Suggestions for DOOM 3.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Everyone expects DOOM 3 to be the greatest FPS ever made.

If it is not, we will likely have Mr Carmack’s head put on a pike.
Not fair, but it is true and is the reason why the likes of “Team Fortress 2” and “Duke Nukem 4 Ever” have not been seen for, almost half a decade.

So I figure here we can give Id a chance to correct and add things that have bothered us for years, and perhaps save his life in the process. Little options that did not exist, and quirks that helped destroy the submersiveness of the game. After a few months I will copy the best ideas (with credit given to whomever came up with it) and mail it to ID software. I can’t guarantee that they will do anything about it, but you would be surprised the amount a attention a mailed letter gets from a business.

First off, I want to see feet. I am tired of looking down and seeing only a dark circle (if even that!). I want to look down and see a body and legs.

When I look down, the view should pivot, as if it is a head on a neck, not just some point that makes a perfect turn. Also, because you are a head, this should constrict your view a bit. Try and look around right now, and you will see that you are unable to perform the tight, perfect moves of a FPS.

When I look at my feet I should see them get dirty. Mud, blood, water, should all make some visible affect on my clothes and self. They should also leave tracks (Even DN3D had that!). Imagine how terrifying it would be to see recently laid tracks from some unknown, but nearby, monster. The more intelligent monsters should be able to follow your tracks.

Realistic physics. Ever notice how in Half-Life, if you jump on the moving tram you will fly backwards while the tram will keep moving forwards? This is a Newtonian no-no.

No more indestructible lights.

Have a form of coop play where there is still only one hero, and you still go through the exact same levels, but your friends play all of the enemies. How cool would that be?! The various monsters still have the same powers and health, but now have a human guiding them.

Movement abilities similar to “System Shock 2”. You should be able to lean to the side and grab onto, and climb ledges. Perhaps you have to put away your gun before you can climb onto a ledge? Or at least you have to put it into a prone position?

.

Any more suggestions for me to send to Id?

2

What always bugged me about the ammo was how if you had only room for say, 1 shell, and you ran over a box of 20 shells, you got one shell and the other 19 vanished into the bit bucket. How hard would it be to leave a box of 19 shells on the ground? So you gotta define 19 more objects, (box with 1 shell, box with 2 shells, etc) I think PCs can handle it now.

3

I hope they don’t do what most of the FPS games are becoming - sneaking around picking off enemies one by one (Counterstrike, Wolfenstein, etc.). Bring back the days of Doom and Quake2 where I could burst into a room all guns blazing, not really worrying about what’s on the other side.
Also, I hope there are LOADS of weak enemies to mow down with a gun that spits out hundreds of rounds per minute (eg. Chaingun of the original Doom/Quake2).

4

I dont know how well this works for SP games, but for chissakes, when you reload a gun, you dont pull the old clip out and put new cartidges in the old clip before putting it back in, you drop th old clip and put a fresh one in. If you had 10 bullets remaining in the clip, then they are GONE.

Also, bullet holes that are BULLET HOLES. not just some sprite painted onto the wall. If I shoot through a wall and there is a bright lit room on the other side, I want to be able to see light beams shoot through.

Explosions that are EXPLOSIONS, again not just some crappy sprite.

Decent AI would also be nice :slight_smile:

5

I want all the original monsters and weapons back!
Rendered in the latest 3D graphics, of course.

Most importantly though, they’ve got to keep the ‘feel’ of Doom 1 & 2 somehow. I want to be able to mow down hundreds of monsters! Screw realism!

Just like in Doom 1 & 2, they’ve got to have an ‘Easy’ difficulty level that actually is. Too many games these days have a system where ‘Easy’ = f-ing hard, ‘Medium’ = near impossible, ‘Hard’ = you might last 2 seconds before you are a puddle of blood and entrails.

I’d absolutely love it if they released ‘special edition’ versions of Doom 1 & 2 with Doom 3 – ie. the old games re-done with the new graphics engine.

6

Shadows. Not a dark puddle at your feet, but long shadows. Imagine the junction of two hallways, and from the hallway at your right is coming a big, long shadow from an unseen creature. Scary. Also good for multiplayer. :slight_smile:

7

Eliminate automatically picking up any useable object you happen to walk over. Have a pickup/putdown command instead.

Add a speed/manueverability penalty based on how much gear you’re carrying. Your character should have to decide whether that enhanced body armor is worth forgoing the extra ammo.

