Slashdot Mirror
Doom 3 Gets Reviews, Piracy Questions, Exultation
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.
Jon is the legendary programmer of such classic PC games as Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke nukem 3d, Quake 1, 2, and 3, unreal, and the upcoming doom3. Jon has single handedly created the genre known as the first-person-shooter. He has also popularized the OpenGL 3d format over Microsoft's competing Direct3d format, as well as caused public interest in 3d cards when he first released accelerated quake for the s3 virge chipset. Jon carmack has redefined gaming on PC's.
Now stop for a moment and think, What would have happened if Albert Einstein had worked creating amazing pinball games instead of creating the theory of relativity? Humanity would suffer! Jon carmack is unfortunately doing JUST THIS, using his gifts at computer coding to create games instead of furthering the knowledge of humanity. Carmack could have been working for NASA or the US military, but instead he simply sits around coding violent computer games.
Is this a waste of a special and rare talent? Sadly, the answer is yes.
Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. Not only is Jon carmack not contributing to society, he is causing it's downfall. What was the main reason for the mass murder of dozens of people in columbine? Doom. It's always the same story: Troubled youth plays doom or quake, he arms himself to the teeth, he kills his classmates. This has happened hundreds of times in the US alone. Carmack is not only wasting his talents and intelligence; he is single-handedly causing the deaths of many young men and women. How does he sleep at night?
Carmack is a classic example of a very talented and intelligent human being that is bent on total world destruction. Incredibly, he has made millions of dollars getting people hooked on psychotic games where they compete on the internet to see who can dismember the most people. I believe there is something morally wrong when millions of people have computerized murder fantasies, and we have Jon Carmack to thank. Carmack has used his superior intellect to create mayhem in society. Many people play games such as quake so much that their minds are permanently warped. A cousin of mine has been in therapy for 6 months after he lost a 'death match' and became catatonic.
It is unfortunate that most people do not realize how much this man has damaged all the things we have worked hard for in America. Jon has wasted his intelligence, caused the deaths of innocent children, and warped this country forever. To top it off, he got rich in the process and is revered by millions of computer users worldwide. Perhaps one day the US government will see the light and confine Jon Carmack somewhere with no computers so he can no longer use his intelligence to wreak havoc on society.
And it's good :) doesn't run so hot on my setup though..
:-/ great for the story.. bad for my trigger finger
amd athlon xp 2400+
512mb ddr 400
7200rpm hard drive
nvidia geforce 4 ti 4400 (128mb)
it doesn't detect my surround sound setup (sb live! with klipsch pro media 4.1's)
it runs at medium detail @ 640x480 and gets pretty choppy in places...
my only complaint so far is that it's so dark that even the flashlight doesn't even really let you see much (i'm trying not to turn my brightness up but it seems i may have to so i don't keep running into guard rails and such)...
overall though.. i think the intro was a bit long.. i wanna kill stuff.. and kill it i shall... after the 15-20 minute introduction
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
I'm going to buy Doom3 from id directly at the id Store. When there's a game I really get a lot out of (or plan to in this case), I try to buy directly from the developer to give them as big a cut of the pie as I can. They get full SRP instead of what's left from the middle man.
My way of thanking companies that still create good titles.
Perhaps I am being naive, but I really don't see the multiplayer support as being that big of an issue.
Unreal Tournament and others have filled the niche of playing head to head rather well. No one cares as much about the graphics quality, the omg lighting effects, the dark horror of the story...they care about fragging that bastard who just got the rocket pack you were headed for.
Doom 3 seems much more a single player game and well appreciated for it. I expect that in time, multiplayer will be beefed up some and become more viable. But for the time being, this is a single player game that seems to be kicking ass at showcasing great effects, great design and a good story-line.
I've always been curious as to how you can rate the technology down to a single percent. Same goes for all the other parts of the game (interface 92%, Grpahics 95%).
Most sites have (wisely) abandonned such an approach and rather go with a 1-5 scale or A,B,C,D,E ratings (with +/-).
I mean come on...
Come on, linking to 100 screenshots of Doom III in a slashdot blurb? That's just cruel.
Alphanos
they said they're doing something totally new... quake 4 is being done by someone else, and the wolfenstein series is being done by someone else.. so they're doing something totally new this time around and they should be starting on it soon.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
One problem that contributes to piracy is release dates. In the UK, Doom 3 will be released on the 13th, and, being such a long awaited game, it's inevitable that people here will download it, rather than waiting for over a week longer than those living in the US.
