everything wrong with doom3 can be levied against its pacing

[Mk7_Centipede]

Doom 3 has some great moments in it, but it doesnt really bill itself as anything other than a remake of knee deep in the dead.  we dont really interact with the main antagonist until halfway through the game.  and after 6 hours of killing demons there are still temps looking for screwdrivers in dark crevices.  The entire pda plot seems to confirm that everyone just kept acting normal as all hell broke out- yet when you arrive lost souls burth forth from the stargate and zombify everyone but you.  Hence, the entire time you are never really sure if you are witnessing events or showing up after the carnage.

 

This is endemic of the entire game too, as even the protagonist is halfway between a faithful rendition of doomguy and a new character entirely.  the heavier doom monsters fail to appear in the game and yet we have half a dozen lost soul clones (if you count the crawling monsters) that all suck [clones of the most annoying doom enemy ffs].

 

There isnt any real buildup to the stargate with barons walking through them.  most of all the experiments you come across are plasma lasers and exploding rooms.  and then there are like 2 teleporters, which seem kinda obviously the main thing.  heck, the new doom annihilaton movie did a better job of making cler what the uac does.  even in doom2016, going to hell is a major plot point and you fight hte cyber demon twice.

 

but in doom3, you dont have a dialog with the antagonist until you get to hell.  Sure, he appeared on roughly 2 computer screens- but in hell he is talking to you as you move through the levels.  You hadnt really been in constant dialog with anyone for the first 6 hours of gameplay, then the badguy starts speaking to you and its a breath of fresh air.  it sure seems like they could have easily conveyed that the enpyro squad was your squad, and that drB is in charge of enpyro and responsible for your squadmates death.  BAM motivation!  instead he seems like this distant guy that maybe accidentally started the hell invasion or something so he is gordon freeman?

 

WHat is with this giant mechanical gyrating cybernetic heart?  doom3 looks great once you tread past 2 episodes of labs.  in a very on-the-nose manner, the devs explain to us their playtesting ailments and cool geo constructs via pda messages.  but not the giant mechanical cyber heart.  its just not really important to the story at all.  looks fantastic, but doesnt mean anything.  i have no idea why this is like that.  but it do.

 

the lost mission imo absolutely kills it with execution.  you get to talk to a guy on the screen pretty early and he gives you a mission.  no need to spend 6 hours looking for a squad only to never find them.  i think we could have walked in on barons coming through portal and killing squadmates.  i mean, what, we see a baron smash a scientist?  oh no not another dead scientist!  but i like the more soldier-friendly cunt that wants to avenge his friends and totally has no love for the uac.  at the very least complete his mission despite the bullshit going on at the research facility.  i mean, it seems logical.

 

doom3guy doesnt really have a macguffic where he is immune to the lost soul swarm that turns everyone into a zombie (half life gives you the hev suit).  i think the lost souls coming out of tv screens but not getting to doom3guy is a bit of a stretch.  it just doesnt make any intuitive sense and ruins the pacing because you are forever confused as to whether you are arriving after the fact or witnessing things happen.  and doom3 never really decides to go one way or another.  the lost mission is rather clear that you wake up after the fact and everything is storyboarded to the player in game.  you never spend extended periods of time looking for something that isnt there.  hell in doom3 was handled pretty dang well but the fantasy aspect is taken to some cool extremes.

 

in doom 3 i never really felt like i knew the direction i was headed, but the lost mission does a lot to let you see the path ahead of the player.  hell in doom3 isnt scary.  some of the techbase themes are pretty intense imo, but nothing in hell is frightening and its kinda weird.  you lose all your guns to be given most of them back immediately.  i dont even know what the point of that was tbh.  i dont think the lost mission bothers with the soul cube or whatever.  roe kinda shied away from imps because vagaries throw fireballs that are easier to catch with the grabber.  feels like we got 6 lost soul variants and 6 imp variants at this point, and almost none of them are more interesting than the basic imp & lost soul.  is the maggot an imp variant or pinky variant?  and why are the revenants and archvile (and doom3guy) so slow?

 

oh, hell has infinite run?  why isnt their infinite run on mars and you are slower in hell?  i dont understan why the game gets easier when you go to hell.  it doesnt make any sense tbh.  and like imps look different?  like ok.  look different and be easier.  hurray hell!

