You’ve been waiting for this game for more than 4 years, saving money into your piggy bank in order to perform upgrade of your PC as soon as the game will be released, you’ve been ignoring Painkiller and UT2003(4). What’s the name of the game? Doom 3!
Advanced leechers had the game 3-4 days before its official release in United States, thank EB Games for that, they’ve sent certain amount of copies before it should have been sent out. I haven’t seen such great hype about one single game since the release of Quake 3 and perhaps UT2003 though in smaller scale. Almost every progamer was downloading/awaiting the game, and today we shall discuss the fulfillment of their expectations.
It’s not a news for anyone that Doom 3 was eventually developed as Single-only game, Carmack was saying this in his interviews. The multiplayer was added because of the 1000 and 1 petition the players gathered.
The original goals were creating kick-ass game engine and best Single Player experience. Well, I have to admit that he managed to succeed at both. It’s actually scary to play the game, no matter how well you were preparing for that. If the source of your PC’s sound is Home Theater or cool headphones, and it’s night outside the window – the effect is granted. The last game that gave me creeps while playing it was Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but Doom 3 is just whole new level of home entertainment. Thank gamma, lack of lighting sources and the shadows. Oh, what amazingly nice shadows we got here! Of course you need to play at High or Ultra High (doc, call the ambulance, we’ve got maniacs again) graphical settings in order to experience the full potential. Doom 3 became the first game where you actually need to use such useless item as flashlight, actually you have to use it 2/3 of the whole Single Player campaign. But the problem is – you have to remove your weapon before using the flashlight (I believe that the Marines are not taught using flashlight with their left hand).
However the gameplay can be boring, you just run around the map looking for another PDA of some scientist, kill monsters and that’s about it. The maps are similar one to another, and that’s a disappointing fact as well. But it is still interesting to play the game, but the fact that the gameplay reminded me of Unreal 2 and Half-Life seems even more interesting…
If I’m not mistaken - our web-site’s readers will be interested in multiplayer mode of the game, that’s why I shall go on with telling you about it.
Multiplayer
The settings are pretty ascetic, nothing totally new is present, although in advanced settings you can define some interesting settings, check them out. There are a lot of mods released in no time, however part of them are cd-key stealers and Trojans. After setting up your nickname and skin – you have to choose one of the four game modes (Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Tourney, Last Man Standing), and one of the five maps to play at (d3dm1 – Tomiko Reactor, d3dm2 – Delta Lab, d3dm3 – Frag Chamber, d3dm4 – The Edge II, d3dm5 – Lights Out). The overall impression about the maps is that they are too small, narrow. I’ve had a similar feeling when running at DM-Zeto in UT99. There are not many tricks, but it is still a matter ot time till there will be more.
Another interesting aspect are the cans that are carefully set up around the maps, you can blow them up with any weapon. Some thunderbolts can be “turned off” as well. As a result – there will be lighting at all in the area, allowing a player to hide in the darkness with a rocket launcher in his hands. You can make the things brighter a little by writing r_gamma 2, r_brightness 2, but this will not the game look like some shining.
Carmack was mentioning that from now on you will have to play duels in different style. But the first thing I’ve got on my mind was 2 players sitting in different corners of the map and waiting for their opponent to come. You cannot see the player who is hiding in darkness without using your flashlight, but switching from flashlight back to your current weapon takes time, time enough to frag you. What should be done now? Introduction of brightskins or leave it as it its? That’s one of the many decisions the developers of OSP will have to face. So far the models are not brighter than those used in UT2004, and the gameplay reminds of Half-Life DM.
Hitbox no longer exist, if you are shooting between legs of your opponent – the bullet will not hit him, if you are shooting into his head – it will take more damage than shooting lower.
You can turn on warm-up in Multiplayer, but you will not be given all weapons at once. The voting is present by default, it is made in UTComp style for UT2004. As to the Server Browser, it once again reminds us of one used in Unreal Tournament.
The network code, does not impress me so far, it is not a lot better than in Painkiller. The problem is in game’s graphical engine, it’s supremacy. You can play without any lags at LAN, but while playing on the internet they might appear out of nowhere.
