Doom 3 lesson learned for Doom 4

Sounds like Id Software learned their lesson with Doom 3. No more 'dark and dingy' and 'contrived monster closets' for Doom 4.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/85484-John-Carmack-Sheds-Some-Light-On-Doom-4

I thought I read somewhere Doom 3 was going to be the last?

not until the fat lady sing

No more horror? doesn't sound like a true Doom title to me..

It looks like the opposite to me: they probably want to attract the kind of userbase they had with the original, which was later stolen by Serious Sam and Painkiller. The first two Doom were a lot more about cheesy sci-fi action than horror. When it came out I didn't find any thrilling moment, or even felt a creepy atmosphere, while with the old wolfenstein it was fairly easy to jump on your chair (it is one of the reasons because I never really liked Doom). And in the original Doom there were quite a lot of rooms filled with well lit enemies too.

Personally I like having to sneak around a bit, but I'm glad they listened to the 'monster closet' thing. That was definitely what killed the game, IMO.

>It looks like the opposite to me: they probably want to attract the kind of
>userbase they had with the original, which was later stolen by Serious Sam
>and Painkiller.

mmmmmmmmmmmm... painkiller.... must... play... painkiller.... hralalalala

I loved Doom 3. It's the scariest game I have ever played. It was kind of stressful, because it was so frightening, but it was awesome! I wouldn't want to play a bunch of games like that, but I am glad they made it like they did.

Maybe ID realised that doom3 was a terrible game, boring as hell. Should have been called 'Plod along in the Dark 3'.

Well, sad as i've enjoyed the darkness and the monster closets in Doom3 a lot. There are far more action titles available than titles which manage to scare you. Hmmm sounds kind of boring and after just another one to me.

Doom was always about having hundreds of enemies on screen at one time, I don't see how they can accomplish this with the polygon counts of today, even with this new Rage tech.

Afraid of the dark?

Just play some more whack-a-mole, with your eyes closed then.

Yeah. Only one I can think of that is actually scary is Vampire: The Masquerade.

It's scary at the beginning, but is very predictable and repetitive.

The only (almost) recent game to date that managed to make me jump many times was Clive Barker's Undying, which had excellent ideas for the job. Otherwise, it's much if they make me jump at all. For example, while the atmosphere was tense, in the first half life I made a jump only one time (a good one though) in a air shaft right after the headlight went off and a headcrab suddenly jumped at me... my sister was watching me play and literally jumped back as well. :)

Never happened anything similar in the sequel however (and though HL2 has an excellent atmosphere, Episode 1 and 2 are reminiscent of Doom 3 in their extremely linear level design).

It's a lot easier to get a creepy atmosphere than actually scare the player/spectator.


Come on, after the first batch of japanese horror movies we saw a lot of horror games too. The fact that often these games don't manage to scare at all is another matter entirely. :)


It has already been accomplished many times, from recent wargames which manage literally hundreds of enemies, to fps which manage tens on enemies. Techniques like geometry instancing and normal maps are there for such uses. And I don't recall more than ten, fifteen enemies at a time in Doom (looking at the maps today, it seems that I remember well).

I also really enjoyed Doom 3. I know the first 2 games had more action and I will appreciate another action packed title but I think Doom 3 was the best of them.

Doom 3 was great, made me jump a few times.
Unlike the movie...

I like Doom3, not as intense as Doom1 or 2 but it was good.

I really tried to persevere with Doom3 but it became so tedious to play, I lost all interest. Three times now I've gone back to it. Last time was with a hardware config that gave me smooth framerates, but even that didn't compel me to continue playing.

I thought Doom 3 was one of the better titles in recent years.

Played alone, in a darkened room, with high quality headphones on, was a pretty terrifying experience.

But nowhere near as bad as the psychologically deranged System Shock 2 - I got so freaked out, I actually had to stop playing and haven't continued with it since.

I remember Undying having some pretty scary moments. Although I do remember having some oh my god moments whilst playing Duke Nukem 3D in the dark with a set of stereo headphones. "Suck it down!".

Doom3 was scary, but it was also extremely flawed in the way that Carmack has realised. Good on him for admitting it instead of insisting that people "just don't understand his games".

I think my biggest hate was the character's inability to hold a torch and a gun at the same time. Hell, you could take off a boot lace and strap the torch to the shotgun (although gaffer tape is better).

