Gameplay question

[brushfire]

One of the addictive qualities of DOOM, imo, was that you could take on waves of monsters with little or no slowdown in your framerate, because monsters were sprites. When FPS games evolved to polygons, they had to lower the monster counts to make framerates acceptable.

Will Doom 3 try to duplicate its earlier model, or will the gameplay be more like Quake, Half-life etc. where you only fight a few monsters at a time?

[AirRaid]

This has been gone over a few times by id. There will only ever bee a couple of monsters onscreen at once in Doom3. Party for framerate reasons, partly for scarier gameplay.

Also, Doom1 never really had those "hordes" of monsters people keep talking about. Maybe 15 at once tops, and they were only weak enemies - zombies and imps.

[Use]

I'd say Warrens has its share of hordes.

[Tyockell]

Nope, get use to only 3-5 enemies at a time probably at the most maybe more of smaller enemies like lost souls I dont fucking know....it'll still be a good game though.

[Shaviro]

Doom never had hordes of monsters. They say you will meet up to tens of monsters in Doom3. The highest count will probably be 10, though. I'm glad that the monster count will be that 'low' actually.

[toxicfluff]

I'd say that Doom had a fair amount of monsters TBH. More on some maps than others, but you take somewhere like The Refueling base, or The Courtyard and you have a lot of monsters, and quite frequently more than 10 I'd say.

Anyway, I hope D3 doesn't have up to 10 monsters, because 4 starts my system grinding, if there is a couple of light sources.


//Edit: plus, if there is too much action you don't have any time to think. And I find that when playing a game fear usually sets in during the calm periods in between fights and right at the first moment of the encounter.

[deathbringer]

Hordes of monsters charging at you while you oummel them with heavy weapons is good, but doom 3 is going to be mainly a horror-oriented game, and 'serious sam' isnt excatly horror is it? XD

Think of resident evil, you get attacked by 3 creatures at once in that and youre shitting one XD

[Tetzlaff]

I never found big monster hordes one of the most typical elements of Doom. I only remember it from certain levels, like Courtyard in Doom II.

Neverending mass battles like in Serious Sam can become annoying. I prefer Quake-style monster fighting: different types of monsters attack you in various combinations and locations to allow for diverse combat situations.

[Tyockell]

Yea I dident like it when there were alot of enemies in one sector in doom, It made me aware that when there were a bunch of say imps that they really were all exactly the same and it kinda took away from the game play for me.
I just found it more realistic when say you have 2 imps, 1 shotgunner and a former human....it kinda mixes it up and made the game seem even more amazing.

[Alboroto]

From what I've seen in the videos, seems like one or two enemies at a time is enough, since they move, jump, dodge, etc...

Doom needed lots of enemies to keep you busy...

[Lord FlatHead]

I believe in the new PC Gamer (US) there's a bit about the new spider monsters, which attack in small packs (4 or 5 at a time). I think that's about the largest amount of enemies you'll be facing at any given time.

[Tyockell]

Lord FlatHead said:

I believe in the new PC Gamer (US) there's a bit about the new spider monsters, which attack in small packs (4 or 5 at a time). I think that's about the largest amount of enemies you'll be facing at any given time.

Stoked, pack enemies :D

[Scabbed Angel]

Okay don't flame me, I'm not judging d3 off the alpha, but I setup a room full of 50 fatties on no target and then turned the notarget off, and i was still getting 1-5 frames a second. I actually think that's pretty good. My system isn't even that good, but no there will not be hordes. Even if d3 is optimized i doubt a room full of 50 zombies will give you wiplash with the intense frate rate. I could be wrong. . . heh

[brushfire]

Thanks everyone. I'm sure I'll still get it. I guess by hordes I was talking about the technique where you can sometimes gather lots of mobs and take em down quicker if they fought each other to death a lot. There was one Doom II level where that was very easy and fun, can't remember the level number though (had a very big courtyard with health and armor potions laid out in a big X).

[The_Aeromaster]

I've said this before, but it was a long time ago:

I think not having a ton of monsters at once is going to make the game much more realistic. Think about it, if you were actually in the Doomguy's situation, you think you'd make it through a crowd of 20 zombies or imps without one of them killing you?

What this does is, they make the monsters more challenging to beat, and only throw a few of them at you at a time. In the original Doom, by the time you beat the game, you've killed thousands of monsters. That's a little too unbelievable. I think this does wonders for gameplay.