Weapons
The weapon switch speed remained almost the same as in Quake 3. Once you respawn you have four weapons in your disposal (flashlight, fists, grenades and pistol).
Fists (screenshot). Well, what can be said here? Once you run out of bullets you can use your fists to continue fighting. The best usage of fists will be combining them with berserk power-up, only one punch will be enough to finish off the opponent. But when you are not using berserk – fists seem to be useless weapon.
Pistol (screenshot). The pistol is similar to the one used in Unreal Tournament, meaning that 5-6 hits are enough to make a frag. All weapons have reload from now on, the reloading time differs from weapon to weapon. The pistol’s clip contains 12 bullets.
Grenades (screenshot). Grenades can explode in ones hand if you hold them steady for too long. The Splash Damage became smaller, and they are not as bouncy as their Quake 3 relatives. The explosion does not occur at once, but after definite amount of time. This means that if you will hold the grenade in your hand for a bit longer – it will explode faster once it has been thrown out.
Shotgun (screenshot). The shotgun became very effective, the damage is awesome, however the reloading time is rather long. 8 shells in 1 clip is the limit.
Machine Gun (screenshot). Oh, this one is actually hard to describe. Standard machine gun, similar to the one used in Quake 2. The accuracy is pretty nice, the firing speed is average and the damage level is average as well. The clip features 60 bullets.
Plasma Gun (screenshot). The good old plasma gun from Doom is back. The firing speed is average, but the bullets are really slow to reach the target. The damage is average. This weapon can be efficient at short distances when the enemy is really close to you. One clip has 50 bullets.
Chain Gun (screenshot). There are no significant changes since Quake 2 came, the maximal amount of bullets is 60, they get spent pretty quick because of the firing rate, which is very fast.
Rocket Launcher (screenshot). Since this game does not have shaft or a railgun this weapon will become the most popular and mostly used in duels, tdm. Narrow corridors make this weapon even more efficient! The maximal amount of rockets in one clip is five. You can make rocket jumps, they take very little amount of health/armor, a lot less than in Quake 3. The rocket’s speed is approximately the same like in Quake 3. Perhaps even faster.
Items.
Besides two armor types (50 and 5), various types of health packs and ammo clips there are power-ups:
Berserk (screenshot): makes you run faster, and the power of your punch is absolutely lethal! However you have to pay for such gifts with your vision, everything will be very blurry as if you are extremely drunk or under LSD. But that’s not all, you will also be screaming out loud and your enemies will hear your scream. Well, pretty paradox power-up, alternative to Quad Damage.
Invisibility (screenshot): everything is clear here, invisibility makes you invisible for some time.
MegaSphere (screenshot): +100 health.
Full list of items in the game »
Movement on the map
No matter what people say, the movement speed has decreased comparing to Quake 3, it became like one in Quake 2. The movement technique is close to Quake 2 and Quake 3 as well. If you were able to perform Strafe jump/double jump – it will not take long to get used to Doom 3’s physics. Just remember that in order to speed up efficiently you will need to find an open location, or a wide corridor. A lot of things are depending on your first jump, so be careful while doing it.
Ramp jump. New element of faster movement – climb on the ramp and jump off from it – as a result you will fly further and higher. Such trick can become popular in daily battles, so be sure to learn how to use it.
Lift jump. In case you were playing UT, UT2003 and UT2004 – it will be easy to learn this type of movement. If you were ignoring one of the best multiplayer games to date – I will tell you the secret of lift jumping. Once you are standing on the lift and it is going up – jump before it reaches its destination and you will jump very high and far. It can be useful in order to reach unreachable places at maps. Air Control is here to stay, so there is no reason in comparing the game with QW.
HUD
You cannot change the crosshair, as well as fov in multiplayer (actually you can do that, but it is rather complicated, to be POSTED LATER). The font size as well as size of icons cannot be changed as well. Seems that there is no huge reason to play the game without OSP, even id Software were too lazy to polish it up, otherwise I see no explanation to demo size – 15/20 minutes will be like 2-3gb!
