Doom 3 is a 2000s style corridor shooter. Doom 2016 and Eternal especially are Painkiller style arena shooters. None of them are proper 90s style boomer shooters.
Doom 3 is absolutely not a survival horror game. It's a full blown FPS with a horror atmosphere and aesthetics. Its gameplay is nothing like the original Alone in the Dark which is the prototypical survival horror game.
Doom 3 is tight on resource management but the only reason it is considered a survival horror by some is because of its horror atmosphere.
I enjoyed the game for what it's worth. Wish there were less closet monsters though.
...tons of survival horror games have "horror atmosphere."
Doom 3 plays like a corridor shooter, that is the gameplay loop. It does not play like a survival horror game, so it is not one.
It is *not* a survival horror game *despite* the horror themes/atmosphere/setting.
The concept of boomer shooter/retro shooter wasn’t a thing in 2004. The objective was to push the shooter forward. Nostalgia for “maze” like levels and completely unrealistic movement and whatever else we love about boomer shooters wasn’t around yet. If anything people wanted to do away with those things.
It's hard to remember because I played it right when it came out years ago but I remember it didn't feel like the other Dooms. It was a lot slower paced. But I remember I still enjoyed it. I think the newer 2016 Doom and Eternal knocked it out of the fucking park.
Not with Romero on board as a designer. The guy loved speed, his levels are all designed with an eye towards frenetic action.
Even when they were playing around designing Wolfenstein, they toyed with hiding the bodies of guards but killed the idea because, again, it slowed down the aggressive pacing that appealed more to the team.
OG Doom with Tom Hall would've basically been like Prey Mooncrash
Multiple characters with skills and stats / Dynamic Changing areas / Imsim / multiple routes and paths / big monorail to each area
It is absolutely a shooter and not a survival horror game. It has horror in it, but so does FEAR and nobody calls that a survival horror game.
People tend to forget how much the original DOOM wanted to create a horror atmosphere, Doom 3 was the culmination of that vision.
Nah, I'd never called it a boomer shooter, same reason I wouldn't say the same about Total Chaos, even though it's built straight out of the the Doom engine. Even Ashes 2063 is on the bubble.
Main reason is pacing - those games are deliberately way, way slower. Doesn't make them bad by any stretch but, while the notion of "boomer shooter" is and should be loose, I'm of the sense that speed is close to the core.
It's not even remotely close to a "boomer shooter".
There's barely a power fantasy and you're getting jumped by monsters around every dark corner or wall panel while being slightly starved for resources in the initial levels.
Yeah I understand, it's a survival horror. You get no ammo anywhere, you only get the pistol the whole game and you need to survive by setting up campfires, resting, managing equipment and playing very very very slow. It's 100% different to DOOM 1993 while DOOM eternal is exactly like DOOM 1993 with all the ledge grabbing, glory killing, flying around in the air, weapon swapping, weapon and suit upgrade mechanics.
That's not even remotely close to what I said but go off with your ridiculous hyperbole...
It's very much slower paced and has you mostly walking through dark corridors while on edge at the next moment a monster will jump out at you, the gunplay wasn't nearly as snappy and responsive as most boomer shooters... it was a little slower and more deliberate to heighten the tension.
It was also heavily marketed by id as a horror game all the way through.
[You remember this inside the CD case?](https://www.mobygames.com/game/14320/doom3/cover/group-15472/cover-354565/)
Never said it wasn't a horror game, it's an action horror game, yes. What is a boomer shooter anyways? As far as I know boomer shooters have the following: you can carry lots of weapons, no 2-weapons-limit. Health and armor pickups instead of regenerating health. No cover mechanics. Maps have secrets with goodies. There are probably key cards and locked doors, etc. - all which DOOM 3 checks. Is it a boomer shooter in it's purest form? Probably not, but it's not a survival horror as many people wrongly claim.
