DOOM³ is Fine but its Shotgun Still Sucks Ass

AKA Ranking of DOOMs, Part Two, I Guess?

Look, we’ve all been there before, haven’t we? We’ve all had a beloved franchise that was known for its fast action and its deeply satisfying gunplay as we faced down hordes of enemies and chewed through them like a skull fed into a grinder that allows you to shoot little bits of skull at other enemies and thought “yeah but what if it was spookier” or “what if we had a tech genius make a really fucking impressive lighting model and just kinda focused on that” or “what if we rebooted a beloved franchise and changed all the creature designs people loved” and also “what if we did a more setpiece/narrative focused game that had the bad timing to come out three months before the release of Half Life 2 which would do that but better and also the heads would not all end in points?” This are totally normal things we have all said to ourselves and to others at one time or another.

I’m not here to praise DOOM³, but I am also not here to bury it, and I am absolutely not here to turn you, the gathered masses, against Brutus and his co-conspirators for their cowardly actions on the Ides of March. The most I might do is convince you to go back and look at a game that is pretty good with a perspective that is not completely jaded. That or you will just shake your head and think “god damn man the flashlight mechanic was dumb shut up,” which is also I guess a real possibility. Am I gonna make a case for the flashlight? Of fucking course I am, who do you think I am, anyway?

Shoved Off the Pedestal

For the DOOM 64 talk I went into the development history a little and also pointed out the absolutely abysmal timing of its release, and hey guess what I’m gonna do the same fucking thing, because much like DOOM 64, I feel like DOOM³ doesn’t quite get its due, albeit for different reasons. Also, in terms of like, ranking, DOOM³ doesn’t deserve as much due as DOOM 64 does, if we’re being honest. Anyway, let’s get into the real thing here, which is what it used to mean to be an id Software title.

It's hardly a hot take to say that id Software had a run of releases that were basically unfuckwithable which ran from Wolfenstein 3D through Quake II at the very least, extending through Quake III Team Arena if you happened to be on that side of the UT vs Q3 wars. I was more of a UT dude myself, although I will not deny that Quake III is in fact still a good time.

One of the big things you got with a new id release was, of course, the new tech. This was the rule for every game except for DOOM II, where they were like “look the people are gonna just want more DOOM so let’s give that to them” and were proven to be 1000% correct in their assumptions. For the most part, old id would always be on to a new engine when they dropped a new release, and that new engine would inevitably do some shit you never saw in your fucking life before. Wolfenstein 3D basically became the de-facto granddaddy of FPSes (yes yes, Catacombs 3D is more accurately the granddaddy, but there is a 50/50 chance you had not heard of Catacombs 3D until just now so we’re sticking with that). With DOOM, it was fucking DOOM, it was a revolution in how to cram a bunch of cool shit on the screen and make it look 3D and run fast. With Quake, it was full 3D environments and characters and movement (plus deathmatching over TCP/IP! You could not do that before). Quake II had frankly ridiculous lighting technology, and Quake III basically took that fidelity to new heights and put out an engine that carries some of the best games out there – but you’ll notice I didn’t have anything like crazy-ass lighting technology or a brand new way to play online in there (it did eventually become a game you could play in your browser, which is its own achievement, but we're talking about at release, here). Partially because once that stuff was developed, it didn’t really need to be developed further – there’s code from Quake’s networking technology that is still running in modern shooters to this very fucking day, after all – but the point is that by the time we get to DOOM³ there was an expectation we’d be both playing a good-ass game and seeing some graphical wizardry the likes of which we hadn’t seen before.

Which we did get. Once again John Carmack developed an absolutely insane lighting model – one which was so advanced that it actually kind of made the game hard to run! Instead of pre-baking lighting effects into the level, DOOM³ did most of it in real time – which was a little beyond a lot of gaming hardware at the time. What you got though was dynamic lighting and shadow-casting on moving objects (you know, like the demons trying to kill you) which looked fucking awesome. In fact, it required you to be able to run Direct X 8, which for a lot of people meant it was time to upgrade your video card. The thing is, it looks fucking incredible in practice, especially when using the flashlight. Unfortunately, this lighting model could get confused and bog down if there were multiple light sources going at the same time – such as, for example, a flashlight and muzzle flash. You might also notice that rooms in DOOM³ generally only have one or two primary light sources - again, because this saved computing power.