Character health is a subject in itself:

Have your character’s maximum speed be multiplied by your health ratio. If you’re down to 5% life, you should be crawling on the floor at about an inch per second.

I think Duke Nukem allowed you to carry stims, but none of the others I’ve played allowed you to carry health kits. You should be able to carry at least the lighter first aid kits.

Also, health kits should not instantaneously heal you. Aside from the necessary conceit that field treatment can restore you to full health after taking massive injuries, you shouldn’t be able to instantly revive yourself in the middle of a firefight. Make it so that if you survive, you have to find a safe spot to apply first aid.

I hate how your effective field of view in FPS’s is about 90 degrees total, or 45 degrees left or right. How about an optional “fisheye” viewmode that compresses your character’s peripheral vison into narrow strips on the left and right sides of your monitor.

On the subject of game design: either I’m a really terrible player, or almost all shooter games are designed on a “whoops you’re dead, try again” basis. This is a holdover from arcade games that wanted you to spend 100-200 quarters mastering a game. I think that it would be better to design a FPS that you have some realistic chance of getting through it alive, if you are an experienced gamer who employs common sense. It will help the immersion and identification with your character a lot if you have an incentive to really try and survive. You don’t get that when you know that whatever you do, you’re going to die the next time the game springs an ambush or a new monster with unknown characteristics on you.

8

Oh, boy, have I thought about this a whole lot:

-Difficulty levels: Gone should be the days of “Easy”, “Medium”, and “Hard”. There should be a dynamic difficulty system for the advanced gamers who want to tweak their gaming experience to the max. Lumpy said “Eliminate automatically picking up any useable object you happen to walk over”. I disagree… they should keep that, but have the option of turning it off. In other words… if you’re not that good at FPS’s, keep the classic “Run over an item and instantly get it” routine.

However, the more advanced players should be able to make the game more difficult, not by making the enemies nearly invincible or impossibly accurate, but just by making it more difficult to funciton in the gaming world. Ever try to reload a gun while sprinting at top speed? Not easy, is it? Or how about bandaging oneself with a medkit? And how come a person can twist, turn, aim, and function perfectly just after being blasted in the air by an explosion?

My dream FPS would have the option to make things more difficult… make it so that you have to slow down and concentrate a little to reload your gun (and as Shalmanese pointed out, no more “Magic Auto-Loading Clip” syndrome). Make it so that you actually have to stop running around, sit down, and spend a few moments applying a bandage to your leg. Make it so that when an explosion - or a large object - knocks you into the air, you see your body go flying uncontrollably… Rocket Jumping is impossible in this manner.

-Health System: Ever been punched? It hurts for a few moments… but eventually the pain goes away. Yet, in a FPS, if you get punched, that’s a few points off your life total that is gone forever. Don’t people heal? Don’t they recover? A gunshot wound should cause you intense amounts of pain and shock at first, but as time goes by, you’ll slowly manage to get over the pain (unless you bleed to death or something, but that’s another point entirely).

Anybody seen the TC for Quake 3, Urban Terror? They incorporate many of these things into the game… you pull out a clip, and any remaining bullets in that clip are gone. You get shot, and you keep bleeding (and eventually you’ll die from it) if you don’t quickly apply a bandage. If you jump up next to a wall that’s eight feet high or so, you’ll put your weapon down and grab onto the top and hoist yourself up (in other words, you can climb over things!). If you get your leg hurt, you’ll limp. I see no reason why any FPS, ever, should NOT have these details incorporated.

Armor: The strength of armor is not a linear, quantifiable number. If you’re wearing body armor, and a bullet penetrates it, does that make the entirety of the rest of the armor lost its overall strength? No, it just puts a tiny little pinprick in that one spot. It will take a hundred such pinpricks before the armor is in danger of falling apart.

Inventory and items: Give us, as Keanu said… “Lots of guns.” I fail to see why there are only ten types of weapons. There should be several different types of assault rifles, dozens of types of pistols, several different types of shotguns… the gun industry is not so monotonous, you know! Sure, an M-16 and an AK-47 may seem to fill the same role, gunwise, in the game, but why not allow the player a little bit of aesthetic customization? If someone happens to think an M-16 rocks the house, let 'im! Or if they think an AK-47 looks cooler… let 'im! Why limit ourselves so much? Give us a bit of cosmetic choices to choose from!

