It seems like a lifetime ago when I played the original DOOM, but I still remember it well because I loved it! DOOM ][: Hell on Earth was even better, particularly because my co-workers and I played it together over the company LAN at lunch breaks. Or at least we did until management complained about "excessive network bandwidth utilization". That was ridiculous, of course, insofar as we were engineers who could easily demonstrate that the game used very little bandwidth for the four of us. It obviously had nothing to do with bandwidth; it had everything to do with wanting to control what employees did during lunch. I never heard any complaints about people who played networked games of Hearts instead, but I digress.
That aside, the DOOM series of games was a watershed event in the gaming industry. I had enjoyed Wolfenstein 3D when it was released, so I was naturally inclined to buy the next game from Id Software. But DOOM was far more special than anyone was expecting. It was the first computer game whose graphics were good enough, whose environments were scary enough, that it was really hard to put down and stop playing. Heck, I even wrote a best-selling shareware level editor for the whole DOOM series of games, WadAuthor, which garnered me plenty of paying customers and a book deal to boot. Those were some fun times, that's for sure.
Since then the gaming industry has come a long way. Gone are the days of Mode-X, two-dimensional, sprite-based graphics. Nowadays everything is rendered at resolutions and color depths that would then have required a super computer to play. Audio has moved from eight-bit, monaural tracks to CD-quality surround sound with more channels than seems reasonable. A lot has changed and, to be perfectly blunt, DOOM was Id's last great game. Quake II wasn't too bad, but Quake III Arena was merely a technology demo in search of some other developer to make a good game with its engine.
So the obvious question rears its ugly head: after four years of development, does DOOM 3 (D3) deliver the goods? Did Id make a good game this time around, or are we simply seeing another technology demo?
It must first be said that the visuals in D3 define the new state of the art, hands down. John Carmack has long been one of the heavier hitters, setting the bar for the rest of the industry with his previous game engines. So it's not surprising that D3's visual presentation is outstanding. Heck, I wish I could throw away all of the superlatives I've been using for the past couple of years; they just don't do justice to the way the game looks.
The texture quality is great, with one caveat. The animations are very fluid and convincing. The special effects are phenomenal, rivaling the stuff being produced just a few years ago in animation movie houses. True lighting has finally arrived. The age of light maps, funky shadowing shortcuts, and the rest of the hodgepodge of game development tricks is coming to an end. D3 renders multiple light sources with amazing shadows, color, and detail. If Far Cry (FC) hadn't already been released we'd have nothing against which to compare it. As it is, D3 makes FC look pretty simplistic by comparison, at least in the way it handles lighting and effects.
It's funny, but the only complaints I can level against the visuals aren't really complaints. Things have progressed so far in game development circles that the limits of verisimilitude themselves are starting to become an irritant. What I mean is that such great strides have been made in making things look realistic that the slight details stick out all the more. When game characters are obviously cartoonish, the eye is very forgiving where fine details are concerned. But when a game character looks about 98% human, the remaining 2% sticks out like a big, fat, positively gangrenous thumb.
For example, in looking at Sergeant Kelly, who gives the protagonist his first assignment, I couldn't help but notice the angular nature of his largely bald head. His mouth also didn't move quite right. His teeth were more pronounced than they should have been. The color of his skin wasn't quite the color of any skin I've ever seen. And so forth. Game development has progressed so far that it's starting to move into that territory where fooling the human eye becomes very difficult. It almost makes me wonder if, perhaps, going in the other direction makes more sense; i.e., using the technology to make more obviously unreal characters so that the eye and mind don't leap to the defects so quickly.
I also noticed a certain discrepancy between the texture resolution of the data on computer monitors compared to the screens/signs around them. Walking up to the introductory information booth, for example, the word 'Information' above the screen was fairly pixellated whereas the video playing on the computer monitor below was clear and beautiful. This is especially apparent when looking at the access control panels to doors, whose text is razor sharp compared to the details of the door frame. Isn't it funny? I've been complaining for years about the lack of interesting graphics on computer monitors, and then when developers go wild with detail I can't help but notice how everything else pales by comparison!
In short, the game is more visually perfect than any other game made to date. The artistic style is classic Id, and the execution is impeccable. If there are any negatives to be found, they're of the very faint variety of the sorts of things I've mentioned already.
