Doom³

The Good
History has not always been kind to Doom 3. While it released in 2004, after a long period of delays, to critical fanfare and very impressive sales, it has since been viewed increasingly as a bit of a disappointment in comparison to its predecessors.

It's important to note, especially for folks who weren't old enough to pay attention to it at the time, that the game set out to do exactly what was in fashion for the industry at the time: graphics showcases that showed off lots of shiny real-time lighting and bump mapping and a very tight, on-rails FPS experience a la Half-Life.

The hype around Doom 3 was immense, dating all the way back to the year 2000 with John Carmack's famous .plan update which explained how id's owners had been reluctant to return to the same franchise for yet another FPS, and in return the staff had threatened to walk out if they didn't get to do another Doom game.

I loved Doom 3 back when it came out and still love it today, though I can acknowledge that pretty much all of the popular criticisms of the game are on the nose. It is a mediocre shooter and a mediocre horror game with dated graphics and gameplay mechanics that weren't strong enough to age gracefully, but man does it have some fantastic production values. Part of the allure when it came out was to just see what a Doom game could look like were it to be reimagined with the period's contemporary technology, and on that front the game excelled.

Some of the reasons for the game's drastic shifts in direction from previous entries were obviously decisions dictated by technology concerns. The real-time stencil shadows offered by the engine looked harsh and sharp, so the setting was dark and metallic to lend well to this effect. The engine was not capable of drawing convincing-looking outdoor scenes or areas with natural lighting, so the game barely features any. Most machines of the time couldn't render a scene with more than five or six actors at a time, so surprise, that's what you get. And of course, rendering scenes with wide open spaces and lots of detail was hard on the hardware too, so you're in cramped corridors full of tight corners and doors that automatically close after a few seconds.

The call to take the game's design in a horror-oriented direction would've been the natural one to make. The original games were commonly thought of as being rather scary in their day, even if they seem quaint by modern standards. But in the id Software board room, there were other concerns.

"Well it's a Doom game, so it's gotta have the demons and shotguns! And the chainsaw too! Gotta have lots of shooty shooty stuff 'cause that's what Doom is known for!" Tim Willits says, upping the irons. "Heavy metal and pentagrams! SLAYER!"

"But it's gotta be dark and scary and tense because that's where the technology works best, mmm!" Carmack retorts, his vocal tic aggravated by the lively debate.

Todd Hollenshead leans in to look at the two, brows furrowed, his luscious locks dangling at the sides of his head. "So which way do we go? Big, stupid and fun, or dark, serious and scary?”

"BOTH!" The room erupts into riotous cheering. "Both at the same time!!!”

After watching the opening cutscene, you're given some time to trudge around in a safe place with no enemy threats, filling the shoes of your nameless protagonist (we can call him Doomguy, or maybe we should call him Kevin, since his visage in this game is modelled after artist and id Software co-owner Kevin Cloud's visage, not to mention it's Kevin's arms holding the guns in the original games, and it's Christmas time as I write this so Home Alone has been on TV like fifteen times already this month). Doom 3's increased focus on horror and a slowed-down pace lends itself well to establishing a fantastic sense of place in the environments.

There's no 'use' key, but instead the game offers rich interactive screens. When you approach one, your gun drops away and your crosshair becomes a mouse cursor, that you can click on the screen's elements with. Interactive terminals in FPS games are nothing new, but the implementation of this mechanic in Doom 3 is incredibly slick, maybe the best I've seen in a shooter. Your view doesn't lock into the screen or take you to a menu or anything, you can just walk up to it and start using it just like any touch screen in the real world.

Things like that serve as small elements of what makes up the game’s greatest strength, its presentation. Even in 2019, Doom 3 looks fantastic, and it’s not because it’s got bump mapping and stencil shadows, it’s because the game is a lovingly crafted work of art. The environments are lovingly brought to life with details and movement. Machines run through complex procedures, carrying glowing tubes of blue liquid from place to place. Pistons pound up and down, consisting of complicated arrays of individual moving parts. Often, nearby monitors and terminals update to reflect the cycles of the machinery around them. These landmarks aren’t static meshes that see repeated use, either – they’re handmade, one-offs that you’ll see once and probably never again. Lights flicker, spark and move about from place to place, making the shadows dance along the walls and floors. Computer terminals are crammed with scrolling text, animated graphs and charts, many of which are interactive even if they don’t actually affect anything in the game world.

This isn’t even covering what it looks like when you get to hell, either (sorry, spoiler warning: this is a Doom game, you go to hell). The representation of hell in Doom 3 is fantastic, filled to the brim not just with fire, brimstone, skulls and pentagrams, but also with some truly weird architecture and lots of cool scripted events.