The end result of that is that level designers had to be far more judicious in placing light sources, which some people might say gives the environments a more cinematic feel and other people might say makes it so you can’t fucking see anything. It also, of course, means you can pull your flashlight out or you can fire your gun, but you can’t do both. I am certain it was computationally taxing enough to have the imp fireballs and other projectiles cast real-time shadows as they traveled along with your flashlight beam/muzzle flare.

I will stubbornly defend this as an example of constraints enhancing art – the DOOM³ we get as a result of these technical limitations is dark and moody and also – importantly, especially since they wanted to lean more into the horror aspects of DOOM as a series – tense as hell, as you swap between a flashlight and your gun to squeeze off shots at the groaning noise you hear in the dark. It’s the part of the game that is fun, to me, although in a different way than its predecessors (except for maybe DOOM 64, which is also spooky and tense in its own way).

Well, and let’s also not forget the important fact that for me (and countless other kids, I bet), the original DOOM was scary as hell too! Those were fucking demons, man, and there was blood everywhere and fucked up dudes in various states of dismemberment and sometimes you were just in a dark room and you heard a bunch of imp snorts and it was like “ah man I am so dead ah fuck ah shit.” Sure, now it isn’t scary at all but back then it was Real Shit, man. You kids today don’t understand, god damn it!

But again, here’s the thing: for all its fancy lighting, the character models kind of look like ass. Everyone’s head is pointy, and the animation rigging isn’t that good either (especially in the 2002 E3 demonstration – seriously, everyone walks like they have a full diaper). When people saw Half Life 2, they saw a game that maybe didn’t look better overall (seriously, the lighting in the original DOOM³ is something special), but they did see a game where character models looked more human and also had heads that did not end in points. The curse of DOOM³ is that everyone is a fucking conehead, and instead of slapping some hair on everyone they made two of the primary characters bald so you can really see it.

In essence, yeah, DOOM³ was a technical marvel. I have a crystal-clear memory of walking into a Microcenter and seeing one of their gaming PC setups running DOOM³ with the settings jacked up as high as they could go, and it was one of those brain-altering moments. It looked fucking amazing. The trouble is, Half Life 2 looked better. Its physics were also way more on display (DOOM³ actually has pretty solid physics, but they’re never the main event), so for the first time, id put out a new game on a new engine… and it wasn’t the coolest shit on the market.

A Rote Narrative

The other thing they decided to do? Hire a professional writer (Matthew J. Costello) to give the game a more cinematic story a la Half Life, the game whose sequel was going to eat their fucking lunch shortly after release. If you wondered why we suddenly had a moment of “everything is fine except for this ominous feeling” into “oh fuck this experiment went bad now we are all dead” it is because that is how Half Life went. Hell, the game even has the revelation that the higher-ups were totally aware of the whole Hell/Xen thing all along and were just keeping it secret while also performing research on it!

This story is pretty rote – you’d seen it before, except this time you were on Mars and the aliens were demons. Which is, to be fair, the plot of DOOM – you’re just on Phobos and not on Mars. It’s still teleporter experiments that lead to Hell, but while in DOOM you don’t really ever know if the UAC was aware of the whole “oh we’re messing with hell” thing, DOOM³’s UAC very explicitly knows about hell – and has been sending people in there to explore, no less. Now, does everyone know about hell? No, not at all – but the primary antagonist is UAC Scientist Doctor Betruger (just an umlaut away from being German for liar/fraud, which is a little on-the-nose but we’re talking about DOOM anyway), and he pretty clearly turned Delta Labs into his own little kingdom. It’s fun to read the numerous emails and listen to the voice logs and watch the dumb little instructional videos, and it gives the place a good texture – even if one too many audio logs end with the recorder going “oh no! No! Noooooooarghleblargh” which is and remains one of the dumbest things in fiction, right up there with journal entries that end with “oh no, what’s that? It’s horrible!”

Still, nobody is playing any DOOM for the plot unless they are a real sicko (it’s me, I’m sicko) so like, whatever.

The Enemies are Spookier in Motion

Here’s the other thing about DOOM³: all the monsters who came over got redesigns, and also they put new monsters in. All the monsters, barring a few notable exceptions come out looking worse. The Cacodemon is perhaps the worst offender – it gets multiple eyes instead of its trademark cyclopean look, and also like… tentacles hanging off of its chin? I refuse to even put a picture of it here, it offends me too greatly.