Optimizing Doom 3
First of all, I would like to advice you doing couple of simple things that will increase your performance:
À) In c:Doom 3base directory there are several files with .pk4 extension. Each of these files is just an archive which can be opened with WinRAR. The problem with these files is that they get decompressed when you are running the game, this takes a lot of processor’s and RAM’s power to perform such actions, why don’t we help them out a little? Extract all archives into base directory and replace files if asked. After this – delete all .pk4 files and launch the game. Everything should work faster now.
B) In DoomConfig.cfg file you can see such line: seta image_cacheMegs and some parameter after that. If you have more than 128mb of video memory – set this parameter to a bigger one, for example – 90. The performance will boost up a little as well.
Right from the beginning the game is very dark, you can light it up a little:
seta r_brightness "2"
seta r_gamma "2"
That’s about it, I mean the general settings and optimisation. There are a lot of graphical tweaking can be done, so be sure to check out the full guide »
Useful console commands.
In order to access the console you have to press: CRTL+ALT+~, but in order to bring the console back to tilde – use this command: com_allowConsole 1
Main console commands:
noclip - No clip
notarget - you turn invisible for enemies
freeze - freeze everything around
give all - all ammo
give keys - all keys
give pda - PDA
give weapon_bfg - get BFG
give weapon_shotgun - get Shotgun
give weapon_chainsaw - get Chainsaw
give weapon_plasmagun - get Plasmagun
give weapon_machinegun - get Machinegun
give weapon_rocketlauncher - get Rocket launcher
god - god mode
benchmark - benchmark test
com_drawfps 1 - show FPS
timedemo demo1.demo - playback of test demo (used for benchmark)
aviDemo - saves your demo as .avi file
gfxinfo - shows information about your video-card
status - Shows the status of the game
r_gamma [0-2] - Setup gamma
r_brightness [number] - Setup brightness
s_volume_db [number] - Setup sound level (0 for turning off)
s_showlevelmeter 1 - Show the sound level (0 for turning off)
g_showprojectilepct 1 - Toggle hit % to HUD (0 for turning off)
killmonsters - kills all monsters
kill - suicide
quit - quits the game
Full list of console commands »
Progamer’s opinions
I’ve decided to ask several famous progamers about their opinion on Doom 3, what are their first impressions? There were 8 questions asked in total, but not all people have answered their questions, so this section will be updated in future.
a) Have you played Single Player and what can you say about your impressions?
b) What about multiplayer? Have you tried it?
c) What can you say about the netcode?
d) What's your opinion on maps
e) What's your opinion on all those shadows/interaction with cans, etc
h) Any advices? In terms of tweaking and gameplay improvement.
f) What can be tweaked with OSP?
g) Overall impression about the game?
 ic-FOX (Quake 3)
a) Single Player is friggin scary, no matter how prepared you are. Even though I haven't progressed that far yet.. I intend to sit down and play from start to finish after quakecon :)
b) I only ran around a little bit on lan.. The current maps are defenitely not suitable for competition play. One thing that disturbed me was that the default jump-height is pretty low there are many places where just 10 pixels higher would save you the time of running behind the pillar, up the stairs, etc etc. slows gameplay down. The weapons feel very monotonous and the fights will probably all be pretty similar, with the RL dominating most of the cramped maps.
c) I have no clue about the netcode because i was the server on LAN and i havent been able to play online yet.
d) Too small and cramped. I mean, you really dont want to hit your head in the ceiling when trying to speedjump though a door or something. mapscale 1.5 at least!
e) It's very cool and all.. But it probably won't affect the multiplayer gameplay that much, unless some new custom maps offer cool ways to utilize that part of the engine.
h/f) I would like to see bightskins and the ability to change fov. of course the usual hud-tweaking should be possible along with crosshairs, fontsize etc :). As for gameplay improvements, add a railgun. I know its all about getting used to it but those are some of the things i reacted to :)
g) Also, the way i figure there's like a one pixel difference which decides wether the RL and grenades take ~10 health or 80.