I've got 4 computers at my disposal of various capabilities, and this is how Doom3 has run on them:
XP 2600
Ati Rad 9800 Pro
2 x WD Raptor striped raid
1GB PC3200 Corsair
Can run smooth on High settings at 800x600, AA disabled. Game looks fantastic
------
XP 2000
Geforce FX 5200
80GB 2mb buffer maxtor
512MB PC2700 Generic
Barely runs at 640x480. Framerates are in the 10-20 range. Would not recommend purchasing if you have similar specs. Upgrading the CPU or video card would have the largest impact.
------------
P4 2.4Ghz B
ATI Radeon 9500
512MB PC2100
2 x 80GB Maxtor Striped RAID
Runs smooth on Medium settings at 640x480, or Low at 800x600. Definitely playable.
-----------
Haven't tried the 4th yet, but I don't hold much hope. It's an XP 1600 w/ GF4 Ti4200.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Thanks for sharing the good news. There aren't enough high quality games focused on the single player as it is. You want multiplayer, go play all the rest.
From the BBC article:
"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 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".
What FPS have you played that didn't involve primarily going from room to room and shooting things? Half-Life, the previous holder of the "best single player FPS" crown was exactly the same. Walk, shoot, repeat. It's all about presentation, which both games have done very well at.
One of my favorite things in the original Doom games was getting monsters to fight each other. And id clearly designed some levels to encourage this.
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
For those of you finding the game too dark try these settings:
1)In game bring down the console (ctrl alt ~)
2)r_gamma 1.3 - The default is 1, try a range from 1.2-1.4, some have said to go as high as 1.8 but that is way too bright and takes away from the atmosphere imho.
3)r_brightness 1.5 - Again the default is 1, try a range up 1.8 to what looks best for you.
4) Turn off AA, turn on vsync on.
To boost performance try this!
In your DOOM 3 directory, find "DoomConfig.cfg" (x:\Program Files\Doom 3\base). Open DoomConfig.cfg in Notepad.
Find the line:
seta image_cacheMegs "XX"
Where XX is try increasing this value in according to how much ram you have. I have 1 GB of ram, and set it to 256, HUGE boost in framerate, game runs a lot smoother now. Try these values: 32, 96, 128, 256.
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
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
With the release of Doom3 today, I am taking two weeks of vacation effective immediately. I will not be reachable by direct email, cell phone or smoke signals. Should you feel the need to contact me, please leave a message and I will respond when I stop playing the game because I started hallucinating.
It make take me a while to respond as I expect my fingers to have fallen off by that point. Also, I will most likely be unintelligeable so be prepared not to understand a word I say. After two weeks, please alert all my co-workers to my return. They will need to prepare for my two weeks of body odor as well as purchase very dark sunglasses. I expect I will be very pale by then, perhaps blindingly pale.
Sincerely,
Your local Space Marine.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
How long till a Linux binary appears?
I tried running it under WineX (Cedega) and it just went into an infinite loop loading. I tried installing win2k on a partition to run it, and the installer BSoD'ed. Too afraid to try it on my laptop.
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?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Yeah, the single player game is great. I'm decently far in (I have the BFG) and I'd have to say that the atmosphere and tension are excellent. I'll be moving slowly through an environment, wondering where the next group of enemies will pop up, and then something will happen and I'll find myself in an intense fight. The beginning of the game has a lot of smaller encounters -- don't worry, the difficulty and intensity continues to escalate throughout the game. While the game itself tends to be fairly linear, I think it's understandable in that it's more of a methodical, horror type game that makes use of scripted effects and sequences to heighten the tension and terror. At the point I'm at I feel constantly nervous with a sense of foreboding; while I've been scared I haven't jumped out of my chair (unlike my girlfriend, who had to stop playing)
I have played 4 player DM with my friends and I have to say that it's a blast. I've always preferred smaller DM (I don't see the point in spawning, killing a guy who happens to be next to you, then dying quickly), and the well designed DM maps are very fun to play on. I've had a good mix between surprises and insane firefights (wait until you try berserk mode!)
Regarding how well it runs: I have an Athlon XP 1600+ with 512 MB of RAM and a Geforce FX 5700 Ultra. I can play in 1024x768 at medium quality with high effects and only experience some occasional stuttering. One of my friends has a similar computer with a Geforce4 MX and he says that 800x600 at medium runs very smooth.
All in all, I'm very pleased with this game and would say that it definately lives up to the hype. Make sure your monitor brightness is set to a decent level -- at first I had mine way too dark, and the game wasn't nearly as enjoyable. You should be able to see your environment without a flashlight. Also be sure to set your system to surround sound in Control Panel->Sounds and Audio->Volume Tab->Advanced, as the game doesn't support EAX and its autodetection or whatever.
