Doom 3

Close those blinds, kill the lights, lock the doors, and crank up that subwoofer, ‘cause Doom 3 is in town.

The game’s monsters are brutally detailed, with some very high polygon counts and an all new “per-poly” hit detection system that, when combined with the ragdoll physics, lets you kill monsters in all sorts of interesting and disgusting ways. Shooting a zombie in the face with a handgun will actually cause a big blood splat to appear on the model in the exact area you hit him, and likewise with the legs, chest, ass, or anywhere else on the body, but one big annoyance is that it takes far too little effort to force a corpse to explode into the cliché gibs, offering you only a tiny amount of leeway in playing with the corpses and enjoying the ragdoll physics – demons are particularly guilty of this because their corpses literally fizzle away after being on the ground for barely a second. Luckily, the community is to the rescue once again with a quick mod that came out to totally disable this dissipation effect so we can properly enjoy all the work that went into this part of the game engine (am I the only one sensing a pattern here? Hell, it was only a few hours before the first “duct tape” mode came out that allowed any weapon to emit a flashlight effect because people were so annoyed at having to lower their weapon to get a proper look at dark rooms). But moving on, while the overall level of graphical quality and geometry detail in Doom 3 is superb, I instantly got the impression moving through the levels that the art team relied a little too much on bump mapping. A lot of the objects in the game feature neat little bumps and variations that really add to the realism and detail, but this actually gave me a negative impression as far as the overall level of graphics detail went, because the bumpmapped areas looked incredibly blurry in contrast to the rest of the object, and up close a lot of the world geometry seems to be flawed and low in texture detail. It wasn’t just my graphical settings either – seeing the game running on the higher detail modes produced the exact same effect. Everything from control panels to crates suffered this “texture blurriness” problem that really stood out, and surprised me given how high in detail the rest of the game looks. Maybe I’m being too picky, but I honestly think more detail could have gone into the texturing of the game’s world objects.

There’s so much going on under the hood with the Doom 3 engine that I couldn’t even begin to understand, but suffice it to say, the game is well set up to last through the next few generations. With so much detail and brutal power behind this engine, as well as the capabilities to do things I’ve never seen done before in FPS gaming, I’m honestly so impressed that it runs so well on such a wide range of systems. Even on low detail at 640x480, the game still looks very impressive, and I’ve heard reports of people getting it running adequately on video cards as low as a GeForce 2 MX (don’t quote me on that). At the same time, “adequately” is about the best most people can expect out of this game unless they’re running some manner of crazy ubermachine, and medium detail at 1024x768 seems to be the perfect “middle ground” that most people will find themselves playing at, averaging about 20-30 FPS for the standard system the usual gamer these days will tend to own – not exactly exceptional, but at least acceptable, especially given how slow-paced the game is. Load times are pretty good, and there’s integrated support for third party mods (a “Mods” option in the main menu lets users load custom game resources as desired – albeit, only one custom directory can be active at a time it seems), so I look forward to seeing how far people push the engine in the future – just thinking of the possibilities with the game’s unique interface system alone gives me goosebumps. But rest assured, this game will push the hell out of your system at the higher detail levels, so you may find yourself a part of the horde throwing out fistfuls of money to get better hardware. Be careful with overclocking too – word has it on the block that the game gets very temperamental with systems pushed beyond their regular spec.

Audio, another incredibly important aspect to the game’s horror experience is naturally very well presented in Doom 3. It’s just that feeling you get from carefully walking up a darkened corridor, only to have the last remaining lights suddenly go out, some loud bone-chilling laughter occur somewhere in the background, and then the cawing shrill of a Revenant coming around the corner behind you that makes the entire experience authentic, unique, and deathly afraid of dark places. I hope the audio directory for this game is rolling in sacks of cash at the moment, because while visuals are important to the spook-factor, it’s the audio that really raises the hair on the back of your neck. The voice acting is superb (when “the catastrophe” happens and demons are pouring into the base, the scared-as-hell commotion you pick up over your radio is downright bone-chilling). The game takes full advantage of whatever audio hardware you have available (make sure your speaker settings are correct in the Windows control panel), so make sure you jack up that surround-sound setup you paid through the nose for.

Moving on, after grappling with Doom 3’s multiplayer component, I stumbled across a simple word that more than adequately defined it: “broken”. Honestly, my twenty minutes with the server browser interface never got me actually into the game – well, scratch that, one server I actually WAS able to join, except I got stuck at a black screen with absolutely nothing for me to do except bring down the console and type “reconnect”, only to find the server had gone down. The rest of the time, my attempts to join a running session either resulted in a “server is full” message (this with servers that had as low as 1/4 players in them, even after I refreshed the list), a simple inability to connect, or some odd, obscure message about how I had the incorrect assets or something, followed by what seemed to be a random hex string. The server browser, to be honest, sucks. The few filter settings I could play with (there was nothing to filter below a certain ping level or by empty / full servers) didn’t seem to actually work, because no matter how many times I told the server to not display password-protected servers, they still kept coming up. Even the sorting columns are broken, as trying to sort by ping gave me a messy listing with 150ms servers appearing above the 90ms ones. Who the hell tested this thing? Even creating my own server to dick around with showed that I wasn’t missing out on much – Doom 3’s multiplayer component only offers a few smallish levels (with maximum support for only up to four players – yes, four, although hacks are already out to bypass this) gameplay support for the generic deathmatch modes, like Last Man Standing or “Tournament”, and there was no sign of any kind of CTF or objective-based gameplay. And as a big, final kick in the face, Doom 3 does not have any co-op support, which is something I find incredibly annoying, seeing as how the Xbox port of the game is apparently going to ship with this functionality out of the box, and it won’t just be a half-assed splitscreen hack job either. Again, the modding community is hard at work to bypass some of the gameplay-related problems, but come on id, what’s up with the crap-tastic server browser that refused to even let this particular journalist even play the game online due to incomprehensible or false error messages? After the intense and high-quality singleplayer experience I got out of Doom 3, trying to hop online was like being given a million dollars, only to later on be punched in the face, laughed at, and told it was actually monopoly money. What happened, id?

I’ll admit that I’m pretty damn angst-ridden over my brief touch with Doom 3’s multiplayer, but to be honest, I still have faith in id Software. The complaints and problems with this aspect of the game will all be fixed in due time, the SDK will be released sooner or later, and soon Doom 3 will give birth to some of the most amazing mods to grace the gaming community – until Half-Life 2 comes out, anyways. While the whole “release now, fix it later” charade is something that will annoy anybody, that doesn’t change the fact that the Doom 3 engine is destined for big things, and the game’s legacy will most likely carry on for years to come, just as id Software’s previous games have. John Carmack is just too big and the game’s technology too advanced for it to simply fade into obscurity. But for the ultimate relevant question, is Doom 3 truly something that you, the average gamer would really want to buy and play through? Is it worth dropping that $50US for id Software’s next big-name overhyped title? I respond with a resounding “yes”, even if the experience was ultimately a little disappointing. The game is definitely not perfect, but with production values this high and a scare / immersion factor that goes through the roof, even after the 50,000th imp leaps out of a closet to claw at your face, Doom 3 is a game that any player would be stupid not to own in his collection. As soon as the multiplayer aspect is fixed up and I get my god damn co-op play, I think the game will be elevated to a “thing of beauty” state, but as a singleplayer title, it is still very much worth experiencing. Close those blinds, kill the lights, lock the doors, and crank up that subwoofer, ‘cause Doom 3 is in town.