Doom 3 vs Doom 2016

Which game do you believe was better? I bought the latest Doom yesterday and so far i am enjoying it. Doom 3 was kinda different, though. More scary, less colourfull. I quite liked the previous game. There were awesome bossfights and the atmosphere was realy dark. The latest Doom is, in comparison to the previous kinda more sofisticate in gameplay? (codex, upgrades...) Or at least it seems so. I can't realy tell if i like it more than Doom 3. Thoughts?

I liked Doom 3 more than most people seem too, but Doom 2016 is one of the best video games I've played in a long, long time.

Doom 2016 was the 2016 GOTY for me.

Doom 2016 is probably my favorite single player shooter of all time. Only really competing with FEAR and Halo: CE. In comparison, Doom 3 is a game I didn't even bother finishing. It's alright I suppose, but I never liked the look of it (althought it was quite impressive techwise), and it wasn't really doing it for me atmospherically. So it ended up being a slow game where I just wanted to shoot more stuff and skip all the bullshit.

Though at some point it ends up being kind of a semantic argument about what you want out of Doom. To me Doom was always shredding guitar and shooting demons really fast. I never quite saw the horror aspect of it as a major component, so making a game entirely based around it was very confusing and less appealing. Doom 2016 however got that shit exaaaactly where I wanted it.

Doom 3 looked great, had interesting mechanics and was an important game at the time. Doom 2016 on the other hand, is one of the best FPS games I've ever played, and yes, better than Doom 3.

Easy. Doom. I couldn't play Doom 3 for more than a few minutes. Uninteresting.

Never got around to actually playing doom 3, but doom 2016 is pretty overrated. It was basically follow the map to the collectables and shoot dudes, shooting felt good but i thought the levels looked like copy paste map design and i was just running from place to place looking for upgrades. It may get better later on but seeing as how it required like 40gb updates i just uninstalled the thing and haven't gone back to it since.

@oursin_360: You're a sick man.

Doom 3 is not good. I liked the graphics and stuff at the time but really had no fun playing it. I think it got a wet fart reception with a good amoutn of people so I have a hard time calling it overrated though.

Doom 2016 rules. It's an old school fast paced shooter done absolutely right. It even has old school style levels, but as someone who has played some old school shooters recently, the levels are SO much better and more clearly laid out as well. Great game.

Doom 2016, for all its flaws, is still a very good game, and miles away from Doom 3.

I would be shocked if anybody thinks Doom 3 is the better game. Eager to hear a convincing argument that would shock me though.

I like Doom 3, but c'mon... this isn't even a question. Doom from last year is flat out amazing in nearly every respect and is exactly what modern Doom should be.

I'll say one thing about DOOM 3.

Harbinger might be my favourite track on the DOOM 2016 OST and it heavily references the DOOM 3 OST!

I see that not many of u like doom 3, though i enjoyed it a lot, as a fan of horror games.

I believe the consensus is that Doom 3 is SIGNIFICANTLY better. Doom 3 is simply the greatest game ever created, and John Carmack's swan song. The latest Doom is a burning dumpster fire of questionable ai, bad enemy placement, and laughable story.

Doom (2016) over Doom 3 for sure, though I did enjoy Doom 3 more than most seemed to.

I would put Doom 3 over Doom (2016) ONLY when taking in to account the VR (Vive) Mod for Doom 3. It is pretty damn amazing, guys. It's like... your hand is the torch, man.

I think in retrospect, Doom 3 occupies the same space as Diablo 3 for me - a solid game brought down by the name attached to it.

I mean, I thought Diablo 3 was a good game, but it wasn't a very good *Diablo* game, if that makes any sense. If it hadn't had the Diablo name attached to it I probably would have enjoyed it more, but connecting it to that series set certain expectations that I felt like weren't met and that colored my perception of it.

Same thing with Doom 3. It had a lot of good stuff going for it, but it wasn't a good Doom game. Doom is about frenetic action and shooting demons, not horror and monster closets. Distance has helped me come around a little bit because I'm not as hung up on the name.

Doom 2016 on the other hand, felt exactly how I wanted a Doom game to feel.

I'm anxious to read the justifications for how on earth Doom 3 could possibly be better, both as a shooter or as a Doom game.

I didn't really like Doom 3 at all. Way too slow and dark. Doom 2016 is no contest.

Ah yes, good game vs bad game, a classic match up. Doom 3 was impressive technically at the time, that's it. It has nothing else going for it. It's hilarious that the thing even has the name "doom" on it, it's so far from the spirit of it. Call me hyperbolic, but I'd go as far as to say that Doom 3 is a disgrace to the franchise itself, and deserves to be forgotten.

Doom 2016 but the game needs better variety in combat.

I haven't played Doom 2016 yet, but slow and dark is what I liked about Doom 3. The original Doom was never a fast-paced game for me, I walked around slowly, absorbed by the atmosphere, admiring the lighting, wary of the sounds on the other side of the walls.