Bravo! I know all the other reviewers are wetting their pants over D3's visuals, and I'm pretty pleased with them myself, but it's the audio in this game that really makes it special. Id has truly outdone themselves this time around, and they deserve some kind of award for it. First, all the audio elements (e.g., sound effects, ambient noise, weapon sounds, etc.) are wonderful. But get this: Id has gone above and beyond the call of duty and found a way to do all the in-game audio mixing in software, with what seems like a small investment of CPU time!
For those readers who don't grasp the significance of this feat, it means that D3's audio will be mixed equally well on all systems that have the requisite CPU horsepower. There shouldn't be any goofy glitches introduced by problems with this or that sound card's API. There shouldn't be any funky integration issues either. The audio should simply work properly through a single software layer on any sufficiently capable sound hardware. That's fabulous!
The only down side of such an approach is that D3 doesn't take advantage of some of the more advanced features supplied by different vendors. So, for example, D3 doesn't take advantage of the nifty environmental effects supplied by Creative Labs' EAX specification. That's a tangible loss, in my view, but it's easily outweighed by the simplicity and reliability of the resulting audio mix. Virtually anyone with any sort of advanced speaker configuration should be able to enjoy D3 in full surround-sound audio, without diddling around with any audio card configuration utilities. That's great!
But even as impressive as the technical details are, the artistic aspects of the audio are even more superlative. D3 is a game that raises the bar for audio production values. The weapon sounds are all quite good, though I do wish the minigun and the energy weapons had more impressive reports, but the sound effects and especially the ambient audio bits are positively superb. As good as its visuals are, it's D3's audio that reaches into the human psyche and cranks the fright knob up to eleven. If you don't believe me, try playing the game without any sound; you'll quickly find that audio manipulates human emotions far better than mere pictures.
I have only one complaint with the audio, which is relatively minor. To wit, it's pretty clear, to me at least, that Id is doing the audio processing in a separate thread. I say that because the aural and visual effects aren't always synchronized. I guess they could simply have written crappy, single-threaded code, but I doubt it. The developers have made a few games, after all, and their aural/visual synchronization has always been flawless in the past. The most notable example is with the machine gun. Its visual effect gets out of sync with its firing sound from time to time; it's an annoying little problem because it temporarily dispels the illusion. Maybe they'll improve this in a future patch. I imagine most folk won't even notice, but after decades as a musician I'm pretty good at discriminating even very small delays.
Let me start with my only complaint against the interface: I should never have to restart the damned game just to change a setting! Perhaps I shouldn't react so strongly, but I'm sensing a nasty trend of late, and it's a trend I absolutely despise. It used to be the case that games would let me twiddle the video resolution, color depth, audio settings, etc., all while remaining in the game. That way, I could quickly try out multiple settings until I found the combination that worked best for my system.
But not any more. FC took a huge step backward in this regard, forcing me to exit and restart the game for virtually any change to the video or audio settings. While not quite so bad, D3 isn't far behind considering that it forces me to exit and restart the game for many of the video settings. Why the developers don't do what they did in all their previous engines (i.e., stop, unload, reload, and re-start the video subsystem) is beyond me, but instead D3 stupidly comments that my new settings will take effect the next time I start the game. That would be great if I wanted to twiddle settings for my next play session, folks, but I want to change them for this one!
That's incredibly irritating when one is trying to find the gaming "sweet spot", the configuration that runs best. Take a lesson from Microsoft. It only took the goofballs in Redmond just over a decade of Windows development to figure out that maybe customers ought to be able to change video resolutions without restarting their computers. Over a decade later they're finally starting to clue in that users also want to be able to reconfigure their networks without restarting. The goal here, developers, is a good experience for the user, and if he's having to exit and restart the game just to change a few settings he's not having one. Trust me on this: a player should be able to change anything without leaving the game. Period. Restarting the whole game engine is allowed; forcing me to exit and restart isn't.
Beyond that negative comment, however, the interface all works pretty well. The menu screen is clean and attractive, the menus work well, the keys can be mapped easily, though the defaults work pretty well, etc. Where Id has really innovated with D3's interface lies in the player's interaction with devices in the world, but I'll say more about that when discussing game mechanics. Suffice it to say that the interface is more than up to the task at hand, save for the multi-player game browser which I'll also discuss later.