"Brand new console" is something of a misnomer here. Do you mean the 4-year-old console that was $300 when it came out (PS2) or the 3-year-old console that was also $300 (Xbox)?
Let's not forget that these consoles were sold *below* cost with the intention of making money on the games.
I'm not saying $55 isn't a lot for a video game, but comparing it to the price of 4-year-old consoles that were sold at a loss doesn't prove anything. What you should compare it to is console titles, because console titles are supposed to make up the loss on the consoles. OTOH, PC titles have no need to make up said loss, so why are they getting just as high as the console titles?
UT2004 was a nice exception, costing me only $25.
-Dan
After two hours of getting creeped out, eaten alive, ass kicked, munched on. pulled down the ever so trusty in-game commandline, typed in the words:
spawn monster_boss_cyberdemon
Holy mother of God! Is that...omg!!...
Yes, that is Bill Gates' head in a jar.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
In the US legal system, copying a copyrighted work without proper permission is a particular crime known as "copyright infringement".
It is legally distinct from theft... "the felonious
taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same".
In a case of illegal copying, no property is actually removed from the rightful owner.
I'm not saying that makes it any less illegal, or makes it morally justified, but the earlier poster was at least correct in that it is -not- theft.
I'd mod you up if I hadn't wanted to post.
The ID crew should load up Thief 3 and play "The Cradle". "The Cradle" is scary but interesting. Instead of a never ending stream of monsters, you have a limited amount, and they're not actually all out to get you per default. You can engage, or you can sneak past. One option more than in Doom 3 (as far as I can tell)
"The Cradle" is scary because you'll imagine the worst possible thing happening all the time, and even though the worst possible thing that you imagine doesn't happen, the game use sound, visual and story-telling to keep you on your toes throughout.
In Doom 3, the worst possible thing pretty much happens every turn. If there's a ledge with an item on it, the ledge will fall as you walk on it. If you're backing into a dark corner, there will be a zombie waiting for you This is a much less rewarding experience overall.
Take the place where you find the first shotgun. ID's design: Put a piece of ammo/armor on the floor off the given path. Player jumps over rail the grab item, floor falls out, player ends up in dark room with three/four zombies attacking.
I would probably have designed it thus for a first try: .. player jumps over rail to grab item, floor falls out revealing dark room, player+floor ends up falling on zombie, killing it (can use humor here). Lessons learned: 1) Be careful where you walk. 2) Dangerous creatures are lurking for you in the darkness. 3) They can be killed by dropping heavy things in their heads.
Both approaches would teach the player that exploration is rewarded and that it can be dangerous, one just isn't so obvious about it.
Doom 3 just made me realize how good a game Thief really is. Way underrated.
At least in Thief the lighting made sense most of the time.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
System Shock 2
(Well, it could be played other ways than just run and gun -- almost adventure game style instead of FPS.)
-Tom
I have to disagree with you; I've been playing with the gamma set to "normal" levels, so I can't see the baddies in the shadows unless I use the flashlight. In a darkened room, with the headphones up fairly loud, the game is overwhelmingly intense. The time it takes to switch the flashlight back to your weapon, shooting at vague shadows in the dark, realizing you've just run from a pack of imps into a pitch-black corridor, the whole lighting scheme (and/orlack thereof) is a huge part of the game.
I know some of my feelings for this game come from the excitement of playing the original, and seeing how well they've improved on it, but I think this game still calls for setting your own environment to "ultra-creepy" and immersing yourself.
John
Until game manufacturers make buying the game a higher quality experience than pirating it, piracy is going to continue to be a "problem". To illustrate my point, let's compare my experience buying the game with that of my friend who downloaded it.
.iso image in sequence using Daemon Tools to install each disc (at much faster speeds than loading from a CD). He has no problems reading some cheaply produced CD. He just installs the no CD patch from the beginning, rather than trying to work around iD's ineffective copy protection. He's up and running with the game before I've had a chance to buy it.
Here's my experience: I bought the game just after midnight last night. I waited in line for about 25 minutes to pay $54.99 for the game. I missed getting the free T-shirt because too many other people showed up before me and they ran out. I go home and start to install the game from the CD's. Disc 1 has a serious problem and keeps failing reading at about 98% of the way through. Eventually after trying 2 different CD-ROM drives and cleaning the brand-new disc several times, I am able to get it to read and continue the install. Now, after the game is installed, I try to run it. It won't let me start without disc 1 in the drive. Okay, I get out disc 1 again and put it in the drive. Now it tells me it won't run because I have CD emulation software running. Okay, I disable daemon tools. Still, Doom 3 refuses to load. At this point, I give up and download the NoCD patch. After that, everything works fine.