Other games had beat Doom 3 to the market with some of its banner engine features (Deus Ex Invisible War, Far Cry and even fan projects like Tenebrae for Quake already had the per-pixel lighting implemented) but Doom 3 is seemingly built from beginning to end to make full use of its engine’s features in an artistic capacity. Even if modern engines show Doom 3 up with soft shadows and physically based rendering and vastly increased poly counts and texture sizes, Doom 3 still manages to hold its own based on the quality of the artwork alone.

It’s also worthy to note that compared to other titles at the time that ran on bleeding-edge technology, Doom 3’s engine is solid and stable. Aforementioned games like Deus Ex IW and Thief 3 are janky, having significant trouble even running on a modern computer. Not the case with Doom 3. Not only does it run on today’s hardware, you will find performance is consistent, maintaining a good 60FPS rate on most mid-range hardware at native resolutions. It might take a bit of fiddling with the console to get your desired resolution (use CTRL-ALT-~ to bring up the console, set r_mode to –1, then use the r_customheight, r_customwidth and r_aspectratio commands to fix this). For people with a monitor supporting higher refresh rates, it’s important to note that the Doom 3 engine’s tick rate is locked to 60Hz. It will not render more than 60 frames per second, no matter how much power you throw at it, which is disappointing for folks like me who run a 144Hz screen and care about the difference. This also results in some slight audio quirks like how rapid fire guns like the machine gun and plasma gun seem to ‘hiccup’ and miss as they fire, and the player’s footsteps sounding like the Doomguy is occasionally tripping over his own feet. It’s ironic that this had to be done when the Carmack’s reasoning was to ostensibly prevent exploits and cheating in multiplayer games, when Doom 3’s multiplayer is a clear afterthought with very few features. The BFG Edition goes a good way to alleviate this unfortunate quirk by allowing you to double the tick rate to 120Hz.

For a first-time player, the introductory levels are a gripping experience, as you see things go quickly from bad to worse while the demonic invasion takes over. Stuff is blowing up, people are dying or being possessed left and right, imps are crawling out of the freaking walls and your radio is screeching with screams, men yelling orders and gunfire. You heft your shotgun and open a door to come face to face with an imp. He screeches a dissonant shriek at you, rearing up to pounce and take your head off. It’s great. The game throws almost its entire bag of horror tricks at you in the first couple of hours, and I found it genuinely scary at a few points... to start with, that is. More on that later.

The story is hardly any more developed than the original game but the dialogue is well written and well-acted, making use of a wide cast of veteran voice actors to record the various NPCs you interact with (for like, five seconds, before you have to proceed without them or they get killed) and the various audio journals you listen to.

The quality of the level designs throughout is consistently good, and the game maintains a deftly paced, hypnotic rhythm of exploration and combat. Level layouts are less linear than later FPS games, still coming from the boomer shooter school of design, though they are more streamlined than in previous id titles. Like Half-Life, the game knows not to keep you doing the same thing for too long, alternating between corridor crawls, spooky bits, heavy combat, set pieces and the odd breather moment.

The Bad
Doom 3 has a problem being comfortable with itself and deciding what it wants to be, though, and that’s what makes its gameplay the weakest of any instalment in the Doom series.

With the technological conceits and weaknesses that it is clearly designed around, id had the opportunity to incorporate some survival horror sensibilities into the game. And they did, too, but it’s ultimately the sense that they had to make it an action game too, that holds it back. Doom 3’s horror is only skin deep and doesn’t go into the gameplay mechanics, save for two features: the flashlight and the weapon reloading mechanics. Every other mechanic is standard FPS fare centred around combat, and the combat is never particularly great. Sorry guys. It’s certainly serviceable and balanced, but it’s far from thrilling.

Why? Well, it’s too easy most of the time, for one. Ammo and health are extremely plentiful, if you just remember to look around behind things. Demons may often lie in wait behind some of the pillars, pipes and crates you may pass, but even more often it’s caches of health, ammo and armour that lurk in the dark. And those storage lockers that you have to read emails and listen to audio logs to get codes to? Just ignore them if you like, aside from getting the odd weapon a bit earlier, they almost never have anything that you can’t easily get by without. If you’re playing the BFG Edition re-release of the game, the need to manage your ammo reserves goes from trivial to non-existent, by way of it doubling the ammo received per pickup, and adding even more ammo pickups to each level. Resident Evil, this ain’t. If you're looking for a game offering frantic moments where your blood is pumping while you sprint down the hallways trying to get away from a relentless pursuer after feeling the dread-inducing dry click of your empty gun, keep on looking.