Doom3 is damn boring game, huge walk with main task to pick up some data cards from one room in order to be able to pass to another one with ridicilously stupid AI and no gameplay but creature jumping out of closet all time...poor..

Undying was a much better game.

Doom 3 is on my top 10 all time best games, along with; Half Life 2, Oblivion, Far Cry, System Shock 2, Bioshock, Serious Sam ep1, Quake 2, GTA:SA, Tron 2.0............ (something like that)

I played Doom3 for about 2 days then gave it away to a guy at work. HL2 is much better imo and equally as scary.

Tron 2.0 was very imaginative and even coherent in its own way... the fact that it was written by people who knew how computers actually work made the difference. :)

Doom3 feels like plastic. Not just graphically, but gameplay wise. A few days ago I started playing it to see how my new graphics card can handle it. Played about a third of it on the hardest difficulty but it started to feel so dull and crappy I didn't want to play. The formula of the game just doesn't change. "Give hint of a new enemy - present the new enemy - fight the new enemy - start over". And between those you collect pda's, kill a few zombies and imps jumping out of a closet. Yawn.
F.E.A.R. was much more successful with fitting horror stuff to FPS genre and is also much more memorable and enjoyable. What is more scary than a little girl standing still?

Doom 3 and Bioshock are probably two of the most over-hyped games of all time and are dull, in the same way a slasher movie is dull. Some people like this, in the same way some people like slasher movies.

I'm glad that ID have decided not to repeat the same mistakes as in Doom 3 however despite their technical excellence and innovation, to me ID have yet to produce a really great game I enjoyed playing. It's like they work so hard to develop the technology they didn't have much time to make a good game. Now ID (like Unreal) is mostly focused in making engines and not games. I think that Doom 4 will likely be another repitive shooter that's graphically impressive and boring to play.

Darkheart

I agree totally.

How DARE you!!! I love Bioshock. The gameplay is light years ahead of Doom 3, i.e. Monsters don't magically appear right behind you when you've checked every nook and cranny. It also has one of the best story lines and some seriously sweet graphics. The only thing that disappointed me about it was the shotgun, which was as effective as a pea shooter.

Scariest games I've played...

Dungeon Master on the Atari ST, you'd walk round a corner and a mummy would go "Waaahhhh" at you! Brown trousers central!

And Alien Vs Predator (Quake 2 engine I think it was) when you played as the Marine. Was one of the few FPS games where you could get hurt quite easily... 3 swipes from an alien and you were dead! Which meant that you crept around really carefully with your motion sensor going boiiii boooiiii booooiiii booooiiiii boooiii, if a door opened or a lift moved it made your motion sensor blip, if you threw a flare you motion sensor blipped... It was fantastic! Oh... And it came with an audio CD that played at the same time that was big movie style classical music which just added to the tension!

Horror wise, it was an epic fail with me: the first time the little girl appeared with all the flames before here, I didn't feel at all that she was dangerous. The very same fact that she was peaceful despite the situation gave an eerie atmosphere which made me feel safe because I felt everything was unreal. Then the girl comes near me, and I suddenly die: the writers clearly expected me to start screaming and running the other way around, but it just didn't work at all, and the situation on the whole looked very silly. I'm just not used to consider children scary or dangerous, despite countless tries from japanese horror movies.

Hey, I didn't think of it, and I always liked it a lot. The first Alien vs Predator was the most genuine horror experience out there: played at director's cut with the marine, it was scary as hell and extremely tense without the need of scripted events. The sonar blips were damn slow compared to the aliens, and you had the clear sensation that they came out of nowhere even though the developers didn't cheat. Sadly the sequel isn't half as immersive.

Also having the infrared vision excluding the sonar was a real dilemma compared to the gun excluding the torch in Doom 3. ;)

Nah, that's not the same.



Doom3, System Shock II (i can't remember if i got scared with SS1) and partly by HalfLife (whoever invented those headcrabs, i'll jump at you, if i ever meet you :O)).

By the way this made me installing Doom3 again, still an awesome and scary game.

FEAR was good, doom3 made me cringe- did not like the game, and was not scared.

I didnt play it until quite recently.

I got into Fear from the point the guywhacks you in the head with a plank- you just don't expect it.

Hmmm, that's how Fear felt to me, i mostly never was scared and all the leveldesign was boring to me. What i really love inDoom3 are the nice little details, everything is smooth, it even runs well on a GeForce3.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/sales-show-doom-3-was-not-bad-willits