A number of reviews have complained about D3's game mechanics. Or more to the point, they've complained that D3 doesn't go much further than the original game did more than a decade ago. This is an accurate criticism, for the most part, but I don't think it very trenchant. D3 does fail to provide peeking around corners, a prone stance, and a number of such mechanics found in other recent FPS games. Heck, D3 doesn't even provide as flexible a flashlight as Half-Life (HL) offered years ago.
But none of this matters very much for one simple reason: the mechanics of D3 are well-suited to the game. Does anybody gripe that checkers can't move like chess pieces? Of course not; they're two very different games. While it may be as easy as it is unimaginative to lump D3 in with a veritable host of FPS games, D3 has a more specific focus: it's an interactive horror shooter. For a typical FPS game it makes sense to give the player a prone stance; it makes zero sense in D3 because what idiot would ever want to lie prostrate with some awful spawn from Hell closing in on him?!
I do take issue with the flashlight. I think it's utterly stupid that the protagonist can't find a single strip of duct tape on that whole base with which to attach his flashlight to his weapon. It's all the more stupid that a base like that doesn't have some kind flares, that the security guys don't have some kind of night vision gear, helmets with lights, etc. But even I have to admit that the flashlight mechanics do build tension, and that's presumably what they're intended to accomplish. It was always a tough call when the lights went out: do I whip out the flashlight and find out what's making that awful sound, or do I hold on to my weapon and hope I'm not standing at the edge of a precipice?
I actually think the mechanics of D3 are well-considered and work nicely. The lack of peeking around corners keeps things simple. The sprinting mechanics, by which I refer to the general balance or length of time a player can exert himself, are nicely done. The way the view reacts to any impact adds a terrifying element to melee combat. The movement feels pretty good. The weapon switching and general usage parameters are similarly good. The addition of the PDA helps distinguish D3 from other run-of-the-mill FPS games by adding some fun and useful bits here and there, though as I'll discuss later its content could have been better.
I also have to wonder: am I the only one who has noticed how cool the interaction is with computers and other devices in the environment? D3 has been slammed by many for its "derivative" game mechanics, but D3 is also a big innovator when it comes to interacting with things in the world. The computer monitors, storage lockers, and other mechanical devices in the world of D3 can all be manipulated pretty much as a real person would manipulate such things. That's a huge step forward, and I don't understand why other reviewers haven't made more of it. I had a great time playing around with the computer displays, entering codes into lockers and doors, messing around with the teleporters, etc. The developers deserve kudos for getting that all exactly right. I hope other games take their approach and run with it; I'd like to think that the days of dumbed-down device interactions are over.
Aside from the aforementioned irritating limitation on the flashlight, there are two other things about which I must complain, first among which is the lack of alternate firing modes on the weapons. Maybe I've been spoiled by other FPS games, but the arsenal of D3 comes up short in terms of flexibility. I would much prefer it if the pistol and shotgun featured alternate fire modes that let me fire faster with an accuracy penalty. And what about some kind of grenade launching capability for the basic machine gun? How about a tracked-fire mode for the rocket launcher? Or how about being able to use the plasma rifle to toss a much bigger, deadlier, and slower-firing ball of the green goo?
I like all of the weapons in D3, mind you. I just don't think they're as useful or as interesting as they would be if at least some of them had alternate firing modes. I remember Red Faction fondly because its shotgun had a fully-automatic alternate fire mode; using that thing was an absolute blast. I sure wish that D3's shotgun were as versatile. I think Id missed an opportunity here. It's not that the arsenal isn't fun; it's that it could have been better.
Finally, I must also complain about the way grenades work. Frankly, the rest of the world has been doing this better than Id for years. I don't want to have to switch to a particular weapon to pull out a grenade! I want to have a key that lets me toss one as a complement to whatever weapon I'm using. I'm sure I can probably put together a keybind that let's me map a single key to a grenade-throwing sequence (i.e., select grenade, throw, and switch back to the previous weapon), but that's exactly the kind of drudgery the game should do for me by default. As it is, the game makes it harder than it should be for the player to use grenades, and that's a pity given their really nifty explosion effects.