[AirRaid]

Scabbed Angel said:

Okay don't flame me, I'm not judging d3 off the alpha, but I setup a room full of 50 fatties on no target and then turned the notarget off, and i was still getting 1-5 frames a second. I actually think that's pretty good.

Did you use Monster_zombie_fatty or ragdoll_fatty? Only the ragdoll_fatty monster in the alpha has ragdoll effects... in the final they all will, (I would imagine) and there's a pretty huge framerate difference. I spawned 5 ragdoll fatty's and got 2 fps. Even less when I shot them down.

[The_Aeromaster]

Scary, but I'm sure there will be some optimization done by the time the game is released. Think about if it runs that slow with 5 of them on the screen, imagine just 2 or 3 of the more complex monsters, the game would fucking freeze. So I'm sure there will be a huge difference when the game is actually out.

[Lord FlatHead]

The_Aeromaster said:

So I'm sure there will be a huge difference when the game is actually out.

That, or there just won't be any areas with more than one big detailed monster.

[AirRaid]

Yeah, this was from the unoptimised alpha, I'm certain that you'd get vastly better framrates in the final version.

And anyway, I don't think we'll NEED huge amount of enemies. I'm scared of meeting ONE imp, or ONE Hell knight, the thought of two at once is really quote worrying. Not to mention any of the stronger enemies...

[Coopersville]

What I liked in the original Dooms was how they always barely kept you alive. You'd fight a few chaingunners, then pick up ammo. You'd run into a couple barons, then search for a secret stash of ammo and health before you felt safe enough to advance, etc.

[Captain Red]

brushfire said:
There was one Doom II level where that was very easy and fun, can't remember the level number though (had a very big courtyard with health and armor potions laid out in a big X).

Map 17: The Courtyard.

[The_Aeromaster]

Coopersville said:

What I liked in the original Dooms was how they always barely kept you alive. You'd fight a few chaingunners, then pick up ammo. You'd run into a couple barons, then search for a secret stash of ammo and health before you felt safe enough to advance, etc.

Yeah, that was cool. You were always on edge, it was what made the game so addicting too, was cause when you kept living through one impossible situation after another you wanted to keep pushing your luck lol. But it certainly added to the tension when you were low on health.

I hope there's lot of "Wow, how the fuck did I make it out of that room alive?" scenes in D3

[Fredrik]

Ct_red_pants said:

Map 17: The Courtyard.

You mean Map 18.

[Ultron]

What about if you don't kill a load of monsters, run away and find another load of monsters, will the first load of monsters follow you? Then that'd be double the amount of monsters. Will the system cope or what? Monsters won't chase you far? That would suck.

[Yo-Han]

They will have tought about that..i think monsters will follow you..but they will be so treathning or quick that you can't ignore them..and they probably have to be dead untill the engine let's you encounter new ones..not so hard to program that i suppose

In the most FPS games enemies do not follow you long time around..they hang around you and they mostly have to die to advance in the game

[Ultron]

Yo-Han said:

They will have tought about that..i think monsters will follow you..but they will be so treathning or quick that you can't ignore them..and they probably have to be dead untill the engine let's you encounter new ones..not so hard to program that i suppose

In the most FPS games enemies do not follow you long time around..they hang around you and they mostly have to die to advance in the game

Which FPS games are like that? Neither Doom, Quake or Quake2 are like that.
That way you wouldn't be able to open doors or go anywhere until you had killed a load of monsters, that would just be stupid. There's another way of restricting access like that, it's called "levels" :p

[Yo-Han]

--->thats what i meant,did use my words a bit strange,my native language is dutch ...you are mostly bound to the level your in..and sometimes yes you need to kill this one guy in some kind of bottleneck or you will not get further in that level..not always bosses in that case..was the case in many places in HL1

[dsm]

Assuming that the Doom 3 enemies won't follow you around for long, I at least hope that they won't stay in one spot when they've 'lost track of you'. Oh no, they should go somewhere so that when you go back to the spot you last saw them, you won't be expecting them to suddenly be lurking in some other shadows than before not too far away from you.

I really hope (and expect!) that iD will use the shadows to make it unpredictable where the demons might hide once you've alerted them - that will reduce the linearity of the game. And I've heard that the level design in D3 will be very linear unfortunately (:~() so let's hope that at least the monsters will make up for that.

[Yo-Han]

..hehe that's one thing J.Carmack was very certain about..it's all about real time lighting shadows and the atmoshere and gamepaly we create with it..if you encounter a baddie and are able to loose him, he should be somewhere else..but not far from where you saw him first,i agree