Caltrops - Doom III

Forum Overview :: Doom III

by FABIO 08/05/2004, 1:37pm PDT

So yeah this game is gorgeous (when you can see anyways) and runs surprisingly good, not like the minimum specs of death fortold in the previews.

So yeah this is pretty much the game that System Shock 2 should have been, which means it's pretty awesome. It also happens to be the game Half Life should have been, where it's all scripted events of shit going haywire and possessed zombies and demons from another dimension fucking things up instead of taking time outs for 30 minutes to go switch hunting so you could jump over pools of toxic waste.

So yeah play with the lights off and have a blast.

The negatives

-Okay I get the concept behind darkness=scary, but I guess ID figured that total darkness=MORE SCAREY. It's scarey to not have everything brightly lit, it's not scary to not see anything. I see a few inky black blurs moving, so I shoot at their approximate location. A red circle on my crosshairs tells me that I'm hitting something. I keep firing until the red goes away. I walk up with the flashlight and see 2 dead zombies. Scarey? Another time I start heading up some stairs and an Imp's face bursts out of the stairs right in front of me. The thing is I only found out what it was after the fact when I scoured the area with the flashlight. Actually SEEING an imp's face pop out at me would have been scarier than seeing a dark blur against the backdrop fo the stairs.

It wouldn't be so bad if you had muzzle flashes lighting everything up. Someone swears to me that this happens, so many it's my hardware or settings. Having a strobelight effect as you fire on approaching monsters would have been cool. Being able to spot muzzle flashes from zombie marines shooting at you (since they can see perfectly in pitch black thanks to Vin Diesel eyes) would have been cool. Worse than any game balance issues with lighting, it takes me out of THE MOMENT when I fire my shotgun and everything is still pitch black.

I'm really wondering why the flashlight can't be included on weapons. I mean, seeing guys pop up into the spotlight right in front of you is still scarey. It's certainly scarier than dark blurs.

-Voice-only logs you can't fast foward

This is why System Shock 2 had text to go along with the logs. If you needed to find out a keycode you could just scroll to the bottom. In Doom3 you will need to get codes from audio-only logs and the code is not given until the very end of the 20-30 second log. Forget the code by the time you reach the place you need to use it? Wait through the log again to get it.

Log voices sound like regular voices instead of the electorincally recorded voices of System Shock 2's logs, which kind of makes them less creepy. So, System Shock 2 wins in this catagory.

That's pretty much it.