Additionally, no more “Infinite Inventory”… Deus Ex started on this road, but I think that they didn’t quite get it right. For example, if you want just a shotgun with a thousand shells, you should have that option. If, on the other hand, you want to carry a rocket launcher with twenty rockets, that should also be an option. Or if you want to keep your favorite plasma gun and a crapload of power cells, that should also be an option. Or you can mix and match.

In other words, let the player carry around a duffel bag (in fact, put it on his model), and he can fill it however he wishes. Pump it full of grenades, or thousands of rounds of pistol ammo, or a single tactical nuke… why are we limited to just a hundred rounds on the shotgun?!? It makes no sense when we’re limited for no reason like that!

Further… one of the niftiest scenes in movies are the gun battles that happen when the good guy has ducked behind cover, and they’re battling it out. Allow a character to stand behind the corner of a wall, peek out, and point his gun down the hall. Make gun battles where a character can’t just run out and charge the opponent. Make it important to duck behind cover.

Additionally, a person has a bit of a “field sense”. Not just sound will tell him if a bad guy is behind him, or in his peripheral vision (besides, not everyone has perfect surround sound). Give some sort of indication that you sense an enemy in a certain direction… simulate peripheral vision, for instance, by making the left side of the screen flash red when there’s an enemy off to your left (but out of the screen’s field of view).

-Physics: I’ll ignore the issues of shadows and “no more sprites” (hey, it’s tough as hell to calculate destructible terrain in a realistic manner). But other things, such as gravity. Anyone play Ultima: Ascension? Boy, was that game a pooch-screw. You could jump off a hundred-foot tower, and fall to Earth at a casual six miles per hour, maximum speed. What the hell is up with that? 9.8 meters per second, squared! Just throw that little calculation into the game engine! Better yet, base the game engine around that!

-Dirt: Dirt is not a flat, solid surface akin to metal or stone. Dirt moves around. Dirt is grainy. Dirt is uneven. Give us dirt in the engine.

-Plants: I will have a thousand orgasms in one second on the day when I see plants move realistically. If you brush past a plant, what happens? It moves. It waves back and forth. Give us plants, not 2-dimensionl pictures that are placed crossways in a sorry attempt to look 3D.

-Rocks: Outdoors, rocks are everywhere. They are of all sorts of different shapes and sizes. Ever stood up against the side of a cliff? Is it clean, smooth, and otherwise a perfect wall jutting out of the ground? No, it is jagged, broken, and littered with rocks all over the base. Give us rocks.

-Environments: We want massive, humongous levels. These tiny little levels that have all the doors locked except for the ones that take you exactly where you want to go are getting tiresome. Deus Ex won out in this regard… there were almost always several different ways to get somewhere. Yet in games like Max Payne (great game regardless), there was only one direction to go. No thank you. If you don’t want the player to go in a certain direction, just have the character stop, think to himself, “I don’t want to go this way” and force him to turn around.

-Deathmatch SECOND: I don’t know about you people, but if I want to play multiplayer, I get a multiplayer game (like Counterstrike). But Quake II? I bought that game for the single-player missions… but it seems that all the levels weren’t designed realistically, they were designed for multiplayer play. Fuck that. Why have game designers taken the notion of “We’ll make a GREAT online game, and tack a single-player game onto it as a bonus”? No, no, no, a thousand times, no. Look at Return To Castle Wolfenstein. The single player was AMAZING (although, admittedly, a tad lacking in some respects). The multiplayer, in my opinion, sucks balls… but it seems that’s just me…

-Other things: Keep the old enemies. Keep the Imps, keep the undead humans, keep the Cacodemons, keep the Barons from Hell. But give us more than just that. Be creative with your enemies. Give us some enemies that bleed out of the walls, or enemies made out of shadows. Give us enemies that will, literally, track your scent across multiple levels to hunt you down. Give us enemies that move far faster than you can, so sometimes running isn’t an option. Don’t just give the enemies more hit points to make them more difficult… make them dodge, or get behind cover, or apply bandages of their own.

In short, a game should actually deliver what it has promised. Half-Life promised a lot of these things, but either didn’t deliver, or delivered poorly.

9

Uh, wasn’t FINAL DOOM technically DOOM 3?

I’ve played them all. What did I miss here?

10

If you like that, watch these video’s from the upcoming unreal tournament 2. The physics portion starts at around 3:25, and you will not be dissapointed, trust me :). You don’t see it in the in game footage because Digital Extremes, at the time the video was shot, had not implemented it. For those not in the know, it’s a gun blazing, non-campish fps. It’s like the quake’s, and not at all like camper-snipe (CounterStrike) ;). BTW the music in the video is horrid, so just mute it.