 

literally none of the weapons share the same ammo.  the enemy variety is stunted.  you dont know any story or lore until the final act of the game.  and nobody talks about te giant metal heart thingy.  it seems like half-life and halo should have given the id crew more pointers as to how to effectively convey narrative and gameplay.  especially if your focus is to have more story and cutscenes and fright.  none of the expansions even have you playing as the same character, even if you are still the same model and voice.  why the hell was anyone wanting to play with a soul cube when there wasnt even a ssg?

 

is doom 3 just a half baked game?  why are there trites and ticks and cherubs that all basically do the same thing?  why didnt they just give the imp more anmations rather than making an entirely new enemy just to come out of a crawl space and act like an imp?  did nobody see 28 days later and think "man it would be cool if some of our zombies or demosn were fast and threatening!" but id software managed to slow down the speed of the revenant between its final trailer and release?

 

i feel like there is a good game inside all the content that is doom3, but its really hard to get at.  i think the lost mission does a great job of distilling the quality aspects of d3.  i dunno what to say other than i wish doom3 was so much more than what it was.  i just dont think they had any real design goals besides make cool scifi horror stuff.  i think doom1 had more polished narrative tbh.  at least knee deep in the dead had an inspired monster selection- whereas alpha labs throws all these random one off monsters at you when it should just be zombies and imps.  e2m8 has more story than the fight with saboath- i had no indication that there was about to be a boss fight in doom3.

 

doom2016 does the story right in many ways by pointing out that the uac wants to open a portal to hell.  doom3 makes it seem like they were just making lasers and hten demons showed up but they dont believe in demons so they get eaten because they are stupid.  but that is lame.  the uac is bad.  it opens portals to hell ffs.  they do that with intent- but nowhere in doom3 does any character or organization seem to have any intent or desire to open a portal to hell.  Betruger seems to just want to have experiements, like making cool lasers and find screwdrivers.  like hell is just some backstory?  its obvious that betruger is the badguy.  but why is he a badguy?  he seems to be pretty highly funded scientist.  he cant even read the artifacts as far as i know and he seems to be the biggest demon in hell.  sure.

 

i mean, is doom3 really just one big work accident and nobody is to blame?  if so that has got to be the lamest narrative setup ever conscieved of in gaming history.

[reflex17]

I agree pacing is a large part of it, it plays much more like a survival horror game. The thing I miss out of Doom 3 and 2016 compared to the originals is more 'complex' level design, and excessive amounts of monsters. Even in Doom and Doom 2 vanilla there are times during the base game when you genuinely feel outnumbered.

 

The 'work accident' side of the story is probably just a symptom of having to make a narrative from an, at that time, 11 year old game that didn't really have an extensive story to begin with. Every iteration of idtech was a exponential increase in capability and id was always more concerned with making something "cool" as opposed to "world building" in the strictest sense, especially early on.

Edited December 28, 2019 by reflex17

[seed]

6 minutes ago, reflex17 said:

The thing I miss out of Doom 3 and 2016 compared to the originals is more 'complex' level design, and excessive amounts of monsters. Even in Doom and Doom 2 vanilla there are times during the base game when you genuinely feel outnumbered.

 

If you wanted to limit the game's audience well sure, but that couldn't really be done at the time considering the limited power of the hardware - that the game pushed to its limits anyway.

 

HL2 did not have a lot of enemies on-screen either, for instance, likely to avoid making the PCs fold. Having over 20-30 enemies in view like in the originals would have been less than ideal.

Edited December 28, 2019 by seed

[reflex17]

1 hour ago, seed said:

 

If you wanted to limit the game's audience well sure, but that couldn't really be done at the time considering the limited power of the hardware - that the game pushed to its limits anyway.

 

HL2 did not have a lot of enemies on-screen either, for instance, likely to avoid making the PCs fold. Having over 20-30 enemies in view like in the originals would have been less than ideal.

