Praise be, it’s a new Program B episode!
Myself and host regulars Tarnsman and MTrop are joined by 40oz for a discussion on Doom 3 and 4. In addition to talking about our (dis)likes of the 2004 title, we dedicate a lot of the discussion toward harping about classic vs. modern design philosophies in the gaming industry, and the expectations we hold for id’s upcoming title and how realistic they may be.
Batman and airbags also feature.
Next fortnight will be a discussion on speedmapping! As an added bonus, we’ll be expecting all of those featured on the show to create a single 100 minute speedmap over the course of the episode. The maps will be streamed immediately following the broadcast and linked right here in the thread. We’ll also ask you, the greater listening public, to decide which of the maps plays best of all (hint: it’ll be mine. It won’t even be worth checking)!
Drop me a line if you want to appear on the show. That’s 22:00 EDT on Saturday the 8th!
The thing you seem to be missing with the problems of Doom3 is that the game play was not designed to be a scary game. Your avatar in the game is a superhuman in Doom3, even more than in Doom. Sure you can’t run as fast, but you’re basically an ironman that doesn’t take any significant damage from the attacks. You get thrown around when an imp attacks, but you never lose much health. They aren’t dangerous. A game that it was taking pointers from was System Shock 2, which always had the player on his toes, where every monster encounter was terrifying to the player, even if it was the same kind of encounter over and over. Every time you faced a monster, you dreaded it because you knew that you were in danger. They did however do this in different ways. With the creeper robots, the insect swarms that you could only run from, and the beasts that you had to unload all your precious ammo into. Some monsters you were encouraged to melee just so you could save precious resources. Doom 3 lacked these elements though. You had boatloads of ammo, so firing your weapons didn’t have any consequence to you. And even if you took any damage, then you would still easily restock on that two seconds after. Had they managed to balance this, it wouldn’t have mattered much that they recycled how the monsters were coming at them because everytime would they be a posing a number of problems for the player to overcome.
I think also, you’ve missed out on the Doom3 mod scene quite a bit. While there’s not as many mods as for Doom 1 and 2. There are a fair share quite impressive mods out there, as well as custom maps for the person who likes that.
Depending on your standards and what you are interested in, the following could interest you
There’s plenty mods in development and a lot of different mods out there for the one who’s interested to look, though some of the released ones that might stand out a bit more are Dark Mod, HardQore 2, Zombie Slayer, Grimm, Hexen Edge of Chaos, Arx, In Hell, Open Coop, Last man standing, Z-Hunter, Herr W’s monkeys of Doom, Ruiner, EMZ, Quake 2 Lost Marine, Quake Shambler’s castle.
Aaah man, I’ve only just discovered and I would have had some very interesting opinions on the matter. Oh well, if you ever want to talk about Doom 3 again (maybe on its anniversary), PM me.