I can’t believe all the whining I’m seeing over system specs.
Computer gaming, specially at the cutting edge is going to be SURPRISE expensive.
If you cannot afford to be in the hign end market, go to the mid-end and wait for the prices to come down on hardware. Or if you cannot afford that, go back to playign consoles and leave the cutting edge tech to us PC gamers 
The gaming, is so… damn… scary! I’m loving it.
No co-op multiplay on the PC version. Fuckin’ bastards.
Other than that, I’m happy with it.
I stay 2 years behind the curve, and save a heck of alot of money. I guess I’m just patient. Time to upgrade is soon though, as it’s been two years since I got this computer. I’ll probably be able to play this in a year or so. 
Here are my random thoughts, I just picked it up and have played the single player game for about an hour, and the multiplayer for about 45 minutes on several servers.
I’m playing single player at 1024x760/medium on my system, and I had trouble with FarCry on this setup. I don’t think the specs are that far out of line with several other games already out there, like FarCry and UT2K4.
The single player seems good, but I’ve only played about and hour through, so I’m not sure how well it holds up. Night vision goggles would be nice, or even the suggestion of duct taping the flashlight to the guns.
It’s crashy. I got dumped to the desktop several times. Though I don’t normally do this, I’ve taken to hitting F5 to quicksave every time I go through a door. I just installed the Catalyst 4.9 drivers specifically for Doom 3, so we’ll see if the crashing stops.
Online multiplayer seems to blow - even at 640x480/low I wasn’t very far out of slideshow territory, despite having reasonable sub 100 pings. I expect some updates to patch up the netcode will have to come out before it really shines as a multiplayer game.
I have a feeling I’m near the end now, I’m in the “Alpha Labs.” Though I really wanted to love this game, it never quite happened. They took some good bits from Half-Life and System Shock 2, I’m referring to the horror aspects and the PDA messages which move the plot along. Of course there is no denying that the game looks fantastic, with a huge variety of textures and brilliant lighting effects.
I am simply left wanting more from the actual gameplay. After several rounds of “Lights go out, guy jumps you from behind…Lights go out, guy jumps out of closet…Lights go out, guy jumps from air vent”, it became boring rather than suspenseful. I never had that experience of suddenly realising that two hours had passed while I was lost in the game. Haven’t tried multiplayer yet, the lack of co-op is a familiar bummer for us PC gamers.
It’s been really stable on my system. No crashes, despite playing it for a good… must’ve been six hours the night I got it. Haven’t tried multiplayer at all, though. More deathmatch? Thanks, but no thanks. I got sick of deathmatch back when everyone was being blown away by the Quake engine, and haven’t looked back since.
Atmosphere’s great. Good use of lighting and sound to create some genuinely creepy set pieces. I liked that they added more plot and some NPCs to the game. Makes it more immersive. Some great little details, like the way they did keypads, or having to be careful about shooting out windows that lead outside. The random poltergeist activity you keep encountering is pretty cool, too. Fantastic voice acting. I was playing last night, listening to an audio log from an engineer who had been hearing voices in abandoned parts of the facility, and it happened to time up with an especially creepy piece of incidental music playing in the area I was exploring. Goosebumps. Very effective. I like the fact that you can’t have the flashlight on and a weapon in your hand at the same time, although I wish they’d made an exception for the pistol. Would’ve made that weapon a lot more viable. Overall, a very solid game. Can’t wait until the mod community has had a chance to really work with the engine.
A couple of niggles: first, no co-op multiplay. I understand someone’s already released a fan mod to enable this, but it should have been a part of the original game. “Exclusive to the X-Box” my ass. Second, grenades are handled as a seperate weapon, like the shotgun or assault rifle, instead of a “special attack” you can use while holding any other weapon. Dudes, go back and play Halo or FarCry, and come back and tell me why this is a dumb idea. There’s no alt-fire mode for any of the guns, which is odd. Also, at least as far as I’ve gotten in the game, there’s really only two sides. You, and the demon hordes. You don’t really even have any allies, except for the occasional sentry robot. This is pretty retro. For a game touting itself as the next great thing in FPS, I expect a few armed bots to have my back. And having just one group of monsters out for my blood just doesn’t cut it, not after Half Life, and Halo, and FarCry. I want some vicious, three-or-more-way firefights. Maybe that happens later, though. I’m not sure how far into the game I am.
Anyway, bottom line: it’s not the paradigm-buster we’d all hoped for. It’s a pretty standard FPS with top-notch production values. Definetly worth buying, but not good enough to upgrade your computer just to play it.
Here’s hoping that Half-Life 2 will be the FPS that really brings together all the advances made in the genre in the last few years.