I get why people like(d) Doom 3...but wow, liking Doom 3 over Doom (2016)? Really?

Really?

The latest Doom is a modern refresh of the original with new things that also stayed true to its roots. Doom 3...did not. Doom had an amazingly fun story that had awesome moments but never took itself too seriously. Doom 3 was the opposite of that. Doom had an amazing ballet of weapons and tactics that allowed you to cater your play style and focus on what you wanted with weapon, suit, and ability upgrades that never made the game not feel like the classics. Doom 3...did not.

I'm not shitting on Doom 3 but I'm not going to act like it was better than the new Doom in any way. Any. Way.

Doom 3 is a great game. I've finished it several times and enjoyed it every time.

But Doom 2016 is much better. Such a fantastic game.

That's a tough call for me. I like em both in different ways.

I played Doom 3 back when it first came out in 2004. It was truly love at first sight as I was completely mesmerized with the id Tech 4 engine and its claustrophobic environment. Many people dissed the audio logs but I adore them as much as interacting with the NPCs. With that said, the NPCs did not age well in terms of their 3D Models and they all look the same. I also like the quiet moments in Doom 3; shooting demons is fun but sometimes you just wanna take it slow and absorb the chaos around you too.

In the latest Doom, there is no quiet moment - you constantly have to be on your toes and just blast everything in sight. I don't normally enjoy that kinda gameplay but it somehow works for Doom and I love it! Blowing off demons to bloody chunks is so much fun and although the glory kills can be a tad repetitive, it's super fun to pull off. Another thing that separates the two games is the collectibles. Finding Elite Guards, Doom dolls, Classic Maps and other secrets is super fun. That's something Doom 3 lacked - good replay value. I also love the backstory of Doom. Even though there isn't a lot of NPCs to talk to (in fact there's only 3), it's amazing how the game still managed to have a rich lore and story. From the Doomguy/ Doom Slayer's origin to the UAC, I devoured the story more than I did in Doom 3; that one truly lacked narration in comparison. Speaking of Doom Slayer, I think id Software did a fantastic job of crafting the perfect protagonist in the Doom series to date. Again, comparing with the old game, the Doom 3 Marine is incredibly boring and lifeless. I know id wanted to make him like a regular joe but he's too plain looking you just can't associate with him like Gordon Freeman or Isaac Clarke for instance. Doom Slayer is the better one and his backstory makes me wish Bethesda and id would publish a proper Doom Mythos book someday.

Despite my love for Doom 2016, there's one aspect of the game I don't like wholeheartedly and that is the soundtrack, It's Metal, I dig Heavy Metal, but Mick Gordon's idea of mixing it with dubstep sound or whatever it is turns me off so much. The constant audio distortion or whatever you wanna call it hurts my head and ruins the experience for me. Sure, Doom 3 only has one Metal track composed by Chris Vrenna but at least that's more pleasant to the ears and it sets the mood for the game more effectively. Don't get me wrong, the Doom 2016 soundtrack is good but I'd say it's misguided.

Now the question is do I prefer Doom 3 or Doom 2016? Again, it's a tough choice but perhaps let me put it this way: I choose Doom 2016 as the best FPS game I've played in recent years while Doom 3 is my favourite id Software game.

I think I preferred Doom 3.

@oursin_360: What an amazingly reductive way to describe Doom 2016. That's like saying Mario is about hopping on platforms collecting coins and basketball is about people throwing balls into hoops. Each is a facet of their respective thing, yes, but to say the whole thing is that and only that is gross simplification. *shrug*

As to the topic at hand, I think Doom 2016 is the better of the two. I had fun with Doom 3, but it had issues. To paraphrase Brad, "Doom 3 felt like a game built for the Id Tech 4 engine." Id Tech 4 had great textures and environmental details for the day, but it strained the original Xbox (and most PCs) severely... so they made every level in Doom 3 claustrophobic, blocky corridors to keep the framerate stable. Even your time out on the surface of Mars is very constrained; you're in hallways with skyboxes. Id Tech 4 had great lighting effects, but rigs back then struggled with them... so they made everything very dark and you had to choose between your flashlight or your gun so that the flashlight wasn't bouncing light rays everywhere during gun battles. Id Tech 4 had great creature designs and textures, but too many of them would have crippled the rigs back then... so creatures spawn in waves of three to four baddies, and always in the same tired fashion of "one behind, one or two in front, and one... RIGHT NEXT TO YOU! BOOoooO!"

Put all of the above together and you've certainly addressed the limitations of Id Tech 4, but at what cost? Doom 3 had great ambience and atmosphere, but that frenetic, high octane demon slaying from the first games was rather hampered. I think Doom 2016 strikes a much better balance, even if the horror aspect is much diminished (which is to be expected. You're the Doom Slayer, a legendary ravager with unquenchable bloodlust and rage who has become a mythical terror within demon society after the events of Doom 1 and Doom 2. Kind of hard to make a horror game when the player is the ultimate bad ass).