raccoon (Quake 3)
a) I am very impressed with the Sp campaign, and must say that I'm getting the exact feeling as i did when I tried the shareware version of DooM eleven years ago. Very well done, and I can see why the kept the main focus at SP experience instead of online play, even though it has one (would anything else be accepted by the community?).
b) I haven't tried the MP mode enough to make any real statements about it.
c) See the above answer.
d and e) I'm afraid the quite dark atmosphere of the game will make the MP play very slow and sneaky in the beginning, but it sure has the original DooM feeling in general. It IS supposed to be this way, chaps. Maybe there's gonna be patches that will allow you to tweak the graphics and gameplay in a more advanced fashion than it is right now, but once again - it wasn't entirely made with the "arena" type game in mind.
f) Brightskins? I honestly haven't got any clues about the MP tweaking possibilities yet, ask me later!
g) Just the sequel i was hoping for.
 [xYz]redemz (Quake 3)
a) I've played single player and it really impressed me. the graphics are amazing !!:)
b) Tried out multiplayer as in created an own server and runned around the maps a bit it still has the strafe jump bit diffrent .. still fast, rocket jumps are still in and takes very little from your armor and health.
c) I don't know, yet haven't played it on internet.
d) The maps are a bit too small in my opinion so you can't really gain speed and jump around the maps at least I haven't had the chance yet.
e) A lot of shadows.. Not so much in MP, but its still dark in some places
f) In my opinion for now we should get some good 1v1 maps. There shouldn't be too much tweaking in the start
g) Game is awesome, definetly has potential I know I will be playing it :)
h) Personal matter: I think the plasma gun shoots a tad too slow, and shotgun
should reload a bit quicker.
 mysod|impulse (Painkiller, CPMA)
a) Yes i played it a bit and it looks really fun. Definately suited for people with a weak heart.
b) It's a bit weird, a whole different game than q3 or any of the other quakes. I have mixed feelings about it, especially because the maps are way too small. But it has a lot of potential.
c) The netcode seems pretty OK to me, nothing groundbreaking but not bad either. Ofcourse games like these require a lot of data to be sent (as Painkiller) so it could be really hard to get some 4on4 going on. People always complained about Painkiller's netcode being bad, but it seems like Doom3 cant fix it either, a 4 player cap seems like a cheap hotfix to me, but we'll see about that.
d) The maps are really cramped, all of them should be ok for duel or 2on2, but the pace is very slow because all the things u can run/hop into.
e) The lighting and physics in the game are really great. I think Painkiller did a better job on the physics tho, but Doom3's physics arent bad at all. The lighting is where it's at for Doom3!
f) Make some good maps, fix the 4-player cap, allow more movement tricks (such as doublejump, better strafejump).
h) The weapons need to be tweaked, but it's too early to know how imo. Definately brightskins if they allow shadows and other gfx to be turned off, if they want to make MP more of a sneaky play, dont allow brightskins and force the fancy graphics on. But i'm not really waiting for that to happen :)
g) It's ok, I hate to say it but Painkiller at the start was as good as Doom3 is multiplayer wise. The maps are a lot better in PK, but the weaponbalance is really poor, and the netcode is as evil as Doom3's. But I don't know what Doom3 wants to be in multiplayer (fast-paced or slow and sneaky). I guess we'll have to wait and see where the ball will roll.
Conclusions
As you can see the main problem in Doom 3 is Multiplayer. The player’s opinions are different, as well as mine, there are few things I agree on and some which I disagree. The game is about the same, you may like the Single Player and hate the Multiplayer’s speed etc. One thing is certain – we need OSP in order to fix the things up. Although I don’t know what things will be tweaked and what will be left as is. Let’s not forget that Quake 3 had a lot of problems once it was released as well, so don’t fall depressed beforehand, time will show!
Useful links:
Thanks to:
I would like to thank all people who helped me with this article: aLoner, fox, o][-my, Impulse, and #doom3.euro visitors.
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