Compare this experience to that of my friend. My friend just clicked the download link on a Bittorrent site and waited a few hours. After that, he loads each
Obviously, I'm being the good moral person by purchasing the game. However, the fact remains that my experience is notably worse than that of my friend who just pirated it. I guess the game developers don't care.
My other first post is car post.
The cheats and consoelc commands have changed some since the alpha version. One of our users posted a pretty good list here:
:)
Doom 3 Console Commands and cheats
If you figure out any more, please let me know.
I didn't really get that old doom feeling until I turned on noclip and walked through a few walls anyway.
Warning: attempted humour
Doom Three: Two simple words --the former a noun, or transitive verb; the latter the third ordinal, or second prime. But together, they bond to become a powerful concept. One greater than the sum of its parts, a new world-view paradigm, a religion, a little boy's wish, a grown man's hope, yet so much more that cannot be said. I cannot wait -- as I write this from the queue outside my local game shop, my hand trembles; it's cold and the last eight days here have been lonely at night. I sit here, shaking in anxiety for the shop to open, feverishly and unconciously tugging at myself through my ripped pockets, salivating at the thought of buying that precious 27-CD shrink wrapped bundle of frag-laden joyness. I can no longer feel the pain of hunger gnawing at me, or my unblinked eyes drying out as mosquito after mosquito lay filthy eggs on my unmoving door-focused corneas.
Once I get my stinking body inside, punching, kicking and gouging all who stand in my way before setting paws on the box, the sweaty, piss soaked bundle of canadian dollars hurled across the counter, not waiting for the reciept (I WILL NEVER RETURN IT) I shall then flee home, globs of frosted faeces tumbling down my trouser legs, to rip the box to shreds as I scamper up the stairs to my apartment door, barely avoiding slipping to my death on the spattering of saliva that spews ahead as I gurgle and scream. I spend two days loading CD after CD of the Carmack code mana into my pathetic 40GB drive, uninstalling and carelessly -- and joyfully -- deleting any important files/documents or Windows DLLs that stand in my way until all 18.5GB of its magnificant glory sits arranged in pretty streams of bytes in the hallowed magnetic media of my laptop's Winchester. I wait, wait and wait some more as the last bit is flipped from 1 to 0 and XP coughs yet another 32x32 icon onto my disorganized desktop. I grab my Razer Viper, impatient fingers biting into the sides of it like a hawk plucking a salmon from a river -- I slide the mouse smoothly to the icon and double click... first slowly, then rapidly speeding up, I begin clicking like some kind of maniacal parkinsons afflicted beta tester, not caring whether I spawn one or a hundred copies of the executable. I just want to see something. I can't wait any longer. NOW.
SHOW ME LIGHTMAPS DAMMIT.
The cooling fan audibly shifts gears in my AthlonXP 2200+ laptop; whining, whirring like some kind of demented air conditioner and I swear the screen is sweating -- maybe it's excited too? I hear the dulcit squeals of pain as my motherboard integrated radeon IGP 320, radeon 7000 equivalent video card struggles to preload megabyte after megabyte of 32 bit texture into the 64MB of shared SDRAM that it so tenuously controls.
SHOW ME DYNAMIC LIGHTS, DAMMIT.
I notice a strange smell from somewhere, something new, sharp on the nose, not at all like the waft of dried urine that sneaks around under the desk; what is that? As I unconsciously let another flow of hot piss run down my leg -- this is no time for toilet pleasantries -- I ponder the source of the new acrid smell, whilst mainly watching the harddrive light flicker, then remain permanently on. Thefan shifts gears once more.
SHOW ME TRILINEAR FILTERING, DAMMIT.
Fifteen minutes pass, the smell grows stronger; I imagine in my minds eye, each CPU clock cycle, 1.8 million times a second, sucking, pumping and routing that precious bytestream and distributing it to all the hardware that comprises my sub-1000$ laptop. Suddenly, *POOF*, the magic blue smoke appears, wispy at first, then blows rapidly in large plumes from all vents as the CPU fan generates gusts best measured on the Beaufort scale. Then, the screen fades rapidly to a white dot: "Oh the suspense!" I squeal to myself with glee. For a few moment
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
most gamer kids just don't have that
... please tell me where you get these numbers from. One of your own orifices will not suffice as a source, btw. The argument goes both ways as well ... if more people would buy the game then companies wouldn't have to hike the price up to maintain their profit margins. Additionally - assuming the price derives from greed is just that, an assumption. Have you considered the long development cycle, and that perhaps paying their programmers and support staff for the extra year or two ( in comparison to other games ) might be the reason for the increased price, in addition to the need to compensate for piracy?