Doom 3. I don't even love Doom 3 that much but Doom 2016 was a disappointment. Putting a bunch of perk/upgrade systems into a Doom game is like one of the lamest things you can do. And the glory kills got old fast. I know I'm in the minority on this but, ugh. I'll play Doom 3 any day of the week over 2016 even though it's a total jump-scare fest.

I mean sure... but then you go around the wall and you're in a firefight and you move at literally like 90 mph as you run around. It's a fast paced game if you want to get past the third level or so.

People can like Doom 3 for what it is, but it's not faithful to Doom.

Recently played Doom (2016) and felt a little let down by it. It's certainly a good game with a lot of personality, but too much of it in the end boils down to 'kite all these demons around this arena until they're dead then go to next arena'. That being said, I still wouldn't put Doom 3 above it by any stretch of the imagination.

For you, maybe. It's only fast-paced if you play it that way. You don't have to run into firefights, you can hang out around corners and in adjacent rooms focusing on one or two enemies at a time. The original game doesn't really have any overwhelming levels, at least in the first episode. The subsequent episodes and Doom 2 aren't really my thing. Any levels where you do have to run around a lot are my least favorite levels.

Obligatory Bombcast clip.

@gaff: Haha, I thought about this clip the moment I saw the thread title. Simply wonderful. Thanks for linking it. :-)

Doom 3 is better than its rap.

Doom (2016) is better than just about every other singleplayer shooter in the last ten years.

So... what you're saying is that old Doom is a fast-paced game, you just like it less when you have to start moving faster?

For what it's worth, I don't think old Doom is as fast-paced as people often say it is. You can move really fast, but most of the time good positioning, good weapon choice, and smart resource management are more useful skills than the ability to move fast. Fast and accurate movement are still important to finishing the game, especially on higher difficulties, but it is not nonstop adrenaline-pumping movement. I finished Doom 2 on Ultra Violence and there was a whole lot of popping around a corner, blasting a demon, and then jumping back behind cover before I could take too much damage.

Reading this thread makes me realize that a lot of people do need to go back and play some old Doom again. Doom 3 was very much a Doom game - monster closets, horror elements, flashing lights, dark rooms, quiet moments where you're just poking around a place, the first Doom is littered with all of those things. Those are just the elements that Doom 3 took and built a game around. Doom 2016, on the other hand, went for the cheesy heavy metal interpretation of the original Doom. I think both are great games, with Doom 2016 being a good bit better.

Anyone looking for distilled running and gunning and almost nothing else needs to play Serious Sam.

@justin258: Serious Sam is a good example. You never have to play old Doom like Serious Sam. Serious Sam is a fast and overwhelming game.

@justin258: @hamst3r: I have never played Doom hiding or anything like you are talking about and if you want to beat the game on any difficulties and not bore yourself by hiding in a corner you better be running around, which you do again literally at 90 mph. It's a very fast paced game and Doom 3 is not similar.

Honestly I think some of you guys are caught up cause you played Doom when you were kids and it scared you so it was "atmospheric" or something. It's not like Doom 3. This is a game mechanically based around a flashlight and lighting, and where you go around interacting with computers and creeping along hallways. It's more of a survival horror game. It's not like the old Doom. Or you just weren't good at the old Doom games and hid all the time.

@justin258: the closest that the original Doom comes to being atmospheric is turning off the lights in a room and spawning bad guys into it. It was an action based shooter with little else going on.

@artisanbreads: It's subjective.

I imagine that most people never knew at the time that you were "supposed" to play Doom with a mouse and keyboard with the run button held down like it was Mario. In addition, the control scheme(s) for Doom back when it came out was awful. PC action games hadn't even trained people to use the mouse up to that point, WASD+mouselook didn't come about until 1995, and it wasn't standardized until Half-Life... five years after Doom was originally released.

And it wasn't just kids that felt that Doom was scary. The impetus behind Half-Life was based on Gabe Newell's own experience playing Doom, which was very different from how hardcore gamers responded to it. I think Doom was weird, different and ambiguous enough that most people coming to PC gaming for the first time wouldn't have known how to respond to it. Id followed up on that with Doom 3 based on their own experience watching normal people play Doom for the first time.

And even Wolfenstein 3D was scary as hell; having never played 3D Monster Maze, Castle Wolfenstein, or having seen any real violence in a game before. The concept of a violent first-person game with nazis and zombies stalking you through a confusing maze shouting at you in German was pretty striking for its time. Horror games had rarely if ever been seen up to that point. The game was also so difficult that a lot of the time you had to play it like a cover shooter, because the best weapons were hard to come by and you lost your weapons whenever you died. Which was fine if you were conditioned to save-scum in adventure games, but most newcomers weren't.