Fastest Link

First Mirror

Second Mirror

11

I should add that yes those video’s are for Doom/quake’s rival game. If DE can pull that off, just imagine what ID will have. If anyone is interested I can find a clip of doom III. It was leaked during last years quakecon.

12

Here I went ahead and found a older clip. I’ll look into finding the newer one.

click me

13

Ok last post by this lurker.

Here is the video from quakecon. It’s about 3MB, and you might need the Divx codec to be able to play it.

14

For the guy who wants a fisheye view - in Quake 3 and most games that use it’s engine you can type /cg_fov XXX with the XXX being the number of degrees in the arc you want to be able to see. The default is 90, but in Return to Castle Wolfenstein I use 110.

Many of the ideas here are too realistic. There is a place for ‘realistic’ FPSs but Doom 3 shouldn’t be one. Where’s the fun in only being able to limp slowly when injured? That just effectively reduces the amount of damage you can take, as you WILL die if you can only move half your normal speed. Same thing with limping, treating injuries, etc. It may sound neat but (with certain exceptions) it will detract from the fun. You have your few truly realistic FPSs - SWAT 3, Rogue Spear, etc. These games have a much slower pace and the higher lethality of combat is counteracted by the fact that you are commanding multiple people and you are going after a low number of enemies. Then you have semi-realistic games like Counterstrike, Urban Terror, and the like. They make concessions to realism but the game is nowhere near realistic - people survive and continue to fight after multiple bullet wounds, first-aid puts you back in the fight instead of helping your character’s chance to survive after weeks of recuperation…then you have games that make little attempt to achieve realism, and instead design the game mechanics around ‘What is fun and balanced?’ Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a good example - yes, it has (mostly) real-world weapons but they have all been tweaked for game balance. A medic can revive a down character instantly with one jab of a needle. You can shoot almost anyone twice in the head with an SMG without killing them. Not realistic at all, but a lot of fun.

Doom 3 should be fun. Make it pretty as hell with all the bells and whistles, give the enemies interesting and varied AI, and give the player tons of cool big guns to waste them with. That’s what I want.

15

The M-16 patch built in.
No BFG in multiplayer.

16

I don’t really agree with most of your ideas SPOOFE. As Badtz Maru said, those ideas are just too realistic and not really in the spirit of Doom. You’re thoughts on enemies though, are fantastic. With today’s technology the idea of Demons as enemies can be taken to new heights. Enemies that morph out of walls, water, even fire would look amazing and you would never know when they might turn up. Maybe there could be something that possesses the game character and lessens the amount of control you have until it is destroyed somehow.
The dead marines lying about the place should have a bigger role too. Imagine seeing a severed arm of one of your fallen colleagues with a gun next to it. You pick up the gun and the arm comes to life and jumps at your throat. Or you start to work with a survivor only for him to become possessed and turn on you. Maybe you come across a group of tortured soldiers begging you to kill them. (Is this getting a bit sick? Doom always was very dark after all)
Give us some demon weapons too. What if you could catch a flying skull and use it shoot fireballs? Or an acid-flinging arm from a defeated Baron Of Hell?

I’ve got a feeling they’re quite far on with DOOM III anyway so either a lot of these features are already included or they haven’t got a chance. There’s always number IV…

17

Looks at UT2 vid
:eek:
picks up jaw from floor

18

Thusly, the option of turning them on and off. What good is a harder difficulty setting if all they do is upgrade the statistics on the enemies? It’s the exact same game… you just have to shoot a lot more.

“More Realism” in a video game translates into “More Difficult”. Some people like “More Difficult”. If you prefer being able to take two rockets right on the chest and keep going, go nuts. But I’d like to see an option where you have to actually be damned careful about what you do.

Besides, if Doom 3 weren’t about being “more realistic”, then why bother even updating the graphics at all?

19

One of the things I like about Doom is that it will play on the crummiest of PCs. How are you differenting your concept of a new Doom and Quake? The Save game function of Doom is great; Mrs. Plant and I play it in co-op mode and save before she croaks.
:slight_smile:
Most people go for deathmatch, which I guess doesn’t require the save game. Internet play of course isn’t suited to a save game.

Carnie

20

Thats another thing, have you ever tried to climb up a sand dune? its not just harder, its an entirely different terrain. I would like to see different materials affect the way you can move across them, you try to strafe across a patch of jagged rocks while shooting your M16, your going to trip and break your ankle, have the gound DO something rathe than just look pretty.