Because throwing too many enemies on screen would be a performance concern, you’re extremely unlikely to ever be in danger of getting overwhelmed. You’ll round a corner. A wall opens up or a teleport happens and a monster comes in. You shoot him dead and immediately turn around to blow away the guy behind you, because it’s been three hours and you KNOW by now that every single bloody time a monster spawns in front of you, they place one behind you as well. Teleporting in is by far the most common way that enemies are introduced to the scene, increasingly so in later levels, and teleport are telegraphed by about almost two seconds of sound and visual cues before they actually appear. When they do, they also are frozen in place for a bit under a second, unable to attack you. Imps, maggots and wraiths, three of the most common enemy types, all come in this way and can be dealt with using the same tactic: make a beeline for where they’re about to spawn in, stick your shotgun in their mouth and pull blow them away before they can even activate. You keep expecting the game will finally catch on to this and maybe try a different trick, but it never does. It just happens more frequently, and occasionally with bigger bad guys as you go, like cacos and revenants. But the strategy never changes and it never fails. It’s boring.

By the way, that’s not to mention the cheap ambushes the game occasionally throws at you. That imp behind the door I mentioned earlier? Every fifth door has an imp behind it, waiting to do that same pounce. You can’t get out of the way, you can’t interrupt him with a non-lethal hit and you can’t back up quickly enough to get out of the range of his leap. Most of the time you’ll just have to take the hit if he doesn’t go down with your first shot. But most of us FPS veterans know to take doors on a narrow angle to divide and conquer the threats behind it... so you stack up on the side, nudge the door enough to open it and... the imp pounces on cue, and warps around the side of the doorway, in brazen defiance of the laws of physics, to hit you in the face anyway! Come on, man!

The weapons feel chronically underpowered, even though they’re actually not. Almost all of the way through the game you’ll be sticking with your melee weapon, the shotgun. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, don’t try and correct me, Doom 3’s shotgun is absolutely a melee weapon, being completely ineffective from any distance outside of three feet, but utterly devastating when used at point blank. I understand that this ludicrous degree of spread is to create situations where other guns are more appropriate, but this method of doing so is not practical and doesn’t even work. Almost all of the game’s combat is close quarters, with most rooms not more than a few metres in length or height, so the shotgun is almost always the superior choice, even with its insane spread. Why not just make it fire way slower, so it’s no good for groups? Make shotgun shells a little harder to come by, so you’re not reaching for it with every encounter? Yes, I know I’m spending a whole paragraph moaning about a shotgun, but when it’s your standby gun for pretty much the whole game, these problems with it tend to compound.

The other guns are better-balanced, each having a particular situation where they can come into their own, but all share the problem of having some incredibly weak audio-visual feedback. They sound like nerf guns, with the pistol, shotgun, machinegun and plasma gun being particularly problematic in this area. Enemies and the environment alike do not react much to being shot by them. I’m surprised that such a core part of the game, the shooting, sounds and so pithy and flaccid when the sound design, in every other respect, is great.

Okay, now let’s talk about the flashlight. Yes, the infamous flashlight mechanic doesn’t make sense and doesn’t add tension. That said, it’s not as bad as people tend to make out – instances where it is genuinely dark enough that you just can’t see at all without the flashlight are extremely rare, and there are actually a few moments where it is played to good effect, where you are constantly being attacked in pitch darkness, with a moving source of light that you must stick close by and defend so that you can proceed without having to put your gun away and expose yourself to attack.

I do believe that having a gun-mounted light with perhaps a more limited cone of light would be a better compromise, and those scenes designed around the sparse lighting could be mitigated by simply knocking your light out (there is already one sequence that turns your flashlight off anyway).

The BFG re-release of the game makes this situation worse by not only providing you with a shoulder-mounted lamp, but it also assigns an ambient base light value to levels, making it so there are almost NO dark areas whatsoever. For a game which tries to add tension by the idea of threats lurking in the shadows, this is a crippling blow to the game’s already hit-and-miss efforts at frightening you.

The other ‘horror’ mechanic I mentioned is probably a total accident: you cannot interrupt weapon reloads, save for the shotgun. If your gun runs dry in the middle of a fight and starts reloading, you have to sit and wait for it to finish while you are getting pounded on instead of being able to switch to another. Mercifully, the ‘auto-reload’ feature for weapons can be disabled, so you can pick your moments to top up your guns. With it working this way, I actually like the way it feeds into the rhythm of the game – after a firefight or before entering a new room, you get into a habit of checking your weapons to make sure they all have full clips before proceeding.

Aside from these two techniques, there really aren’t any horror mechanics to speak of. If you want a first person experience that’s actually designed to scare you, go play Amnesia or Alien Isolation – Doom 3’s horror is, for the most part, a cosmetic affair. You’ll walk down a hallway and a loud CLANG rings out and a panel of the wall flies off. You’ll walk down another hallway and a dead body will drop from the ceiling and a ghostly voice will say “Help me”. You’ll walk crawl through a vent and you’ll see a shadow flicker past the wall. And of course, there’s plenty of monsters hiding in closets that are seemingly designed to do nothing but store monsters in them – you’ll be walking along and the wall opens up suddenly, and yet another spring-loaded imp comes flying out at you. Of these examples, only the latter one is a moment that puts you in any actual danger, and even these are no more than minor threats at best.