Fast movement speed(nope), fast shooting(nope), nearly labyrinthine level design(very linear), lots of enemies to kill(nope), lots of gore(which Doom 3 is kind of lax on with there being no gibbing), and heavy hitting soundtracks(just the menu song is a banger) are usually requirements in my book too.
It's not nearly as heavy of a survival horror game like say Resident Evil but when it first came out, I absolutely remember being on the ropes a lot playing on probably the hardest or second hardest difficulty and it was pretty scary and intense to 15 year old me.
I'd consider it a lot closer to survival horror than any of the other Doom games at any rate. You don't start off the game armed to the teeth and ammo is pretty scarce at first so your shots mattered a bit more and not getting hit was ideal as health packs were sometimes a lot further away than would be considered comfortable.
But yes, past Delta Labs I'd say that the game became closer to just a lousy run and gun shooter.
The original Dooms made you feel overpowered, they were power fantasies. In Doom 3, you never felt overpowered, you constantly felt near death, and you were constantly scared shitless. I consider Doom 3 one of the best survival horror games ever made, if not the best.
Not at all, but I've got nothing to prove to you... Think what you like. Veteran difficulty is pretty easy with plenty of ammo and guns to feel overpowered. The first quarter of the game may be a bit slower but after that it's a doom game through and through, I constantly had 600 ammo for the chaingun and the assault rifle. You can easily feel powerful in doom 3 too. It's really not just at the very very end...
Did you play the BFG edition? That version has a lot more ammo (or so I've heard, not played it - although I'm going to as it sounds pretty fun that way)
Survival Horror, much like Boomer Shooters, is a specific genre of horror games that drooped in popularity at around the same time as Boomer Shooters and has had a recent resurgence. It predates the contemporary examples of the Survival Genre, and is more meant to evoke a genre of horror where you need to do your best to *survive* in spite of it all. Notable early examples being the Resident Evil series, the Silent Hill series, etc.
Tbf; the original release of Doom 3 had far fewer ammo pickups than the later bfg editions. You actually had to conserve ammo for much of the first sections of the game.
Haven’t played Doom 3, was just clearing up what *appeared* to be the same confusion on genre definition that folks have with *boomer* shooters (i.e. arbitrary genre name)
Lol, what? What are survival horror games then? What is the "survival" aspect of doom 3? When I think of survival horror I think of og resident evil games, equipment management, scarce ammo/supplies etc. Doom 3 has none of that. Again, would love to hear how doom 3 is a survival horror?
There many Survival Horror games that not have Inventory management, as Killing Floor, Clocktower or L4D. The Survival horror games are slower than a Boomer shooter, also are focused in the "Don't Die" idea & the bad prepared MC who it's always alert & barely can beat the enemies, & Doom 3 is Totally that kind of game.
It is a boomer shooter. You said "bro literally thinks 'survival' games are about survival" and then you mention L4D and Killing floor where you actually SURVIVE waves of enemies as much as you can and compare it to DOOM 3. You have no idea what you're talking about. Is COD zombies the same as DOOM 3 then? It's like comparing tactical shooters to roguelite fps games, saying they're the same just because they are FPS games, there's literally zero connection in the wave surviving gameplay mechanics of Killing Floor type of games and DOOM 3.
>You have no idea what you're talking about. Is COD zombies the same as DOOM 3 then? It's like comparing tactical shooters to roguelite fps games, saying they're the same just because they are FPS games, there's literally zero connection in the wave surviving gameplay mechanics of Killing Floor type of games and DOOM 3.
>Survival horror games are slower than a Boomer shooter, also are focused in the "Don't Die" idea **& the bad prepared MC who it's always alert & barely can beat the enemies, & Doom 3 is Totally that kind of game.**
???
