I found Doom 3’s appeal (and unpopularity) to be similar in many ways to Crysis. It was marketed largely as a game using a next-generation engine: one that would look amazing, but unfortunately not run on your computer.
At the least, that kind of approach dampens initial, “Wow!” flash in the pan kind of sales. You are left banking on long-term sales, which are subject to a much deeper view of the game lurking under all that wet paint. Few games offer truly innovative gameplay, and Doom 3 didn’t even make the attempt.
The reviewers got it wrong, because they had the excitement of enjoying all those dynamic lightings, bump and specular texture mappings, and various other bells and whistles when they first loaded it up. It was a truly impressive game at the time (much as Crysis still is), but that simply does not translate into sales if there is a perception that it can’t be enjoyed without upgrading your machine.
Well, id can hardly be said to be attention whores, announcing their game when everyone is busy watching Iron Man and playing GTA IV (and Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii?).
I don’t think id themselves marketed Doom 3 as a game for supercomputers, that was just sort of the assumption people made because when they posted interviews with John Carmack he’d say a bunch of things that nobody but programmers could understand.
At any rate, by the time Doom 3 actually came out, the hardware needed to run it well wasn’t all that high-end, unlike Crysis. Also unlike Crysis, id’s engines (Doom 3 included) tend to scale back pretty well to lesser hardware without ending up looking worse than games a generation or two older than they are. Bash id all you want but I still give them and Carmack in particular kudos for pushing the envelope with their engines without going overboard relative to what people actually own when their game is released. I don’t think Doom3 (or any of id’s other games/engines) was like Crysis at all in that regard.
Mediocre compared to what? It was pretty sub-par compared to games that came out years before it, and its graphics engine wasn’t even that amazing by then. At least, it wasn’t amazing from the end-user point of view. Cross-platform adaptability and scalability isn’t that useful, though, if the only game using it is crap.
That said, considering the overwhelming power of 4th iterations, I am willing to leave open the possibility of something amazing.
In terms of FPS games overall, maybe. But compared to the rest of 2004’s Shooters (HL2, Far Cry, UT2004, Riddick, Halo 2) it was barely worth playing. Maybe if it had of come out in 2003 it would have seemed better.
IMO, Doom3 was fun. Simple, maybe a bit too simple, but fun. People are always quick to bash id for being tech only and no gameplay, but I think they tend to get the very BASIC bits of gameplay right more than most developers, and by this I mean things like the feel of movement and shooting and such. There are so many FPS games out there (many of them made by Monolith, though there are other offenders) where the game looks great and sounds great on paper but it just doesn’t “feel right”. id and Bungie, IMO, are like the Nintendos of FPS games in that no matter what shortcomings their games might have, that basic movement and presentation system is rock fucking solid and makes everything you do in the game at least somewhat fun.
Clearly YMMV depending upon how much that sort of thing means to you, I mean the Resident Evils prior to RE4 were huge hits so obviously not everyone is as picky about that shit as I am.
There’s still Rage – if that turns out to be a good (well, preferably great) game then I’ll be happy to restore my confidence in ID and look forward to D4.
If it’s crap though ID will have become (sadly) a bit irrelevant to me.
I liked the initial buildup in Doom 3, and then once the demons broke loose I kinda lost interest and trudged through the rest of the story. Tech 5/Rage were looking good last year, so I’m sure D4 will look nice, at least.
Monster closets were cool in Doom because it wasn’t a literal closet; it was an entire floor that dropped out from beneath you as the lights went down, or a wall opening up in front of you to reveal a dozen grizzly Pinkies ready to snack on your face. Not very cool with a pair of ragtag melee zombies floundering after you in torn up space janitor jumpsuits. The one sequence that seemed most memorable by those who played Doom 3 was the mobile turret with the flashlight escorting you through the pitch black tunnels, the only other for me was the not quite end boss (the guardian?) that mumbles something along the lines of “shoot the big blue thing hurf durf”. Oh, and the one time you got let outside of the airlocks to see a fleeting Cacodemon. Classic.
I seem to remember that some of the id developers really did not want to do a 3rd Doom, and now we’re getting a 4th one? Did those guys leave the company or is it just the money talking here?
Yeah, they were good moments. I think the best part of doom 3 was when you first enter delta (?) labs and there is no fighting, no monsters, no power, and you’re just walking around. You see an imp outside the building, crawling on the roof; a few pipes burst here and there; kick in the good surround sound support and you have one scary game. Too bad that didn’t last long.
On of the biggest things that blew doom 3 for me was the feel of the weapons. Just plain wrong. HL2 got this aspect right and it made for a better game.
Oh, and I totally love that hand-drawn cover for doom (and doom 2). It’s a shame not many games go for that look anymore.
Wow they can get the…basics right? After 15+ years of games thats the best compliment you can give? If so I think thats speaks for itself as to why allot of gamers shrug at id saying anything these days. The basics are like saying you can pass the 101 level class of a college subject. Big deal.
id has simply been left behind. Companies like Infinity Ward, and Valve are the new standard bearers for the FPS genre.
I’m most interested in what they might do to adapt to what seems like a shifting PC game market. Crysis was massively pirated, and UT3 and Quake Wars seemed to kind of come and go. These days don’t seem particularly kind to the ‘steel & muscle’ style of PC FPS. That may just be perception though, all of those games possibly having made tidy profits.
