Remembering Doom 3 for the 20th anniversary
even this new DoomGuy is 20
Date: 2024-08-05
Note: this post was inspired by the mod Doom 3 Redux, which has a 20th anniversary edition. I don't keep the exact date of game releases, not even for my favorite ones, I only remembered that Doom 3 is from 2004.
I saw this video on youtube:
Doom 3 was released at the beginning of August, 20 years ago. Delayed release between North America and Europe for Windows, while a quite release come to Linux as well, not even a month later. At the time I was still a Windows user, just finished a 2 year school, and I wasn't really ready for life's next challenge.
In 2004, my computer was already behind on hardware generation. Doom 3 proved again that John Carmack is a magician, and technical wizard. The idTech 4 engine blow many others out of the water, including Half-Life 2, which came out same year, but in November. Of course HL2 become a much bigger game, since it continued the first game, and happened to have better gameplay, while Doom 3 was kind of a soft reboot thing. This is just another example that graphics ultimately doesn't matter.
Graphics does matter however, if you don't have the hardware for it. For many years I couldn't really play Doom 3, because I didn't have the neither the CPU or GPU to play it. Every time I "upgraded" my computer, one of the first thing was to test it with Doom 3, it was my benchmark. Despite not looking much as a Doom game, I was still curious about this dark, moody game.
Not until 10 years later, when I finally had a card in my machine, that could run it comfortably. It was heaven! And of course at the time, I was already using Linux, so I used the Linux version of the game. It's magic, to see such a big name on your tiny operating system (stop, I am talking about desktop Linux). Sadly idTech 4 was the last open sourced engine from iD Software, since Carmack left after Rage.
Doom 3 is a different beast from the first 2 games. Since Quake happened in 1996 (just two years after Doom 2!), everything went into 3D crazy. As always every new iDSoftware game had to have a new engine, and Doom 3 wasn't any different. I am not a programmer, but I think what impressed me most are the shadows and lighting at the time. No wonder that idTech 4's best contribution to gaming was a Thief inspired "The Dark Mod", which at first was a mod for Doom 3, then it become a totally solo project. Thief is still the best stealth game today, and
Doom 3 also had a notable thing that previous games of the company did not have: STORY. This was iDSoftware's first attempt to make a story not just for Doom, but for any game. Beyond a wall of introductory text, we get cutscenes and notes all over the base.
But what made me curious is the dark atmosphere. The base game had a separate flashlight, which made it much more spooky. We also played a random marine, not connected to DoomGuy, but people didn't really like the you either see or shoot gameplay, so a mod came out shortly, which was standard in the BFG version of the game.
It was like you are playing not a shooter, but a survival game. Even Silent Hill did it better, because they used a pocket flashlight that you can just put in your shirt's pocket, and your hands were free.
The teleporting enemies stayed in, although it was much slower than in the original game, kind of telegraphed and coupled with fancy graphics and sound. Of course original Doom had the sprite enemies, which had the advantage that you could spawn dozens of enemies randomly, and your machine still didn't crap itself. New engines doesn't know that, unless you are specifically program for it, like CroTeam's engine for Serious Sam.
The engine itself was largely forgotten, used only for a couple of games. Probably the most famous one is Prey (2006), which name got lost, after Bethesda renamed Arkane's project to Prey, because they did not want to lose the copyright for the title. Then there was Quake 4, which was Raven's attempt at expanding the Quake 2 Stroggos storyline on the single player front, while Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was a Battlefield-like multiplayer title, which was impressive in my opinion, but it didn't have much popularity. Raven also did the newest Wolfenstein title at the time in 2009, simple called Wolfenstein. And then Brink came out in 2011, and it was the last title that used iDTech 4. After release of Rage, Zenimax and iD Software released the source code for idTech 4 engine.
I always felt that Doom 3 was a decent shooter, but not a very good Doom game. If they released with another name, and write a different story for it, maybe iD could have a new franchise to play, instead of Rage, which was just a mistake. Doom 3 had an expansion called "Resurrection of Evil", made by Nerve Software. Later these 2 got bundled into the Doom 3 BFG edition, with upgraded graphics. On GOG if you buy the game, it will have the original version as well.