Sure Doom 2016 has got the speed (although not nearly as fast as original Doom) but other than the more fast paced action over 3, I would argue that 2016 isn't that faithful to the original Doom either. Especially when you have to concern yourself with too many upgrade systems that slow down the pace of the game, at least in my opinion.

In any case, do any of them need to be that faithful to the original Doom? Probably not.

Yes. 2016 is extremely faithful to the spirit of Doom. Sure it has different mechanics, it came out in 2016. Especially in comparison to 3 it is WAY more faithful. I am honestly very surprised there are any arguments about this here.

Yes they added progression and stuff but it's a modern game, you need things like that.

@ravey: Totally fair points, but in the end we are talking about people totally new to FPS or a child's understanding of a game for the most part. I was a kid and had the "basically any FPS scares me a bit" phase but once past that you can see how different the two games are. As I said, if you want to be any good at DOOM you are moving.

It can't be overstated that, again, the main mechanic of Doom 3 is that you have a flashlight you need to slowly move through creepy environments and can't see if you're shooting. That says it all about how different it is. The main difference with Doom 2016 is the Glory Kills, which make you be even more aggressive and move around even faster, which is way more of a Doom thing.

In the end, I appreciate maybe that design idea for Doom 3 but the game was okay at best.

@artisanbreads: I think of Doom as two seperate games: one for normal people and one for hardcore players buried in the higher difficulties that was only really understood by people who were experienced and in the know.

Id already saw how people were reacting to Wolfenstein 3D (falling out of their chairs while playing it) and they wanted Doom to be scarier. Quake was intended to be more atmospheric than Doom, and the same for Doom 3.

After Quake, Id's games lost a lot of those hardcore players who understood their games and they started focusing more on technology and content rather than clever data structures and fun gameplay algorithms.

@artisanbreads: It's more faithful than 3 sure, but when I play Doom 2016 I don't feel at all like I'm playing a modern version of original Doom. I feel like saying that it's in the spirit of Doom is too vague. The mechanics are all different. There is jumping, climbing, glory kills, upgrades, it totally changes how the game plays.

I also disagree with the notion that every modern game has to have some sort of upgrade/perk system in it. Like there are perks in Doom 2016 to make your weapon switching or whatever slightly faster. What the fuck is up with that, it's so obviously padded out.

@ravey: I don't think anyone played doom with a mouse when it was released. PC's were mostly running DOS in 1994-1995 as Win 3.1 was just rolling out and as such you didn't even need a mouse all that often. Also as a small kid I found absolutely nothing scary about Doom, much less Wolf 3D or Blood, Hexen or Heretic. System Shock maybe, but Doom? I know everyone experienced things differently but I can't imagine many people being frightened by those old games.

I do not know what is "padding" about that or wrong with it. What modern games don't have progression? An incredibly small number. I think designers don't agree with you.

In the end, still way more faithful to Doom. There is no argument to the contrary to me.

@artisanbreads: There are other ways to handle progression in games. The runes, the suit upgrades, the argent cells all felt like a drag to deal with, and pointless in a Doom game where I just want to strafe dodge shit and shoot demons.
I'm not arguing with you that Doom 2016 isn't more faithful to Doom than Doom 3. However I don't think it's very faithful in the broader scope.

@boonsong: No one is making a game without the depth those things add in 2016 and I am very glad. Not saying it was all done perfectly because it could all use another pass in a sequel.

@humanity: John Romero, Gabe Newell, Brad Shoemaker and Ryan Davis have all described the original Doom as scary. Personally, I think it's a bit more nuanced: Doom felt more challenging, hostile, shocking, surprising and overwhelming than scary to me (though some of the sounds and monster designs were intimidating).

Doom was one of the first "serious" action games, though it still had some elements that were cheesy, unrealistic and arcadey. Doom was also the first 'headphones' game, since it was the first game to utilize ambient sound effects and positional sound.

Wait, people play doom holding the run button all the time? Ive only used the instant acceleration as a dodge for oncoming projectiles. I use it a lot but its not like I hold it pressed in the whole time.

Doom 2016 is the best game by far but I still REALLY love doom 3 as well. Still has some of the best looking/interacting ingame computer screens(Replacing the mouse cursor in the bfg kinda ruined the visual cohesion of it though) The sound in Doom 3 is also great with every room sounding like you can hear every piece of working machinery individualy.

Doom's super great.

Doom 3 was cool, but I was too much of a wuss to ever finish it.

So my assessment is incomplete!

@lestephan: Most modern versions of Doom have an auto run feature so you only need to walk when it's absolutely necessary. Initially, you had to play it like Mario if you were speedrunning the levels (again, the concept of speedrunning is something that might've been lost on a lot of people at the time).