Ugh, I tried playing it on my 2ghz machine with the same video card, and it’s unplayably slow at the lowest res and lowest detail level. It’s going on the shelf until I get a new card in a few weeks or so.
Come on guys - the flashlight fix is easy.
Just bind your flashlight to the right mouse button (normally the useless ‘jump’) and you can switch between your current weapon and the flashlight.
I’ve been using it, and I’m still scared shitless!
I’m not finding it very scary. The monsters are creepy at first, but the fact that like in the original Doom the PC is a tank with guns it soon becomes very boring and repetetive.
Like every other iD game it’s a very good tech demo and I hope some good games are made with it.
It’s not that switching between the two is difficult, it’s that you should not have to in the first place. Space Marines don’t have the same tech available to any enthusiatic present-day gun nut?
Regardless, I am here to be the grim harbinger of doom (heh) for Doom3. Too damned dark. If they only used the ‘flickering’ lights and whatnot at select times, it would be cool and have the desired impact. Instead, it’s just too damn dark all of the time. A flaw of the level designers, not the game engine itself, but still…
Here’s the sad thing. I ordered Doom 3… Christ, must be almost a year ago. I got it yesterday. On Tuesday, in a fit of nostalgia, I ordered 1997’s Outlaws from LucasArts. It arrived today.
Guess which game I spent the day playing?
Civ III?
I just played it for a little over an hour, and my one-line review: I liked it better when it was called “Half-Life.”
It’s a phenomenal engine, without question. I’m playing on a system that was just-below-top-of-the-line two years ago, and it runs perfectly smoothly with absolutely no configuration necessary. The lighting effects are cool, the animation is smooth, the particles are well-done, the level detail is sufficiently complex. (Although I’d be interested to see how well it handles more open environments instead of just the cramped tunnels and passageways I’ve seen so far).
But as a game: meh. The id guys came up with a trend-setting game concept with DOOM, saw it leap-frogged by Dark Forces and Half-Life and Jedi Knight and System Shock and Halo, and then instead of building a better DOOM, just tried to emulate those. (With a lot of Resident Evil thrown in for good measure). The pacing is all off, and the levels just feel extremely scripted. It’s all slick, with no substance.
Sure, DOOM was a rock-stupid game, but it moved. Almost as soon as you started, you were running and shooting. Half-Life is basically the same story as DOOM, but with cinematic presentation. It made sense that it started out slow; everything you were seeing was new. It was setting a mood. DOOM 3 just feels like it’s going through the motions.
When I first started up the original DOOM, I had a pistol and two barrels, I shot one, they both blew up, and I said, “BAD-ASS.” When I started up DOOM 3, it took me through bits of Halo and Half-Life, then a little bit of System Shock, and then after 20 minutes or so (I’m slow), I had a pistol and was looking at a barrel. But I was afraid to shoot it, because that would mean I’d have to sit through a dozen cutscenes again.
Dudes at id, please – don’t overthink it. Don’t try to act as if your games are cerebral experiences. They’re not. There’s nothing wrong with that. Valve and Monolith excel at this stuff, but you don’t, and that’s fine. Fat zombies, flaming skulls, and demons with cyber-eyes are just not cool to anyone who doesn’t listen to Dio and Dokken anymore. And they just don’t warrant an attempt at a fancy storyline. Let us get in there and shoot stuff, while we’re looking at the fancy lighting effects. And also: “dark” is not the same thing as “scary.”
I’ve also gotta wonder how the “user community” is going to work with this game. Are mods going to be super-complicated to make? Have they raised the bar too far for people sitting at home to make their own levels? That’d be a shame.
Sid Meir’s Alpha Centauri. Civ III just doesn’t quote Kirkegaard often enough for my tastes.
So now this is bugging me. Who is it that the player character looks like? It’s some actor, but I can’t place him. At least with Wolfenstein 3D it was comforting to know you were playing as Henry Rollins.
Here’s a picture of him (he’s the one in the background) if you can’t remember or if you don’t have the game.
Who is it?
Still waiting for for the PS2 game.
Will it still be DOOM3 enough on a console?
PS2 was outdone byt the Xbox if I recall, and by the time the xbox actually hit store shelves computers were alreay enjoying the Gefore 4 series. And Doom 3 is all about the graphics. Specular highlights, normal maps, per pixel shading like there’s no tomorrow.
How different, then, will the console version of the game be?
It will make one long for the gameplay and fluidity of Yar’s Revenge.
That’s been bugging me, too. He reminds me a bit of a buffed out Robert Patrick (from Terminator 2 and the last couple seasons of The X-Files), only that’s not quite right. Best I can do though.
Have you noticed that he never blinks in the cutscenes? That dude’s the scariest looking thing in the entire game.
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