The original DOOM story was roughly one paragraph long and, if I recall correctly, it was thrown together haphazardly just to put something on the inside cover of the manual (or something like that). In other words, the original game was about an inch deep in terms of its story. This time around the player is confronted with a more detailed version of the tale. The "accident" at the Mars base isn't quite so accidental; there's an evil, and presumably Satanistic, scientist who is behind all the nasty stuff. He's got a particular agenda and, like the G-man from HL, the player keeps bumping elbows with him throughout the game.
Unfortunately, this is roughly where the improvements end. The cast of characters is pretty forgettable in the final analysis. And why is Dr. Betruger so committed to unleashing the hordes of Hell on mankind anyway? Why does his idiot, right-hand man continue to follow him, even though he knows Betruger will sacrifice him in an instant? Why do all the personnel at the Mars base keep doing their jobs, despite a string of horrifying deaths and nightmarish creatures brought back through the portal? And who the hell is the protagonist? Is he simply mute? We never hear a word from him, aside from a few groans and grunts here and there.
There are enough holes of this kind to make it very hard to take any of the nonsense seriously. It's pretty clear that Id isn't counting on the story to sell the game, and because of its other good qualities they'll surely get away with it. In short, if you need a deep, detailed, engrossing story to enjoy a game, then D3 is not for you. But if you're the type who doesn't mind a pretty lightweight tale, the sole purpose for which seems to be to tie together the elements present in a game, then don't worry: D3's story will work just fine.
Let me begin with the stuff that I didn't like, largely so I can save the best for last. First, although the PDA emails and log entries are a great idea, D3 doesn't make nearly as good a use of them as it could. System Shock 2 (SS2) used the same sort of feature to far better because the emails helped build the atmosphere of horror. In D3, many of the email messages aren't worth reading, and most of the voice logs are simply boring. It's not that they're poorly acted—thank God, for bad voice acting is an absolute mood killer—it's that most of them are delivered in the boring, matter-of-fact tones of a worker drone going about his daily job. It would have been much more powerful if the logs could have helped build the tension.
Second, I was really expecting an experience that would take me back to the original DOOM, a terror-soaked shooter that would do its best to overwhelm me. D3 definitely gets the first half of that right, as I'll soon discuss, but the enemies were pretty sparse compared to the original. I realize they sport far more polygons and probably better AI, though I didn't really notice that they'd grown any smarter in the intervening years, but that part of the franchise was missing. Heck, the Trites would march stupidly toward me in single file; that made them boring and annoying more than anything else. Maybe I'm asking for too much, but I was expecting to do battle with the hordes of Hell, not a bunch of discrete pairs and trios here and there.
Third, one came to recognize patterns pretty quickly in the original game. A red keycard bathed in a column of light was a sure sign that unbelievably bad stuff was going to happen when it was taken. I remember after a while I was actually wincing in advance of such event triggers, almost not wanting to set the inevitable carnage in motion. That was as cool as it was amazing in 1993. In 2004, however, it's a bit old. I'm all for ambushing the player, but how about making it a bit less predictable?
I was surprised at how easily I was getting past many encounters, simply because I could predict from what directions the bad guys would come! A nice cache of goodies usually meant I could expect two imps to spawn as soon as I grabbed them. Two carefully-aimed shotgun blasts later I was moving on to my next prediction. I wasn't always right, of course, but if my score were a batting average I'd be offered a multi-million dollar contract for sure! Come on, Id, those small "cutouts" at the base of wall panels were an iron-clad guarantee that Trites would soon be coming; where's the surprise?
Anyway, on to the things that rock! First, introducing new enemies with neat cut scenes is a great idea. They make up some of the more memorable moments in the game. One corridor looks pretty much like any other, but I will never forget the way I first met the Demon (a.k.a. "Pinky") or the Lost Souls. I wish the cut scenes had been done differently (i.e., I wish they didn't take control away from the player), but they were great nevertheless. I have nothing but fond memories of all the cool sequences that I got to watch unfold as I found a new enemy.
