well)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
One thing both I and my wife agree on is that the original Doom is still, to this day, the most *satisfying* gameplay experience of any of the first person shooters. It's nowhere near as pretty, complex, scary, or even interesting as the newer ones when you get right down to it, but it's still the most satisfying.
This is for a number of reasons. The first and most common one that we can recount is the "one shot, one kill" effect that you can get as soon as you pick up the shotgun. And in fact, the level design emphasized this effect as the first level had a place where you open a door to be confronted by an imp at close range. Your first reaction is to jump and pull the the trigger - BOOM! Imp flies backwards, dead. It's immensely satisfying..something just scared the bejeebers out of you and you killed it, just like that. Talk about your instant gratification. And you could do this with basically all of the lower class enemies.
It seems most of the more recent FPS games require you to unload quite a few shots, even of some of the higher level weapons, before anything at all will fall down. Sure, they all have their one-shot, one-kill weapons, but typically these are specialized like a sniper rifle, which requires using a scope or aim-bot like abilities, or a rocket-launcher type of weapon, which you dare not use in close quarters because you'll likely take yourself out with it as well.
A second reason, though less obvious, is that the first few weapons in Doom are all simply more powerful versions of the previous one. Even Quake messed this up somewhat, in that one of the early weapons you pick up is the nail gun. While more powerful, it's also more specialized -- it works better with some enemies than others. Doom didn't make you think about that until you got quite a few levels in and picked up your first rocket launcher.
Together, these two things worked to make the game simple, satisfying, and gave it a great flow. You could run through the game and if you were good, you'd never have to stop to finish killing something. Your first shot was enough.
The one shot, one kill effect also had other bonuses in that when you started running into guys that you couldn't do that with, you inherently understood that you were dealing with something nastier. It felt more like a difference in kind, rather than (as with most of the newer games) a difference merely in degree.
The final thing about Doom was that the control was *smooth*. Unless you were playing on a bottom of the barrel computer, there was no question of what framerate you were getting, because you were getting enough.
All in all, it combined to make Doom a classic.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze