Doom 3 Review

[SALvation]

INTRODUCTION

Well, it is finally here. Anxiously awaited. Four years of development and two years overdue. Is it worth it? Lets see...

In the early era of pc games, the games were pretty much limited to side scrollers of various types. id appeared on the scene with a small group of developers. They had success with the Commander Keen series, and then in 1991 with Wolfenstein 3D, the first real 3D first person shooter that probably started the concept of video game violence. Doom came out 3 years afterward, and had a huge impact. In those days, you could download the game from your favorite BBS, and play a few levels for free. If you liked it, you would pay for it and unlock the other levels. Things were much simpler then, an entire game could fit on a floppy disk. id made shareware popular, and was able to get their games out quickly, cheaply, and without sharing profits. Flash forward to the present. Now games cost millions to develop, take dozens of developers and will typically come on 3 CDs or more.

<img src="/v2/modules/Reviews/images/doom3.jpg" border="1" vspace="7" hspace="7" align="left">Doom3 is essentially a bet-the-house situation for id Software. Although id has a had a steady stream of hits, it is still a small privately held company compared to the huge conglomerates that have bought up most other independent game developers. Their last project was Return to Castle Wolfenstein in 2001. Other incremental revenue has come from licensing the Quake engine, most noticeably used in the original Half Life. Epic, maker of the Unreal Engine, also licenses their technology, however the Unreal engine is updated annually, making it a more popular choice for new games. This may change with the release of Doom3. Doom3 is based on the last Quake engine, however every part of it has been rewritten and updated. Quake development has shifted to Raven Software who are working on the next version due next year. Quake IV will be a continuation of the Quake II story.

Doom really helped define the first person shooter game. In addition to the game itself, tools and source code of the game were released and or created. Multiplayer was featured and enhanced. People still play the old versions of doom, however, with updated graphics, models, and functionality.

The Quake engine, last used in Quake III, was the last generation graphics engine written by id. At that time it really pushed the limits of graphics. Since then however it has become stale for many. Mods have kept the game alive, but many are looking for the next great thing. Will Doom3 be it?

GAMEPLAY

Doom3 comes out on 3 CDs, no DVD version. A little less convienant, but probably cheaper to produce.

The game overall is spectacular. ID has pushed very hard to make this a realistic game. There was a tremendous amount of detail placed in sound, graphics, animations and special effects.

The physics are again reality based. Overall, I have seen these implemented in many games, and I am not certain to what degree it adds or detracts from the game. They do not appear to be used for much in this game. Killing most enemies will cause them to disintegrate, not too much use of the ragdoll effect, which in my opinion was overused anyway.

One thing that is nice however is that enemies can interact with the environment. It is nice to see them tearing through doors or knocking out grates. This provides more "depth" to the environment....

Much of the game is set in a Mars space station. Many of the tasks involved involve going through layered maps, where you go back and forth and also at different levels in order to achieve different objectives.

The game allows for quick saves and quick loads, additionally it will save at the beginnining of each level. Note however that you only have (1) quick save, so previous saves are gone. Although the initial loads are slow, quick loads are fast, as the engine is smart enough not to reload all of the texture data.

The controls are standard fare and include crouching and a weak zoom mode for all weapons (mouse 3). Unfortunatly no sniper weapons. Movement is fairly slow paced with sprinting allowed via shift key.

The console is still available, although hidden. It can be activated with Ctrl-Alt-Tilde(~). The Tab key activates the PDA and also the Scoreboard in multiplayer mode.

The PDA is a fairly standard means of collecting information and being able to review it at a later time. It contains obectives, data, email, videos and access passes, weapons and inventory list. It can automatically download the contents of other PDAs that you find. One of the irritating aspects of the PDA system is the codes. You get the name of a supply cabinet and the code for it. These will usually follow in sequence to where you find them. You need to write down the codes in order to unlock the cabinets, else review the audio/video/emails. Along with this, they have internet tie-ins to the game. Websites referenced in the various emails are real, and from at least one you can get a code for an interesting goodie.

There are 28 levels. The beginning serves as a orientation trainer similar to Half-Life. In fact much of the story line is similar to Half-Line. The original game had somewhat of a hazy story. They hired a science fiction writer to create the story for this game. Doom3 is not a continuation of the original story, rather it is a retelling of the story.

The entire atmosphere is creepy and scary. Lighting is bad, and to compensate you have to often use a flashlight. Enemies jump out from unexpected directions. It is nice that they don't just spawn, although they will teleport in after the beginning. I find it helpful to save frequently and reload frequently, but then I like to keep my health up.

There are 4 difficulty levels: Recruit, Marine, Veteran and Nightmare. You have to beat the game first before Nightmare is unlocked. In playing Veteran, the game starts off well paced, plenty of ammo, armor and health to keep you full. You will want to explore all crawl spaces, nooks and areas that you can jump to for goodies.

Replay value: Personally I like the model of where there are differing or multiple challenges per difficulty level. This can be best seen in the Thief series where there are different objectives per difficulty. This is also well done in Painkiller, where each level has a specific challenge, although there is no real connection between levels. That is a welcome diversion whereas here, harder difficulty means more monsters that are harder to kill and inflict more damage.

The enemy AI is not that great, although they will show some moves and more initiative as the game progresses.

VISUALS

Currently Doom3 sets the bar for creating an immersive environment. Far Cry was spectacular with its lush island environments, but they have nothing on Doom3. For Doom3, ID has gone all out to make the lighting, shadows and particle effects as realistic as possible. Rooms used to be textured boxes some time ago. That has changed tremendously. These rooms are the most realistic ever, and have lots of equipment, pipes, grills and heavy duty animated machinery everywhere. It is interesting to walk through the different areas and just look at everything.

The lighting and shadows are phenomenal. Much has been made about the graphics. Most systems will not be able to run the game at the high settings, and probably none at the greatest detail level. The most amazing thing about the lighting is the way the shadows interact with the environment. The environment is extremely detailed, lights create shadows, and moving lights create very realistic moving shadows. In addition the glass is also very realistic. It will distort what you see behind the glass, and the distortion will shift as your viewpoint does. Doom3 has also added shimmering heat effects. This is noticeable from steam, fires, and firing rockets.

There are 4 video quality settings:
Ultra quality - no texture compression - 512 MB card
High quality - specular and diffuse compressed, none for normal maps - 256 MB Card
Medium quality - All textures are compressed - 128 MB card
Low quality - All textures are compressed and possibly downsized - 64 MB Card

Gameplay is capped at 60 fps, except for render demos.

The more compression you have, the less details you have and the more artifacts. These can been most easily seen by looking at the edges and corners of objects. High quality will probably be the maximum for gamers with high end systems, at least until some video cards come out with 512 MB of ram.

With a 128MB Geforce 5900 and a Pentium 2400 I found no difference in frame rates in going from Low to Medium, perhaps because frame rates are capped. There is however a big hit in going to High. I found 800X600 is the best rate, and that is with no anti-aliasing. Going to Low and 1024X768 gets a laggy shimmery type of response that is unpleasant.

In general, the low end Nvidia 5900 will outperform all versions of the ATI x800. Once id comes out with pixelshader 3.0 patch, that should further boost the Nvidia scores. The Nvidia cards have two current advantages, Ultra Shadows, which has been a technology searching for a game the past year, and the configuration of its rendering pipelines. The Nvidia cards can effectively double the pipelines when the rendering is done without color and a Z buffer. The speed difference is more dramatic when comparing the lesser ATI models. Nvidia will sell lesser versions at reduced clock speeds. The ATI approach has been to reduce clock speeds and also reduce the number of rendering pipelines. It has a big impact in this game. It remains to be see if ATI can come out with an effective patch to compensate, but it may be unlikely because of the hardware limitations. (editor's note: ATI has released a beta driver specifically for Doom 3 available here which improves performance.)

SOUND

The sound utilized is a full 6 channel surround sound setup. If you have the right speakers, the audio will blow you away. In order to really experience the sound, it is recommended that you have at least a 4 speaker setup.

The music is completely different. In many games you have ambient sounds, level music, and battle music. For this game, they went with ambient music all the way. Each level is supposed to have more sounds than the entire Quake III game, 80 MB or so. Every area has its own ambient background noise(s). This is another one of the features that can be scaled. At the basic settings you may have one type of sound per an event, at higher levels, up to 7. There is no in-game music as such. There was so much sound processing that it eventually caused memory fragmentation to where the operating system would have problems. So they had to change the sound subsystem to use ogg format. ogg allows for better compression, and is open source. Operating systems prior to Windows 2000 and Windows XP are not supported, probably because they do not handle large amounts of memory well, and Doom 3 requires 384 MB.

Future games based on the Doom 3 engine will be abe to use EAX Advanced HD audio. That comes out of a settlement with Creative as regards their shadowing technology.

WEAPONS

Weapons are simple fare - flashlight, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, chaingun, grenades, rockets, bfg, chainsaw and soul cube. The weapons are done very nicely. They have a very solid and real feel. Probably one of the most hated aspect of the game is the flashlight. For many areas, you can either see, or shoot, but not both at the same time. I find myself backing out of those areas to light, and shooting the enemies once they approach. Sadly, that is not always possible, and in some areas you have to shoot completely blind. Another of the complaints is the long reload time that weapons take, and that reloading is not automatic when you reach 0. Well, this is realistic, or at least more realistic than most. I do hate holding a shotgun and then firing to find that I am reloading instead. The way to get around that is to reload everything after every batch of enemies. And remembering to do that. The shotgun is your basic meat and potatoes weapon. Not enough ammo for it in later levels. At close range, it can take out most enemies. It is useful for ducking behind corners and blasting the enemies once they turn the corner. The machine gun is nice for further distances, the chaingun moreso, although ammo also is lacking for it. Grenades... I don't have any use for them, and don't really understand them. I usually blow myself up, or find that they are not convienant to throw at enemies because of their location or movement patterns. The rocket launcher - everyone likes this one. Although I find the visual effects and resulting explosion to be lacking. The BFG, well, you can guess what it stands for, and it is pure fun to have and use.

MULTIPLAYER

Multiplayer is still a big question mark. Out of the box, Doom3 only supports 4 players. This is a disappointingly small number. Some of the first mods promise to enable more players, and indeed, there are currently servers that support more. However when a lan is suggested for more than 8 players, that does not sound very hopeful. Looking at the network settings, it looks like they want to have 64 kbits available per player. Although this may not sound like a lot, it is beyond what dialup can do. It would apply to upstream and downstream for a server. Most cable and dsl users are capped at 256 kbits upstream, meaning any server they run will be limited to 4 players. Although this can be changed through mods, I suspect that you will have to more than a dsl line in order to run a server.

With the new era of games that rely on realistic physics, all of those interactions are coming at a high cost. The era of dialup multiplayer gaming appears to be coming to an end. The ping is too high and the connection cannot pass enough data to keep the client in sync reliably. For multiplayer however, I don't see that complex physics adds anything. It makes more network traffic for the server to keep all of the clients in sync, and then you lose the ability to play on dialup or to play with multiple players on broadband... So this is a big minus.

There are 4 multiplayer modes available, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Last man standing, and Tournament, a 1 vs 1 mode where others spectate and fight the winner.

Currently there are only different colored skins available. Not much variety, but Doom3 has implemented a per-polygon hit scheme. This ensures (for now) that no player models have smaller surface areas than the others. While the per-polygon hit scheme is certainly grand, I can see the potential for it causing more problems with client side prediction where it looks like you were missed but hey, no you weren't.

Doom3 will ship with a Win32 server in the box, a Linux server is planned for release shortly afterward.

A map editor is built into the game. You will be able to make changes (potentially destructive) to the maps that come with the game. In addition, it has been stated that mod tools will be released shortly after the game comes out. In the past, ID has been very responsive to the gaming community with their release of source code and mods. One hopes that that continues to be the case. Lack of tools will really make a gaming community lose interest and wither away.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Requirements:
A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500.
384 megabytes of memory.
Two gigabytes of hard drive space.
An nVidia GeForce 3 or GeForce 4MX graphics card or better; or an ATI Technologies 8500 or better.
Windows 2000 or XP, lesser operating systems are not supported

VALUE

Value: This game is more expensive than most, starting at $55, which is a lot higher than most games. Secondly is the replay aspect. For SP game, once or twice through and you will probably be done. Depending on how you play the game, it may take a solid 20 to 50 hours. Multiplayer value has yet to be determined. It depends on how damaging the limitations are. If you like single player, making and playing mods, this is your game. If you want to see the future of gaming, then this is also your game. If you want to replace your current multiplayer favorite... you may want to wait.

FUTURE

For the Future: Everyone is really waiting to see what becomes of this engine. What game developers will use it for their games? Is there any cross development with Quake IV? Will Quake IV have similar multiplayer limitations? As for John Carmack and id, they are working on a completely new project. Hopefully we will not have to wait 3 years to see it.

Total: 9/10