Second, some of the ambient, scripted bits in the game are beyond disturbing. I was standing in a darkened corner listening for enemies, at one point, when I heard a woman's disembodied voice whisper "follow me". I whipped out the flashlight only to find a sequence of bloody footprints appearing on the floor heading away from me. The hair on my neck literally rose up as goosebumps rippled across my flesh! D3 is filled with wonderful moments like that one, moments that genuinely creep the player out. I am not easily unsettled, having seen the inside of my own father's skull after he opened it up with a rifle, but D3 took me aback. That's a testament to just how horrifying it can be at points.
Seriously, there is a very special quality to the experience of playing D3. I didn't realize it until I had been playing for a few hours one evening, but after I called it a night I experienced total adrenaline crash. It was only then I realized that my chest was beginning to unclench, along with the muscles of my back, my scalp, etc. The original DOOM was frightening and, aside from SS2 and Undying, I haven't had such an experience in another game since. But D3 absolutely blows the doors off those other games in terms of its ability to inspire fear! There's just something about the way D3 brings so many individually unnerving elements together to produce a wildly disturbing experience. I think it's the only video game that has ever made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin, and that makes it pretty special.
Third, D3 does boss battles right! I like a good, tough fight against a big, bad, boss monster. What I don't like are (1) bosses that are completely invulnerable until the player figures out the freakishly obscure, stupid trick, at which point they become a complete pushover, and (2) bosses that are wildly incongruous in terms of their ability to soak up damage. The bosses of D3 are perfect as far as I'm concerned. The first one the player faces, the Vagary queen of the Trites, is tougher than any other opponent already seen, but she's the perfect challenge for that point in the game. The great cut scene that introduces the three Mancubus enemies (Mancubi?) makes it a highly memorable "boss" battle; there's no trick to it, really, it's just a knock-down, drag-out, seriously tough fight. True, the guardian who watches over the soul cube is completely invulnerable until the player knows the trick, but it's not at all obscure: a disembodied woman's voice gives the perfect hint, which makes the battle fun.
Really, the only boss who's a complete pushover is Sabaoth, the being formerly known as Sergeant Kelly. Just as a lark, I wondered if the soul cube would take him down. So I tromped into his lair, tossed off a few rockets in his direction, and then activated the cube: it killed him instantly. I realize my tactic cut the battle pretty short, but I absolutely love the consistency involved. The soul cube kills a single enemy once it's ready to go and ol' "sarge" was no different. In fact, the only inconsistency in using the cube is that it has to be used on the final end boss, the mighty Cyberdemon, a number of times before he falls. But even then it's more fun than most stupid boss encounters. I find myself griping about boss battles in too many games, but D3 gets them all exactly right as far as I'm concerned.
Fourth, D3 isn't a game you're going to finish in a few hours. I managed to get Best Buy to match the price at Circuit City, so I got the game on August 3 for $45. I see that xFire has logged twelve hours of play for me, and that doesn't include the first few evenings that I played it (before that utility recognized D3 as a game). From looking at my saved-game files, I'm estimating a total playing time of roughly twenty hours—and that's only my first trip through it. Believe me, D3 was enough fun that I'm going to be playing through it at least once or twice more. It has its flaws, but it's a very entertaining game nevertheless. As such, I think it's a good value as games go these days.
Fifth, the developers really deserve some kind of award for their level design work. I've played countless other games that feature all kinds of big, heavy machinery, but D3 makes it all believable. Seriously, I have never seen the kind of attention to detail that virtually every area in D3 boasts. The huge reactor was absolutely amazing to watch. And it seemed like everywhere I turned there was all kinds of nifty, functioning machinery. This added to the ambient audio in a very special way, but it also added greatly to the game's immersion factor. Whatever else one can say about D3, it puts you right in the middle of a Mars outpost, and a seemingly functional one at that.
Sixth and finally, I love a game in which the weapons retain their utility throughout the whole thing. Granted, fists and the pistol suck at the end of the game just as much as they suck right from the outset, but every other weapon remains as useful at the end as when it was found. Heck, I was still using the shotgun in the game's final boss battle, just as I was still using the machine gun, the minigun, and everything else but fists and the pistol. That's definitely a bit of nostalgia from the old DOOM; its shotgun was the go-to weapon for every situation and D3 is no different. I like it!