Oh and you can shoot its projectiles so they explode in its face and cause damage to it, so it’s completely fucking neutered in terms of threat. Lost Souls are more dangerous than these poor bastards. It’s a real shame!

Speaking of Lost Souls, they are just screaming faces now instead of COOL FUCKIN HORNED SKULLS, which is a downgrade – and they look fucking ridiculous when you see them in screenshots. Trites look even stupider, and while I do applaud the decision to keep the Revenant design more or less the same as in DOOM II, you gotta admit that “skeleton with rocket launchers on its shoulders” is not… scary. It’s just silly! If you’re going to make your Spookier DOOM Reboot, you might want to reconsider their design a little. There are, however, some real upgrades:

The Mancubus got a fun Lovecraftian look – it’s got face tentacles, which are pretty cool! The Vagary has the dubious honor of being the first female demon in the DOOM series and also an okay stand-in for the Spider Mastermind (easiest boss fight in the game though – Sergeant Kelly goes down fast as hell if you have a charged Soul Cube going into the fight, sure, but he also has a BFG that can fuck you up if you aren’t paying attention). The Hell Knight, of course, is the real prize: the redesign so good that it stuck around for subsequent installments of the series, because it is fucking cool! A big bruiser with an eyeless skull look (he gets eyes in Eternal) who throws big blue fireballs and also slaps your ass into next week if you let him get close enough. He’s dangerous, and scary, and he rules.

The less said about the Pinky redesign, the better. I know there was that one iconic screenshot we saw all over the place where the Pinky was eating the fat zombie guy’s guts in a bathroom in the runup to the release, but I defy you to look at that dumb fuckin thing and then look at any other Pinky design and say “ah yes this is better.” Not as much of a misstep as the Cacodemon, but still a pretty big one. This whole discussion is a little unfair though, if only because the designs in DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal whip so much ass it is difficult to look at the DOOM³ designs as anything other than deeply mediocre at best (again, not counting the Hell Knight, which is why he’s on the cover).

Just Tell Me How the Fucking Thing Plays Already, You Ass

This is the big part of the essay, or it was in my brain when I sat down to write this before I got sidetracked talking about the lighting model and Half Life 2 and all that other shit. What about the part where you are playing DOOM³? How’s that feel?

Well, turns out that it feels great. There are two major additions to the mechanics which basically ensure you will think “damn this does not feel like DOOM” at least once or twice:

1. You reload your weapons. I’ll be honest here, I fucking hate that they did this. I should not have to stop to reload my big fucking chaingun! I should just be able to hold down the fire button and cackle until I am out of ammo! Also having to reload the shotgun really adds insult to injury (don’t worry, we’ll get to the shotgun in a minute here).
2. You have a stamina meter, so you cannot sprint everywhere. You don’t sprint particularly fast either – certainly you notice when you are sprinting versus walking, and I at least generally have sprint held down whenever I’m in combat. Out of combat though, it’s slow and steady plodding about with my flashlight out. I don’t hate this change – DOOM³ wants you to be a little slower so you can absorb the Spooky Vibes more, I think, and it generally works! It is not, however, what people come to DOOM for! This doesn’t make it a bad thing – I mean I just said I don’t hate the change – but it, like reloading, is something you notice and if you were a DOOM player (or really someone who played id Software’s other FPSes) you’d notice you were no longer running all the time. You are not a little murder-machine in this, you’re just Some Guy with, fortunately, guns that are all pretty okay, barring….

Christ, that fucking shotgun. You could almost write an entire essay just on that fucking shotgun itself, based on how damn unpleasant it feels to use. It’s inaccurate as all hell unless you are six inches in front of a demon – which hey, that’s how I kinda tend to play DOOM anyway, but the days of shotgun sniping are long gone here – hell, even pulling the trigger six inches away might still result in zero dead demons in front of you (or, if the RNG falls another way, it might dust a Revenant in a single shot).

Now, I did, in conversation with someone, see the argument that, well, it made sense the shotgun was imprecise and didn’t do tons of damage because it makes you feel more of the tension and helplessness the game is trying to make you feel. Which, sure, I guess you could make that argument if you really wanted to, but I don’t. I think that the shotgun fucking sucks, and them adding a more accurate Super Shotgun in Resurrection of Evil is, to me, them admitting they knew the shotgun sucked (unfortunately, the super shotgun still feels pretty bad – if I unload that into an imp the imp should die 100% of the time, and they don’t).