 

For sure, there's the balance of the programmer's ideal to push the limits of what they're doing, coupled with a marketplace that is always on the lookout for the next cool upgrade. The atmosphere of the games increased so much over time, from Quake, to Doom 3, to HL2, etc. It's completely different yeah because the technology is apples and oranges compared to old school graphics routines. I've always felt the action sequences in these games could benefit from more enemies in encounters, and there being more encounters in general, so in my dream world that's the case. This is all my opinion, and in hindsight of course.

 

One of my favorite quotes from a game dev is from Fumito Ueda, who directed games like Shadow of the Colossus and the Last Guardian, which are usually considered cult hits and "art" when it comes to videogames. When asked in an interview what he thought of this perception, he refuted it saying something like games are a product meant to sell units, so there are certain considerations that must always be taken into account when one keeps this in mind. Making a game is always between what you want to do vs. what you actually can, I suppose.

Edited December 28, 2019 by reflex17

[Mk7_Centipede]

i would move alpha labs and saboath after the cyberdemon tbh.

[Tetzlaff]

19 hours ago, Mk7_Centipede said:

doom2016 does the story right in many ways by pointing out that the uac wants to open a portal to hell.  doom3 makes it seem like they were just making lasers and hten demons showed up but they dont believe in demons so they get eaten because they are stupid.  but that is lame.  the uac is bad.  it opens portals to hell ffs.  they do that with intent- but nowhere in doom3 does any character or organization seem to have any intent or desire to open a portal to hell. 

 

The UAC in Doom 3 isn't evil by itself. They are interested in all kinds of research and there's plenty of explanation what the different sections are researching when you pay attention to the in-game videos and PDAs. They discovered hell when experimenting with teleportation technology. Because they are scientists, they don't instantly believe they found literal hell, in their eyes it's a strange dimension with unknown alien creatures. Which makes sense. The UAC in Doom2016 looks like a bunch of idiots in comparison. When they discover the hell dimension, Olivia Pierce installs a crazy ass satanic corporate cult and everyone seems fine with it. And still it doesn't prevent the demons from slaughtering everyone.

[seed]

7 minutes ago, Tetzlaff said:

The UAC in Doom2016 looks like a bunch of idiots in comparison. When they discover the hell dimension, Olivia Pierce installs a crazy ass satanic corporate cult and everyone seems fine with it. And still it doesn't prevent the demons from slaughtering everyone.

 

+ they willingly sacrificed people as well, as indicated by some screens in the game.

 

The UAC in D2016 are a bunch of lunatics, to almost comic book levels too.

Edited December 29, 2019 by seed

[Eurisko]

I enjoyed Doom 3 but yeah , the pacing is a bitch. It does feel like a slog at times and when I finished it I was ready to be done with it. However , I would still recommend it to folks who've never played it.

 

[HorrorMovieRei]

I think those are all fair pieces of criticism to level against Doom 3. The abundance of "swarm type" enemies as I like to call them being the worst offender as far as gameplay goes. Pacing is pretty bad too, and 75% of the game taking place in the same boring techbase setting does not help at all. All of the levels just kinda blend together when all you see are monitors and crates and catwalks and such. Even in classic Doom I think techbase can get boring in large amounts, but at least in classic Doom you can do something interesting with it gameplay wise with fun encounters. Doom 3 tries to keep things more grounded in reality, and doesn't benefit from the inherent abstract quality of classic Doom's simplistic geometry anyway so, yeah.

 

I still like Doom 3 and think it is a good game, but is definitely the weakest out of the Doom games. It has, comparatively, the least staying power too.

 

1 hour ago, seed said:

The UAC in D2016 are a bunch of lunatics, to almost comic book levels too.

I think this is precisely what they were going for, as stated by Hugo Martin way back when Doom 2016 was announced I think.

[seed]

1 hour ago, HorrorMovieGuy said:

I think this is precisely what they were going for, as stated by Hugo Martin way back when Doom 2016 was announced I think.

 

I know, he mentioned this in NoClip's series too.

 

I was just pointing out the obvious :p .

[CalhounBarn]

I also agree, the gameplay pacing is far too boring to stick with for a full playthrough. The weapons are equally bland to use, especially against the predictable cannon fodder demons. I will say that the Plasma Gun is an exception though, countering Revenant rockets with orbs of plasma never gets old. 

[Quadrant339]

Marine, you need to pick up the pace!