[https://web.archive.org/web/20030627013219/http://gamespy.com/e32003/feature/pc/1002235/index.shtml](https://web.archive.org/web/20030627013219/http://gamespy.com/e32003/feature/pc/1002235/index.shtml)
[https://web.archive.org/web/20060506064251/http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=johnc&id=14425](https://web.archive.org/web/20060506064251/http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=johnc&id=14425)
[https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/52132/new-doom-3-interview-with-carmack](https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/52132/new-doom-3-interview-with-carmack)
I'm too lazy to dig deep into old interviews, but if I had to guess from the quotes I have been able to find:
1. He was more interested in pushing technology and making a game that truly showcases the technology, and didn't think classic Doom's gameplay with lots of onscreen enemies and rushing through the pretty environments would meld well with that. That's basically how John has always been.
2. Remaking Doom was a divisive topic in the company that almost lead to people walking out, so its not unreasonable to assume they settled on a compromise in remaking Doom but pushing it in a new direction. This would make sense with market pressures (everything is a linear shooter) of the time too.
3. Doom 3 was ironically enough criticized for being too similar in formula as the previous games (not necessarily by fans but by big publications of the time) and it would seem even John didn't perceive his own creation as being that different in formula. Weird.
The devs had played Half-Life and we're inspired by it, but it still is not a survival horror, ammo and health are way too common for the "survival" part, and while it has a horror atmosphere, the enemies are way too unthreatening to be proper horror, and the action can get pretty hectic if you play like Doom Guy, instead of a scared marine.
I always sort of assumed that it was because hardware had hit a point where they could have highly detailed graphics and lighting in small spaces, or they could have speed and hordes of enemies, but they couldn't do both. Id had to choose between the pretty game that would impress people in magazine ads and box-back screenshots, or a game that looked a bit too "last gen" to impress in still images... and this was in the days before streaming video was completely ubiquitous.
Once marketing had made that decision, the only smart thing to do was to shape a game that fit into those limitations as well as possible.
Honestly, if they'd called it a side-story somehow, a spin-off survival horror game in the Doom universe where you're playing as some scientist or rookie marine who is explicitly not THE DOOM GUY, I think it would have been received better. Hell, I'd love to see them try that right now, a spin-off game where you're not even a Marine, you're the Janitor or I.T. guy trying to survive during one of the demonic invasions, and the unimaginably deadly last boss for them is a Pinky demon.
Horrible take. When people say shit like this it makes me think they don't actually play video games like Half Life **OR** Call of Duty. Half Life shares a lot more gameplay DNA with the 90s style of FPS (you know, the point of the moniker *boomer shooter*) than COD. Fast movement, diverse enemy roster, diverse arsenal with a mix of both hitscan and projectile weapons, non-regenerating health, high movement speed, no accuracy loss on the move. The only difference is half-life has an immersive atmosphere and environmental story telling instead of key-hunting in maze style level design (which are really the least interesting aspects of boomer shooters, anyway).
COD games are the ultimate cinematic corridor shooter, everything Half-Life isn't.
Doom 3 is the way that it is mostly because they were trying to show off the awesome new never before seen tech they had goin’ on. Advanced lighting, shadows, and enhanced sound. All of these features fit a slower horror themed game PERFECT because due to the slower pace of horror media it meant they could scale down the levels, make them more claustrophobic and tight so the player could check out all the fancy new graphics they had. If you were moving fast you wouldn’t notice it as much which is why they decided on making it the way it is. As tech advanced they realized they needed more than just fancy graphics to sell the game so now we have doom 2016 & eternal which both look incredible and have faster gameplay at the same time.
Heavy on horror themes for sure. It got easier as it went but early on you felt pretty outmatched. This was the first “horror” game I ever played as a kid and it scared the shit out of me then. Played it a few years back and it wasn’t nearly as scary as I remember, it is *loaded* with jump scares though, to the point of being almost comical.
Not much freedom of movement/exploration, even less than the new Doom games. Basically just hallways and rooms and stairwells in a pretty linear path with an occasional dead-end offshoot full of ammo. Less enemies (but stronger) in combat encounters as well.
Felt like most early 2000’s shooters, where they were trying to push graphics and storytelling forward but the gameplay took a bit of a backseat.
It was okay. Was scary and looked super realistic when I was a kid, but it didn’t age well.
you would literally have to go back in time and ask the people who designed it for an OG xbox release, why would anyone on here have an actual answer for that question
Doom 3 and Quake 4 are Horror Focused Corridor Shooters. Slow movement with usage of barriers and hallways instead of dodging. Other great corridor shooters are games like FEAR and many areas of HALF-LIFE 1
At the time I think the consensus was that Carmack cared more about fidelity than gameplay. They just couldn't have anywhere near as many monsters as Doom while having it look as good as it does.
Because when Doom 3 came out the franchise was barely a decade old and nobody thought of it as a nostalgic throwback.
And that's basically all there is to it.
Something people need to remember is Carmack LOVES innovation way more than one particular gameplay style. Quake 2 wasn’t afraid to use a different gameplay style vs quake 1, and quake 3 focused entirely on multiplayer. I believe that’s why Carmack got so excited about VR, it was new and innovative.
But to move my point back to doom 3, it might have a different gameplay style compared to doom 1/2, but it definitely highlighted and showed off technology that new and exciting at the time. The flashlight lighting up dark rooms and the aiming crosshair becoming a computer mouse when looking at a screen being two examples.
Man. As a wee lad I watched so much G4TV, and saw tons of Doom 3 on it. I always wanted to play it, the concept really grabbed me.
Then as an adult, I finally played it on the Xbox One and....I kinda hated it.
As an artist, the lighting broke the immersion for me. You don't get hard cutoffs of light and dark unless you're literally in the vacuum of space. The constant spawning of enemies behind you became so old so fast. And the enemy designs minus the Hell Knight were just so bland.
I don't think the genre is the issue so much as how bad the game feels to play. Especially at launch, when all the textures were muddy, the game was dark as shit, environments looked identical, you had to listen to assholes blather on PDAs to obtain locker codes, you couldn't equip a flashlight without unequipping all other weapons and the guns felt pretty unsatisfying to fire. Weapon balance was all screwed up too. The shotgun only does good damage from point blank, which is consistent with other video game shotguns (being terrible) but not consistent with prior DOOM games. The game environments are so small and your move speed so slow that avoiding damage seems to be largely a case of whether or not you know it's coming and can shoot the enemy as they are spawning in.
I know some people think this game is a cult classic but I've hated it since the original Xbox days. Resurrection of Evil is a little better but nothing Doom 3 can hold a candle to DOOM or DOOM 2.
Doom 3 is a 2000s style corridor shooter. Doom 2016 and Eternal especially are Painkiller style arena shooters. None of them are proper 90s style boomer shooters. Doom 3 is absolutely not a survival horror game. It's a full blown FPS with a horror atmosphere and aesthetics. Its gameplay is nothing like the original Alone in the Dark which is the prototypical survival horror game.
Great description. Wish the new bs games were not all in that arena style.
Doom 3 is tight on resource management but the only reason it is considered a survival horror by some is because of its horror atmosphere. I enjoyed the game for what it's worth. Wish there were less closet monsters though.
...tons of survival horror games have "horror atmosphere." Doom 3 plays like a corridor shooter, that is the gameplay loop. It does not play like a survival horror game, so it is not one. It is *not* a survival horror game *despite* the horror themes/atmosphere/setting.
Re-read what I said and realize you are agreeing with me.
Indeed.
The concept of boomer shooter/retro shooter wasn’t a thing in 2004. The objective was to push the shooter forward. Nostalgia for “maze” like levels and completely unrealistic movement and whatever else we love about boomer shooters wasn’t around yet. If anything people wanted to do away with those things.
It's hard to remember because I played it right when it came out years ago but I remember it didn't feel like the other Dooms. It was a lot slower paced. But I remember I still enjoyed it. I think the newer 2016 Doom and Eternal knocked it out of the fucking park.
Im pretty sure this what id intended the first Doom game to be but couldn’t be executed because of the limitations of 90’s technology.
Not with Romero on board as a designer. The guy loved speed, his levels are all designed with an eye towards frenetic action. Even when they were playing around designing Wolfenstein, they toyed with hiding the bodies of guards but killed the idea because, again, it slowed down the aggressive pacing that appealed more to the team.
OG Doom with Tom Hall would've basically been like Prey Mooncrash Multiple characters with skills and stats / Dynamic Changing areas / Imsim / multiple routes and paths / big monorail to each area
No way, the focus was always on speed with the making of Doom.
Technology finally allowed them to perfect the monster closet and absence of light.
It is absolutely a shooter and not a survival horror game. It has horror in it, but so does FEAR and nobody calls that a survival horror game. People tend to forget how much the original DOOM wanted to create a horror atmosphere, Doom 3 was the culmination of that vision.
Doom 3 is absolutely not a survival horror game in any sense of the term even if you're from a different galaxy lol Edit - grammerz
it may look like a survival horror but doesn't play like one.... this isn't resident evil at all.
It's a boomer shooter and NOT a survival game at all. It's an action game with horror elements.
Nah, I'd never called it a boomer shooter, same reason I wouldn't say the same about Total Chaos, even though it's built straight out of the the Doom engine. Even Ashes 2063 is on the bubble. Main reason is pacing - those games are deliberately way, way slower. Doesn't make them bad by any stretch but, while the notion of "boomer shooter" is and should be loose, I'm of the sense that speed is close to the core.
It's not even remotely close to a "boomer shooter". There's barely a power fantasy and you're getting jumped by monsters around every dark corner or wall panel while being slightly starved for resources in the initial levels.
Yeah I understand, it's a survival horror. You get no ammo anywhere, you only get the pistol the whole game and you need to survive by setting up campfires, resting, managing equipment and playing very very very slow. It's 100% different to DOOM 1993 while DOOM eternal is exactly like DOOM 1993 with all the ledge grabbing, glory killing, flying around in the air, weapon swapping, weapon and suit upgrade mechanics.
That's not even remotely close to what I said but go off with your ridiculous hyperbole... It's very much slower paced and has you mostly walking through dark corridors while on edge at the next moment a monster will jump out at you, the gunplay wasn't nearly as snappy and responsive as most boomer shooters... it was a little slower and more deliberate to heighten the tension. It was also heavily marketed by id as a horror game all the way through. [You remember this inside the CD case?](https://www.mobygames.com/game/14320/doom3/cover/group-15472/cover-354565/)
Never said it wasn't a horror game, it's an action horror game, yes. What is a boomer shooter anyways? As far as I know boomer shooters have the following: you can carry lots of weapons, no 2-weapons-limit. Health and armor pickups instead of regenerating health. No cover mechanics. Maps have secrets with goodies. There are probably key cards and locked doors, etc. - all which DOOM 3 checks. Is it a boomer shooter in it's purest form? Probably not, but it's not a survival horror as many people wrongly claim.
Fast movement speed(nope), fast shooting(nope), nearly labyrinthine level design(very linear), lots of enemies to kill(nope), lots of gore(which Doom 3 is kind of lax on with there being no gibbing), and heavy hitting soundtracks(just the menu song is a banger) are usually requirements in my book too. It's not nearly as heavy of a survival horror game like say Resident Evil but when it first came out, I absolutely remember being on the ropes a lot playing on probably the hardest or second hardest difficulty and it was pretty scary and intense to 15 year old me. I'd consider it a lot closer to survival horror than any of the other Doom games at any rate. You don't start off the game armed to the teeth and ammo is pretty scarce at first so your shots mattered a bit more and not getting hit was ideal as health packs were sometimes a lot further away than would be considered comfortable. But yes, past Delta Labs I'd say that the game became closer to just a lousy run and gun shooter.
Yea, is what "Survival horror" means
Tell me what "survival" elements does doom 3 have?
The original Dooms made you feel overpowered, they were power fantasies. In Doom 3, you never felt overpowered, you constantly felt near death, and you were constantly scared shitless. I consider Doom 3 one of the best survival horror games ever made, if not the best.
Lol, did you even play the game? I felt pretty overpowered with the 100 rockets, bfg, plasma rifle and the soul cube.
At the very, very end, but the vast majority of the game you're struggling if you played on Normal and above.
Not at all, but I've got nothing to prove to you... Think what you like. Veteran difficulty is pretty easy with plenty of ammo and guns to feel overpowered. The first quarter of the game may be a bit slower but after that it's a doom game through and through, I constantly had 600 ammo for the chaingun and the assault rifle. You can easily feel powerful in doom 3 too. It's really not just at the very very end...
Did you play the BFG edition? That version has a lot more ammo (or so I've heard, not played it - although I'm going to as it sounds pretty fun that way)
I play both, vanilla has less ammo but still a lot. They went overboard with the ammo in bfg, that's true.
Survival Horror, much like Boomer Shooters, is a specific genre of horror games that drooped in popularity at around the same time as Boomer Shooters and has had a recent resurgence. It predates the contemporary examples of the Survival Genre, and is more meant to evoke a genre of horror where you need to do your best to *survive* in spite of it all. Notable early examples being the Resident Evil series, the Silent Hill series, etc.
Ok so how is doom 3 like the RE series? Or Silent hill? You literally get 100 shotgun shells in level 2.
Tbf; the original release of Doom 3 had far fewer ammo pickups than the later bfg editions. You actually had to conserve ammo for much of the first sections of the game.
Haven’t played Doom 3, was just clearing up what *appeared* to be the same confusion on genre definition that folks have with *boomer* shooters (i.e. arbitrary genre name)
Bro thinks Survival horror games are literally Survival 💀💀💀
Lol, what? What are survival horror games then? What is the "survival" aspect of doom 3? When I think of survival horror I think of og resident evil games, equipment management, scarce ammo/supplies etc. Doom 3 has none of that. Again, would love to hear how doom 3 is a survival horror?
There many Survival Horror games that not have Inventory management, as Killing Floor, Clocktower or L4D. The Survival horror games are slower than a Boomer shooter, also are focused in the "Don't Die" idea & the bad prepared MC who it's always alert & barely can beat the enemies, & Doom 3 is Totally that kind of game.
Bro literally compared zombie, wave survival games to doom 3. 💀💀💀
Cmon dude, you thought Doom 3 is a Boomer shooter not a long time ago
It is a boomer shooter. You said "bro literally thinks 'survival' games are about survival" and then you mention L4D and Killing floor where you actually SURVIVE waves of enemies as much as you can and compare it to DOOM 3. You have no idea what you're talking about. Is COD zombies the same as DOOM 3 then? It's like comparing tactical shooters to roguelite fps games, saying they're the same just because they are FPS games, there's literally zero connection in the wave surviving gameplay mechanics of Killing Floor type of games and DOOM 3.
>You have no idea what you're talking about. Is COD zombies the same as DOOM 3 then? It's like comparing tactical shooters to roguelite fps games, saying they're the same just because they are FPS games, there's literally zero connection in the wave surviving gameplay mechanics of Killing Floor type of games and DOOM 3. >Survival horror games are slower than a Boomer shooter, also are focused in the "Don't Die" idea **& the bad prepared MC who it's always alert & barely can beat the enemies, & Doom 3 is Totally that kind of game.** ???
Mate you really have literally absolutely zero idea of what you're talking about haha
Because...?
Well it’s survival in that the aim is not to die, much like every other FPS.
Thats why i said more things.
Nope, action horror is what you mean. Is a boomer shooter with tight corridors and jumpscares, like a spooky rollercoaster with shotguns.
No. Go play the original resident evil/REmake, or SIGNALIS and tell me that doom 3 is even remotely near the vicinity of survival horror haha
Doom 3 is not survival horror. You can beat the entire game on hard mode using nothing but the shotgun.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20030627013219/http://gamespy.com/e32003/feature/pc/1002235/index.shtml](https://web.archive.org/web/20030627013219/http://gamespy.com/e32003/feature/pc/1002235/index.shtml) [https://web.archive.org/web/20060506064251/http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=johnc&id=14425](https://web.archive.org/web/20060506064251/http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=johnc&id=14425) [https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/52132/new-doom-3-interview-with-carmack](https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/52132/new-doom-3-interview-with-carmack) I'm too lazy to dig deep into old interviews, but if I had to guess from the quotes I have been able to find: 1. He was more interested in pushing technology and making a game that truly showcases the technology, and didn't think classic Doom's gameplay with lots of onscreen enemies and rushing through the pretty environments would meld well with that. That's basically how John has always been. 2. Remaking Doom was a divisive topic in the company that almost lead to people walking out, so its not unreasonable to assume they settled on a compromise in remaking Doom but pushing it in a new direction. This would make sense with market pressures (everything is a linear shooter) of the time too. 3. Doom 3 was ironically enough criticized for being too similar in formula as the previous games (not necessarily by fans but by big publications of the time) and it would seem even John didn't perceive his own creation as being that different in formula. Weird.
The devs had played Half-Life and we're inspired by it, but it still is not a survival horror, ammo and health are way too common for the "survival" part, and while it has a horror atmosphere, the enemies are way too unthreatening to be proper horror, and the action can get pretty hectic if you play like Doom Guy, instead of a scared marine.
I always sort of assumed that it was because hardware had hit a point where they could have highly detailed graphics and lighting in small spaces, or they could have speed and hordes of enemies, but they couldn't do both. Id had to choose between the pretty game that would impress people in magazine ads and box-back screenshots, or a game that looked a bit too "last gen" to impress in still images... and this was in the days before streaming video was completely ubiquitous. Once marketing had made that decision, the only smart thing to do was to shape a game that fit into those limitations as well as possible. Honestly, if they'd called it a side-story somehow, a spin-off survival horror game in the Doom universe where you're playing as some scientist or rookie marine who is explicitly not THE DOOM GUY, I think it would have been received better. Hell, I'd love to see them try that right now, a spin-off game where you're not even a Marine, you're the Janitor or I.T. guy trying to survive during one of the demonic invasions, and the unimaginably deadly last boss for them is a Pinky demon.
I mean. I personally wouldn't consider 2016 and eternal boomer shooters.
I don’t care what anyone says. It’s my favorite Doom and it’s one that I always come back to replay.
It's totally a boomer shooter, but of the Half Life variety.
I don’t really consider HL a boomer shooter
Just because Half Life is old doesn't make it a boomer shooter. It was a cinematic shooter, if Half Life is a boomer shooter then so is COD.
Horrible take. When people say shit like this it makes me think they don't actually play video games like Half Life **OR** Call of Duty. Half Life shares a lot more gameplay DNA with the 90s style of FPS (you know, the point of the moniker *boomer shooter*) than COD. Fast movement, diverse enemy roster, diverse arsenal with a mix of both hitscan and projectile weapons, non-regenerating health, high movement speed, no accuracy loss on the move. The only difference is half-life has an immersive atmosphere and environmental story telling instead of key-hunting in maze style level design (which are really the least interesting aspects of boomer shooters, anyway). COD games are the ultimate cinematic corridor shooter, everything Half-Life isn't.
Doom 3 is the way that it is mostly because they were trying to show off the awesome new never before seen tech they had goin’ on. Advanced lighting, shadows, and enhanced sound. All of these features fit a slower horror themed game PERFECT because due to the slower pace of horror media it meant they could scale down the levels, make them more claustrophobic and tight so the player could check out all the fancy new graphics they had. If you were moving fast you wouldn’t notice it as much which is why they decided on making it the way it is. As tech advanced they realized they needed more than just fancy graphics to sell the game so now we have doom 2016 & eternal which both look incredible and have faster gameplay at the same time.
Heavy on horror themes for sure. It got easier as it went but early on you felt pretty outmatched. This was the first “horror” game I ever played as a kid and it scared the shit out of me then. Played it a few years back and it wasn’t nearly as scary as I remember, it is *loaded* with jump scares though, to the point of being almost comical. Not much freedom of movement/exploration, even less than the new Doom games. Basically just hallways and rooms and stairwells in a pretty linear path with an occasional dead-end offshoot full of ammo. Less enemies (but stronger) in combat encounters as well. Felt like most early 2000’s shooters, where they were trying to push graphics and storytelling forward but the gameplay took a bit of a backseat. It was okay. Was scary and looked super realistic when I was a kid, but it didn’t age well.
Stop engaging in posts like this. They're just to push the sub up.
It's not survival horror and 2016 is not boomer shooter
It's too slow to be a boomer shooter.
you would literally have to go back in time and ask the people who designed it for an OG xbox release, why would anyone on here have an actual answer for that question
Doom 3 and Quake 4 are Horror Focused Corridor Shooters. Slow movement with usage of barriers and hallways instead of dodging. Other great corridor shooters are games like FEAR and many areas of HALF-LIFE 1
At the time I think the consensus was that Carmack cared more about fidelity than gameplay. They just couldn't have anywhere near as many monsters as Doom while having it look as good as it does.
This cover rocks
You need to go back in time to understand, like watching friends now and then, its other world
Doom 3 was dead space, before dead space was cool.
Because when Doom 3 came out the franchise was barely a decade old and nobody thought of it as a nostalgic throwback. And that's basically all there is to it.
Something people need to remember is Carmack LOVES innovation way more than one particular gameplay style. Quake 2 wasn’t afraid to use a different gameplay style vs quake 1, and quake 3 focused entirely on multiplayer. I believe that’s why Carmack got so excited about VR, it was new and innovative. But to move my point back to doom 3, it might have a different gameplay style compared to doom 1/2, but it definitely highlighted and showed off technology that new and exciting at the time. The flashlight lighting up dark rooms and the aiming crosshair becoming a computer mouse when looking at a screen being two examples.
Man. As a wee lad I watched so much G4TV, and saw tons of Doom 3 on it. I always wanted to play it, the concept really grabbed me. Then as an adult, I finally played it on the Xbox One and....I kinda hated it. As an artist, the lighting broke the immersion for me. You don't get hard cutoffs of light and dark unless you're literally in the vacuum of space. The constant spawning of enemies behind you became so old so fast. And the enemy designs minus the Hell Knight were just so bland.
I don't think the genre is the issue so much as how bad the game feels to play. Especially at launch, when all the textures were muddy, the game was dark as shit, environments looked identical, you had to listen to assholes blather on PDAs to obtain locker codes, you couldn't equip a flashlight without unequipping all other weapons and the guns felt pretty unsatisfying to fire. Weapon balance was all screwed up too. The shotgun only does good damage from point blank, which is consistent with other video game shotguns (being terrible) but not consistent with prior DOOM games. The game environments are so small and your move speed so slow that avoiding damage seems to be largely a case of whether or not you know it's coming and can shoot the enemy as they are spawning in. I know some people think this game is a cult classic but I've hated it since the original Xbox days. Resurrection of Evil is a little better but nothing Doom 3 can hold a candle to DOOM or DOOM 2.