6 years later, John Carmack admits noone could see Doom 3

[Vympel]

Link

Maybe something that you could've realised in 2004.

[adam_grif]

It never really bothered me, tbh. I sort of liked the atmosphere actually. It would have benefited more from a reduction in the predictable jump-scares if anything. The way you interacted with computers in the environment in D3 was something I really liked, and I was always disappointed that other games didn't really do that going forwards.

[Stark]

Computers never bothered me tbh, but I really liked flashlights and was sorry Doom3 didn't use that going forward.

If only he could admit that setting up and interesting situation and they saying 'lol forget it, this is Doom' was a bad idea, I might give a shit about Rage.

[Highlord Laan]

I remember spending more plasma rifle ammo "scouting" ahead down a corridor than actually on demons. A good burst would reveal pretty much everything, leaving anything moving ready for the rocket launcher.

[aieeegrunt]

Ugh I hated that game. The only redeeming feature for me was that I bought it used, and it happened to come with the original doom.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Am I one of those weird people who really didn't have a problem with the lighting levels? Yes, there were dark areas. It's a game about scary demons from Hell, parts of it are SUPPOSED to be dark. Yes, the lack of duct-tape technology was a problem, but why not focus on that instead of 'lol this horror game isn't sufficiently lit!' The game, in my opinion, wasn't cripplingly dark. At least not enough to justify all the whining about it.

The much bigger problem, in my opinion, was the fact that apparently the imp and zombies' natural habitat was a cramped little closet where they waited for weeks on end for some unsuspecting marine to stumble by.

[Mr Bean]

Am I one of those weird people who really didn't have a problem with the lighting levels? Yes, there were dark areas. It's a game about scary demons from Hell, parts of it are SUPPOSED to be dark. Yes, the lack of duct-tape technology was a problem, but why not focus on that instead of 'lol this horror game isn't sufficiently lit!' The game, in my opinion, wasn't cripplingly dark. At least not enough to justify all the whining about it

Sounds to me like your one of the ones who yanked your gamma way up. If your ran your monitor per the games setup instructions without the flashlight on the game was pitch black


Even a light screen it was hard as fuck to see anything. Doom 3 retained the frantic combat of Doom yet left you in the dark half the time.

Monsters in the closet was the other bullshit thing of course, and yes it was worse than dark by far.

[Vendetta]

Monsters in the closet was the other bullshit thing of course, and yes it was worse than dark by far.

Monster closets are a fine Doom tradition. Doom 2 at times feels less like a war with hell and more like you've interrupted a particularly vicious game of Sardines.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Sounds to me like your one of the ones who yanked your gamma way up. If your ran your monitor per the games setup instructions without the flashlight on the game was pitch black

Maybe it's the fact that my vision sucks to all shit, but I find myself cranking the gamma up on almost any computer game. Doom 3 never struck me as cripplingly different in that regard.

Even a light screen it was hard as fuck to see anything. Doom 3 retained the frantic combat of Doom yet left you in the dark half the time.

Now that's going overboard. Doom 3 did not retain the frantic combat of the first two games. Not by a long shot.

Monster closets are a fine Doom tradition. Doom 2 at times feels less like a war with hell and more like you've interrupted a particularly vicious game of Sardines.

The problem is that Doom 3 is not the same style of game as Doom and Doom 2. Doom 3 ended up being a Resident-Evil-ish survival-horror style game with FPS elements. Its pace was far slower, with a lot more emphasis on the atmosphere and general creepiness rather than on the combat. Doom and Doom 2 were fast-paced run-and-guns that were sorta pretty for their time, but focused far more on caffeine-enhanced reflexes and ability to solve simple push-button puzzles on the fly while dodging fifty projectiles.

The problem is that monster-closets worked in the first two Doom games because that was the way they were designed. The levels were all a series of geometric puzzles and traps. You were uberman, capable of carrying about more weaponry and ammo than most gunships and capable of maintaining a fifty mile-an-hour sprint indefinitely. It was a game where walking down a long unadorned hallway and having both walls suddenly drop to reveal a horde of imps felt absolutely natural. You were prepared for that sort of thing and the gameplay encouraged you to charge in, firing whatever you had and madly strafing.

Doom 3 has a much slower pace where you advance cautiously, save as much ammo as possible, and run frantically back to the nearest cover whenever enemies show up, remaining in a stationary safe position to take them out. Random panels opening up beside, behind and above you with no warning does not fit into this sort of gameplay at all, which is why it gets really fucking annoying the seventieth time it happens.

In Doom and Doom 2, the 'monster closets' are placed there just to amp-up the action and drive your reflexes a little further. In Doom 3, they're placed there just to increase the scares, and it doesn't work. I know the board's opinion of The Spoony One isn't the highest, but I think he hit the problem head on in his Doom 3 review:

Cheap scares are the lowest form of horror, because they don't work more than once. And they don't work here. You can always tell a bad horror movie because of it's over-reliance on the cheap scare. Simply put, a cheap scare is when something leaps out in front of a character accompanied by a shrieking orchestral sting to make us jump. They are indeed scary, in that same way that walking into a room and having someone swift kick you in the kneecap is scary. But, to continue the example, such scares get old very quickly and almost never work when done more than a few times. After a while, you just want to hit the game back and wring the money you wasted back out of its neck. If it had one. And we're talking like 20 hours of gameplay based entirely on the worst kind of cheap scare: the UNFAIR cheap scare.

