Different things that I think would have made D°°M³ better.

[RUSH]

Avoozl said:

Who says it isn't some futuristic weapon which is inferior to the modern day shotguns?

There are shotguns from the 1800's more potent than the one in Doom 3. Think about that for a second O_o

[Face23785]

I was going to cover the shotgun, but you guys beat me to it. Well done. As far as the grenades, obviously the physics suck. Unless future grenades are going to be made out of rubber. As far as having to switch to them though, I really have no problem with this. The game was going for greater realism. I'm not as hardcore a gamer as some, so maybe other games have gotten it right, but I can tell you the way games like Halo or COD implement grenades is ridiculous. You keep your primary weapon in hand and press a button and your guy instantly throws a grenade. That's absurd. While you can start the fuse on some types of grenades with one hand, you still need to detach it from your gear. You don't just pull them out of your pocket and throw them in half a second.

So I really have no issues with having to switch to grenades to use them. You can actually do it quite quickly, you just hotkey grenades, hit that key, throw one, and hit it again and it switches back to whatever weapon you had up before you switched. With the abundance of grenades in the game, if you could just instantly deploy them at any time, it would probably seriously unbalance the game. They're a tactical weapon, but you have to utilize a little more strategy to use them, just like you would in real life. I usually use them in situations where I have enemies below me, or around a corner. They can also be useful if you've got a hell knight at a long range on flat ground. Switch to grenades and deploy 4 or 5 of them quickly and let them bounce down the hall at him.

[Jello]

RUSH said:

There are shotguns from the 1800's more potent than the one in Doom 3. Think about that for a second O_o

True. Hell, it reminds me of an 18th century blunderbuss loaded with a powder charge and a bunch of rocks. But I still think that would be more accurate than Doom 3's shotgun.

[ILOVEDOOM!]

On 10/27/2015 at 8:36 PM, Tetzlaff said:

cut-out belly

are you serious? EVERYONE thinks its his belly. BUT ITS ACTUALLY HIS HAND IN SUCH A POSITION THAT IT LOOKS LIKE A BELLY!

[Koko Ricky]

I would like the amor in Doom 3 to actually serve a purpose. The fact that you can lose 100+ hp while taking about 5 damage from your armor is just ridiculous. How did no one in testing comment on that?

[Fonze]

7 hours ago, ILOVEDOOM! said:

are you serious? EVERYONE thinks its his belly. BUT ITS ACTUALLY HIS HAND IN SUCH A POSITION THAT IT LOOKS LIKE A BELLY!

 

Way to 2+ year necrobump to make an unfunny joke... smh

 

5 hours ago, GoatLord said:

I would like the amor in Doom 3 to actually serve a purpose. The fact that you can lose 100+ hp while taking about 5 damage from your armor is just ridiculous. How did no one in testing comment on that?

 

This had me a bit curious, as I found armor to be more useful than not, though it has been some years since I last played doom 3, so I looked up an old thread here about armor being useless and found this:

 

Quote

Armor does very little in SP except against weaker damage. It only absorbs 20% of damage but always with a minimum of 1 (skewing it's protection in favor of weaker hits i.e. take 50 damage -> 10 Armor 40 Health which gives a protection of 20% however take 2 damage -> 1 Armor 1 Health which gives a protection of 50%)

In short armor is only really effective at helping you shrug off minor damage (especially a large number of hits with minor damage such as machineguns or shotguns.) but isn't effective against heavier damage. I will agree that for what it does, there is WAY too much armor in the game, especially considering that none of the enemies hit all that hard.
 
Of course you can change this by modding the game defs which is one thing I have done i.e. scaling up enemy damage and allowing more protection for the armor so it actually has some value. ;)

 

I thought it protected more than 20% but that's what these folks found at the time, though I found this person's take interesting as it notes that armor's usefulness is skewed towards higher percentages than 20% with damage values under 5, meaning that for the majority of the game when taking little hits, stuff like imps and zombies attrition you down over time to a lesser degree, which sounds about right with my memory on thinking about it.

 

I like to look at armor in doom (and I suppose this would apply to doom 3, as well as any game with rng values for dmg and an item which cuts that by a percentage) as being something like an rng-cushion to allow for a slightly better amount of consistency in playing through an encounter.

 

That all said tho, 20% is kind of a funnily small amount of protection, though I like that damage comes out of armor first (assuming these observations were accurate) to help with the more minor, and tougher to dodge, plinks the enemies take at you as you begin some encounters throughout the game.

 

According to replies in that previous thread, armor protection was changed (or seemed to be) at some point in development from like a 30% down to its present 20%, so it's probable that it was noticed in testing and for whatever reason nerfed to balance out rather than the devs buffing other things for balancing, like enemy damage. With how drasticly small 20% is and with it also skewing higher for smaller damage amounts, I feel like this seems to be a more deliberate dev decision to create the type of gameplay they wanted to harbor, for better or worse. I suppose it is nice that armor tends to stick around (and is abundant) at all times, though particularly in NM difficulty. Perhaps it's more of a mental thing that players will play more confidently if they feel like they have some modicum of protection, not unlike how a spotter while weight lifting may not actually be helping, but if it looks like they are you feel like the weight is less and it helps you to keep it moving.

 

While some people in that thread said they just changed the armor's protection value, I also liked this person's idea of balancing that change with a buff to enemy damage, though it would have been very interesting if they had also noted what values they found worked best for creating a new balance and trying to keep it in the same line as the established balance, but with more importance on having armor. For example, I don't think a straight, say, +30%/+30% to armor protection (to bring it to 50%) / and enemy damage, would work well; it'd prolly need to be more fine-tuned for that, and to me having weirdly skewed percentages for armor values can be interesting, such as doom 2's blue armor at 75% and doom 3's present armor at 20%, so maybe even the best bet wouldn't even be to shoot for an even 50% on attempts to rebalance. Idk just random thoughts, though a bit interesting to think about.