While these tactics certainly worked on me at first, the game very quickly gets to the bottom of its bag of horror tricks and doesn’t find any new ways to unnerve you. Once you realise the scary spooky stuff poses no physical threat to you, it ceases to be scary. It will simply keep resorting to the same tricks, becoming less creepy with each use. By the latter end of the campaign, the game has more-or-less given up on the horror angle and devolved to a pure FPS with some spooky atmospheric trappings. By consequence of you retaining your arsenal from the old games, by the end you’re armed to the teeth with rocket launchers, plasma guns and the obligatory BFG, as well as the soul cube that can heal you (and largely supplants the game’s use of health pickups). The only possible way this can go is to favour the combat over the horror, and when the combat is solid but not particularly exciting or tense, that is how Doom 3 becomes as well.

And finally, there’s just one more missed opportunity for making a scary game: character development and story. Doom 3, with its barebones narrative (if well-written), features no clever twists to provoke any sense of shock, disgust or surprise in you. It features more-or-less maybe four main characters. There’s Sarge, your guy who gives you objectives over the radio, Swann, a guy who is always a few steps in front of you, Betruger, the bad guy who laughs a lot, and yourself, a silent protagonist with no history or personality.

The audio logs fare no better, with every PDA filled with recordings and emails of people talking about how the UAC has bad work culture and Mars is very spooky and they have a bad feeling about this or if Bill Lumberg took their stapler again they’d burn down the base. Remember System Shock 2’s audio logs? Do you remember following the stories of Diego, with his submission to the temptations of evil and subsequent redemption? Polito, your ally with a seemingly split personality and packing one of the best plot twists in video gaming history? Bronson, the security chief who chose to stand up for her morals even if she died for it? The lovers Tommy and Rebecca? Doom 3 features none of this kind of characterisation of anybody, despite having more content present in it and a campaign of similar length. It’s a total wasted opportunity, devoting its energies to world building in a world that doesn’t have much that can’t already be explained to you visually.

Sarge is perhaps the one person who you might feel some rapport with, if only for being your only company during most of the game (and even then, only as a voice-over), but it’s not like anybody in the game has a character arc or anything. With developed characters, you can feel empathy and attachment to them, and when they’re thrust into a dangerous situation where they could die at any moment, your fear for their safety can be as real and tense as for your own. Rather tragically, in Doom 3, you won’t ever care who lives or dies and you’ll pretty much never be looking out for anybody besides number one.

The Bottom Line
I find myself holding a weird sense of cognitive dissonance about Doom 3, because while there’s plenty about it to criticise, I still very much enjoy playing it, and have come back to it every year since 2005 when I first got it. Its problems can generally be traced to its attempt to execute on two mutually exclusive goals: to maintain the fast-paced action and irreverent tone of the old Doom games and to create a dark, engaging and deep horror experience. The efforts of each is undercut by the other, a problem that Monolith would also struggle with a year later with their game FEAR, and garnering similar results (though FEAR perhaps fared a bit better by being a new IP with no baggage, and keeping its combat and horror largely compartmentalised).

Id Software’s final parting gift has been with the open nature of the game engine and assets – Doom 3’s mod scene is surprisingly still rich and active, boasting several mods that hint at what it could’ve been if it had gone for a full horror direction (and the other way). I particularly enjoyed ‘Overthinked Doom 3’, which while in need of significant polish, shakes off Doom’s action roots and ratchets up the tension by making increasing the rarity of ammo and the lethality of enemy attacks, while also making weapon handling require increased concentration.

The rebellious spirit of id still lives on in this title, although it certainly isn’t what it used to be. With the legacy of the Doom brand looming large over it, Doom 3 is in many ways afraid to go all the way in any direction and that works to its detriment. Its spectacular 2016 follow-up serves as a perfect counterpoint when id decided to fully embrace the spirit of the old Doom games without any compromise or shame.

While I did touch on this here and there in this review, I cannot recommend the BFG re-release of Doom 3 from 2012. In its misguided attempts to reconfigure Doom 3 into an action game, it strips the horror elements to the point of total ineffectiveness and removes all the tension from the combat by making an already-too-easy game even easier.

Doom 3 is not particularly important in the pantheon of first-person shooters, it’s certainly far from id’s best game and yet I love it all the same. The A+ presentation, lovingly hand-crafted world and solid core gameplay elevate Doom 3 above its confused identity and fundamentally compromised design goals. There are no rough edges here – everything in the execution is quality and polish, all the way, and it’s absolutely still worth your time in 2020, even if it’s just for a single run.