Yet somehow these same gamer kids can afford the hardware needed to run Doom 3. There is a difference between not having the money, and simply not being willing to spend it.
If Id and Activision would sell it for $29.95, their sales would probably increase 500 to 700 percent. Overpricing because of greed will be the kiss of death.
And this gets modded up as insightful somehow
Give id credit for their work, guys. From every moment I'm in the game I see the considerable amount of work put into every square meter of the level. I got the game today, and I can say that this is the most complete, engrossing, and well-executed FPS I have ever played. Its lack of innovation, instead of making me dislike the game (new wheels don't have to be invented to make a great game!) makes me want to strangle all other FPSes to at least get them to the level of Doom 3. Judging from the more negative reviews of the game, the main cause of the feelings is more overly high expectations than anything else--did you really expect (Doom 3 > FPS > shooting at lots of AI bots) to return true? I didn't. But, in my opinion, iD has taken a very tired, though tried and true, formula and made it so the formula wasn't so easy to see. Repetitive play? When the individual elements that are being repetitive are greater than the sum of their parts, it gives you a high--a reason to go on to the next room, a reason to press the quick load key. It's like repeatedly doing very well in Counterstrike and proving time and time again to the rival clan memebr who thinks he owns you that he is t3h nub. Far Cry had a similar level of repetitiveness, but it didn't feel creative, it didn't give me the sense of chaos and unending mayhem that Doom 3 does. You scream repetition, but I gladly agree with you. Just not with "Doom 3 sucking."
A game can be hugely innovative, executing the most ambitious of design docs--but all of this falls flat without sufficient Little Things That Add Up (TM). It makes me feel as if people are bashing Doom 3 because when they are playing, they aren't really "playing" it--they spend so much time looking for the big picture (Doom 3 is just another FPS) that they miss those little things.
The multiplayer is forgettable overall. It seemed like an afterthought (or a bone tossed to the kiddies who refuse to play anything that they can't pwnz0r other people at online), which it was, since Doom 3 was meant to be primarily single player.
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.
I can:
.com and .net versions of the site, he finally kicks off the download.
Mom, dad, I need this computer with a radeon 9800XT and a 3 Ghz HT P4 because I will be studying all the time and I have to do it to do good in class. I can even use it to run programs to help with stuff for college and all
"well, johnny, ok, if you will be using it to study and it will really help you get into a good college then I think it's a good 2500 dollars spent. *to store clerk* I don't know much about these computers but my son does and he has to have the top of the line for school so just get whatever he thinks is good."
3 months later, with no work ever being done on the computer, the parent realizes all the computer is now being used for is chatting online, reading email, and games that were bought ages ago. Doom III is released.
Dad, I want to get this oh so cool game dad. Everyone is buying it and it's the coolest thing ever.
Dad, while not knowing much about computers, knows about scams and suddenly realizes he was being completely played for a fool. He says "no" and Johnny still wants that game. Oh what ever does a young school boy do, who spends all his time doing nothing very productive(part time jobs are not an option for johnny, he isn't used to his parents seeing through his bullshit, but then, this is probably the first time it cost so much).
Part time jobs are not the option but his best buddy just told him about suprnova, a great sight that you can get anything for free. After misspelling the name several times and going to the
Yeah, this happens. I did it once, convincing my parents that a top of the line computer was needed for school. Unfortunately my uncle and aunt are computer engineers so they got calls first and my bull shit only had a slight effect. Not so many people have that uncle or aunt who can ruin those hard worked plans.
By the end of the year. There are still a lot of higher priority things, but it is coming soon.
Hopefully punkbuster will keep the source release from having any negative impact on the player community.
John Carmack
Would one of those higher priority things be providing duct tape to the largest, most powerful high tech company in the solar system that happens to run an installation on Mars that seems to have a high percentage of leaking ducts?
It is also useful for taping flashlights to weapons, or the side of one's helmet.
Thanks,
A Concerned Marine.
(I kid - please don't send flaming skulls to my house;)
I am extremely proud of Doom 3. I think it is the best game we have ever made, and it exceeded all of my expectations. That is a rather trite phrase, but it is literally true -- I had a good set of expectations for how the game would turn out based on the technologies that it was built on, and it wound up being just plain better than that.
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
It's been a slow couple of years for the PC games industry, and for the fps genre in particular. Until the release of Farcry earlier this year, there had been little in the way of technological progress since iD released Quake 3. Since then, we've seen countless games using Quake 3's engine, but little in the way of genuine innovation. 2004 promises to change this; there have been three really promising titles this year, namely Farcry, Doom III and Half-Life 2.
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