Why Doom 3 is still an important and misunderstood game
Why Doom 3 is still an important and misunderstood game
Looking back at the unloved Doom 3 with decades of hindsight.
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The lack of game-feel is shocking, considering the Romero-less Quake 2 nailed a lot what's missing. Q2's peppy little shotgun and beeftank super shotgun made up for how spongy all the enemies got. The chaingun both let you obliterate scarce foes and quickly ran dry for very Aliens sentry-gun moments. The blaster was both gun and flashlight, and would've cast all kinds of sweeping shadows. The machinegun fucked with your aim in a way that was chaotic but controllable, instead of that inexcusable way enemies slap control out of your hands and tank your framerate with double-vision.
As a weird point of comparison - Jurassic Park: Trespasser had very early bump-mapping. I'm not sure the name was settled yet. But it did the effect in software, so it was slow, even on 3D-accelerated machines... and it only existed on physics-puzzle boxes and enemies trying to eat you. So the framerate was guaranteed to suck during precisely the times you needed it to not suck.
That kind of "oh come on" detail permeates Doom 3.
Bumpmapping has been available for a very long time. The spinning donut demo that came with my Voodoo 2 card had it.
That card launched the same year as Trespasser.
That said, apparently the technique was one of those comically early 1970s innovations, introduced by James Blinn himself. Shows what I know.
Dang, in my mind Trespasser was this ultra new game with revolutionary but flawed controls.
Its reach exceeded its grasp. It's waggly single-armed grasp.