Like in Alien, when the cat would leap out at people, the orchestra would screech out a shrill note, and we'd all scream "AAAH!!" like idiots. That's a cheap scare. An unfair cheap scare is something like going to your car only to have Morrisey leap out of the trunk and slug you upside the head with a folding chair. I mean what the hell? There's no way you can see this coming. It's just not fair to expect crap like this. It's the horror equivalent of Lucifer popping out and giving you a slug bug every time you open a door. Startling at first, but after a few minutes of this, I'm beginning to understand how violence in video games can carry over into real life. I'd like to find John Carmack and dig my thumbs into his EYES!! AAAAAAGGGHHH!!!!

[Zixinus]

The game startles you, it doesn't scare you. There are no moments where you can't just shoot anything in your way. There are no moments where you feel that this is really going insane (the only moment I can remember, is finding a guy stabbed to the ceiling, whom I tried to shot out of mercy and then got reminded of the game's limitations) or that the environment is fucking with you. No, you are just going around and shooting things and killing whatever idiot monster decided to be clever and try to surprise you. It works once or twice, but after a while you begin the expect it. I don't recall that there was a sense of the creatures organizing behind you. No, things were going to hell, the demons pass the time by murdering everything and wondering about. You are a guy that is somehow not effected by the zombification-ray or the demon-skull-turning ray and following the orders of your commander in a nice, sealed location defended by gun turrets, mowing down anything in your way and anything clever that thought you might be tasty.

My bunny once startled me when she suddenly jumped up my bed, that doesn't mean that a little ball of fur and nervousness is terrifying. Doom 3 tried desperately to be scary, but didn't quite get the idea that you need more than startles.

Still, it wasn't a bad game.

[Norade]

I wonder when they'll admit that they made the most worthless grenades ever to be included in a video game.

[aieeegrunt]

I think Halo 2 still owns that crown.

[CaptHawkeye]

The problem I have with horror video games is the same problem I have with a lot of current horror movies. They all rely on predictable startles and brain-dead characters. Games can't place story telling ahead of the gameplay and Doom 3 basically had to do that if it wanted to have any semblance of horror. Too bad what ended up happening was the game was stupid, annoying, and felt more like a chore. This was the time I was starting to get tired of bog-standard FPS games though. So I doubt any game could have satisfied me at the time.

Every time I hear some fanboy claim that Doom was the scariest game ever I still laugh though. You found 2D sprites scary? Really?

But hey, people think F.E.A.R was scary.

[Norade]

I think Halo 2 still owns that crown.

You ever try to use a grenade in Doom 3? They bounce for ever and then explode with all the fury of a firecracker. In Halo 2 a well placed nade can down shields enough that a burst of anything will kill stuff.

[Vympel]

But hey, people think F.E.A.R was scary.

Relatively speaking, it was scarier than Doom 3. Of course, I knew someone who played through it like such an ADD-addled caffeine juicer that they missed every single Alma-scare.

[defanatic]

Am I one of those weird people who really didn't have a problem with the lighting levels? Yes, there were dark areas. It's a game about scary demons from Hell, parts of it are SUPPOSED to be dark.

Just because you can explain it doesn't stop it from being annoying.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Every time I hear some fanboy claim that Doom was the scariest game ever I still laugh though. You found 2D sprites scary? Really?

Perhaps the blockiness of the sprites was scary? The only FPS game I found a little bit scary was the original Half-life and even that was not really scary.

[CaptHawkeye]

I felt like I was being attacked by a kid in a cardboard box with monster face drawn on it. The graphics of the time just weren't capable of producing visual scares.

[Companion Cube]

Every time I hear some fanboy claim that Doom was the scariest game ever I still laugh though. You found 2D sprites scary? Really?

Perhaps the blockiness of the sprites was scary? The only FPS game I found a little bit scary was the original Half-life and even that was not really scary.

Half-life was scary for me because I was an idiot child navigating with the arrow keys up until I fought the Nihilanth. Not knowing how to strafe made the game pretty challenging in parts.

[Zed]

I think System Shock 2 was rather scary - I was rather young then, though.

[Norade]

I remember Dino Crisis getting me back when it was new. I was only about 12 though and it was on my friends PS1 when I was used to my SNES that I had at home so that helped a lot.

[Vendetta]

Every time I hear some fanboy claim that Doom was the scariest game ever I still laugh though. You found 2D sprites scary? Really?

Some of the music was creepy. I mean it was crap MIDI, but then everything was crap MIDI back then, so you didn't know any better.

Also it could make you jump when a monster closet opened and a Baron of Hell mooed straight down your lughole. (That even got me a few times when I replayed it recently on XBLA, my excuse is that it has 5.1 surround now, and they were behind me)

The graphics and gameplay weren't scary though, it was all in the audio.

[Molyneux]

I think Halo 2 still owns that crown.

What on Earth are you talking about? Sticky-grenades were godly for fighting Elites, and human grenades were decent in clearing out corridors.

[Sarevok]

I think Halo 2 still owns that crown.

What on Earth are you talking about? Sticky-grenades were godly for fighting Elites, and human grenades were decent in clearing out corridors.

Halo 2 grenades were firecrackers compared to Halo 1 versions.

[Norade]

I think Halo 2 still owns that crown.

What on Earth are you talking about? Sticky-grenades were godly for fighting Elites, and human grenades were decent in clearing out corridors.

Halo 2 grenades were firecrackers compared to Halo 1 versions.

Yes, but they still had uses. Did anybody very even attempt to use Doom 3's bouncy fun balls?