There's only one substantive conclusion I've been able to draw about the multi-player aspect of the game thus far: it's about half baked. Clearly, the focus in D3 is on the single-player game, insofar as the multi-player aspect feels and functions like an afterthought—and an incomplete one at that. Where to begin? First, most of the servers to which I tried connecting (and I mean most, as in roughly eight out of ten) give me weird media errors and fail to let me join. I even went so far as to uninstall and reinstall the game completely, but most servers that are supposedly pure will not accept my similarly pure connection. That's frustrating to say the least.
But that's to say nothing of the bugs. The game browser is in terrible shape. It won't sort properly, it doesn't always show the correct settings, and it crashes back to the desktop. And assuming that one can even get into a game, which I did less than a dozen times in literally hundreds of attempts, the problems aren't over. D3 has the worst lag-like stuttering I've seen in years, and that's in games that show pings of less than 80 ms. But don't worrry, just about the time I'd start to have fun the whole thing would crash back to the desktop anyway. In that regard its timing is perfect.
The short summary is that the multi-player aspect of the game will probably be a lot of fun if Id ever works out the bugs. Until then it sucks badly.
I'm a subscriber to PC Gamer (PCG) magazine. Why do I mention that? Because I think that they, along with too many other reviewers (e.g., GameSpy), are suckers for good graphics. Heck, PCG recently gave FC a ridiculously positive rating, despite noting in their review that the multi-player experience was lame and the AI had some serious issues! And that's to say nothing of the terrible pacing in spots, a relative lack of variety in the weapons, absolutely awful vehicle interfaces, etc. Giving FC such a high score is like saying a car is great, even though its transmission doesn't work and its tires explode every two miles. When I saw that PCG had given D3 a similarly high score, I was very skeptical.
In fact, I've been skeptical since day one where D3 is concerned. Like I said before, I loved the original DOOM. I played Quake, Quake II, and even Quake III Arena, but none of them had the magic of DOOM. None of them made me want to keep playing, and yet hate to keep playing, like the immersive horror of DOOM did. It sure seemed to me like Id had lost the ability to make anything but good game engines. Certain pre-release screenshots of the D3 bestiary—most notably the juvenile looking pictures of the Trites (spiders with upside-down human heads)—did little to convince me otherwise.
But then I played the game. Is it predictable in spots? Yes. Does the techno-corridor crawling get old after a while? Yes. But weaknesses aside, D3 is one of the more amazing games I've played. It is the only game I've played that literally made me want to stop playing. About the time I was starting to complain about having to crawl through yet another high-tech corridor, the game thrust me straight into Hell. And I don't mean the goofy, surrealistic "Hell" of Painkiller; I mean a horrifying, twisted, viscerally disturbing Hell of which nightmares are made!
To be clear, I'm a Christian. I actually believe in Hell, and I doubt that Id's depiction of it is even remotely accurate. But I am dead serious when I tell you that I was so viscerally disturbed by D3's Hell that I literally had to quit playing shortly after making it into the environment. I rarely have such a strong emotional reaction to a mere game, but D3 provoked one in me. There was just something about the combination of the audio, the awful visuals, the terrible and twisted enemies, etc., that attacked my very soul.
And I mean that in a good way! In my view, if a game is going to play around seriously with a subject like Hell, then it shouldn't be some kind of namby-pamby, kinder, gentler Hell. Not at all. It should be the most awful, horrifying, Satanic nightmare capable of being realized, and on that count D3 delivers in spades. I wasn't disappointed with it at all in that respect. The Hell of D3 is a twisted, horrifying, freaky, terrible place that gives rise to one thought above all others: I don't want to be here! For what more could a Christian gamer ask?
So what's the overall verdict? Well, if you enjoy a scary game, and I mean a really scary game, then you simply cannot go wrong with D3. It's one hell of a lot of fun, no pun intended, and I know I'm going to be playing it for some time to come. It's that good. The only people to whom I cannot safely recommend the game are (1) those who despise FPS and/or horror games generally, (2) those with weak hearts, and (3) young children. There really aren't that many video games out there that I would keep my children (if I had any) from playing, but D3 is definitely one of them. It's so disturbing in spots that it might just give me nightmares; I would never inflict it on a child. Persons not in those categories should run out and buy the game. Now. It's that good. Kudos to Id for proving me wrong and building a very entertaining game!
08/18/2004