Between the reloading and the “you can’t sprint forever,” what you get with DOOM³ is something far less frantic and far more methodical than any other DOOM game. Not that you’re ever going to really be hurting for ammunition or health as long as you’re even slightly paying attention. Storage cabinet codes are in emails or audio logs and as long as you listen to those, you’ll get what you need – and if you google the Martian Buddy cabinet codes, you’ll even get the minigun significantly earlier than you might otherwise. The only time you really need to put even a little thought into getting a code is to get the BFG early, and even that one is laughably simple. No, when I say “methodical” I mean that you are going to proceed more or less in a straight line from beginning to end, with a few little secrets but not that many, to be honest. It will feel pretty good and you’ll eventually get to the part where you go to hell and you will think “ah yes this is the part of DOOM³ I remember,” mostly because it is the most metal hell had looked until, you know, DOOM 2016.

By the end of the game, when you’re running through the ruins on your way to confront the Cyberdemon and get rid of the whole Portal from Hell thing that becomes your primary objective, it does start to feel more like DOOM: you’ve got all the weapons by now, and you’ve got plenty of ammo, and there are plenty of demons to kill. It feels different than the earlier stages where you are creeping through shadowy corridors with your flashlight, waiting for the inevitable moment where a demonic laugh will result in a few imps, commandos, or (very rarely) something more dangerous. There are barely any Pinkies, Hell Knights, Mancubi, or Archviles in the game – a far cry from the waves of demons that DOOM II throws at you (to say nothing of a game like Plutonia, who asks the simple question “how many Archviles is too many, anyway?).

The Cyberdemon fight is not impressive. I’m sorry to be the one to say it, but by DOOM standards it’s a real letdown – mostly because it plays like a more traditional Boss Fight – you aren’t shooting the Cyberdemon until it dies, you’re waiting for the hell rift to spit out enough demons to charge your soul cube so you can throw it at the Cyberdemon until it dies. It takes maybe five minutes or so – and it’s not because it’s hard, it’s because you have to wait for demons to spawn in.

It's Good but Not Great

So at the end, what did we learn? Well, we learned that DOOM³ is not more DOOM in the way that DOOM II or hell, even DOOM 64 is. It tries something different, and in a way that is fun and charming in its own way (especially the emails and audio logs and training videos). It also really does succeed in its aspiration of making a spookier DOOM: some of the jump scares got me, and more importantly some of the moments (picking up the Alpha lab keycard from the executive office and hearing deep demonic laughter as imps teleport in to murder your ass spooked my friend and I so bad as high schoolers that we had to stop playing and catch our breaths for a minute. It wasn’t a jump scare, it was that it was dark and scary and we kept hearing ghostly voices whisper “help me” and then some fuckin’ zombie would start moaning in the dark and we’d have to find it and kill it. That doesn’t really happen now, but there is still a solid enough feeling of tension when I go back and play it, and look, some of the dumber voice lines have just stuck with me in a way that I am fully willing to admit has given me some bias here. The Devil... is real. I know.... I BUILT HIS CAGE.

As a historical artefact in the development of modern graphical technology, it’s unmissable. From the standpoint of the evolution of the modern FPS, it’s less groundshaking. It’s an experiment of sorts: could they remove things that people associated with id Software titles (running fast and shooting everything in sight without having to reload, ever) and still come out the other end with a good game that still feels like DOOM? Well, yeah, they could, kind of – but it turns out that putting those two bits back in got us two of the greatest video games of all time, so maybe not the right step. It was id doing something they didn’t normally do – chasing after what Half Life had done in terms of story and setpieces

Still worth playing, though, if only to enjoy how fucking silly Betruger’s constant taunting gets if nothing else.

This is the part where I tell you to forego the BFG Edition in favor of the O.G. version: If you buy the BFG edition on Steam, you get access to the original DOOM³ and Resurrection of Evil files too, which are what I suggest. The way the lighting in the BFG Edition all got turned up robs the game of its spooky vibes and more importantly I think a lot of the tension (especially in the earlier levels) comes from having to switch between the flashlight and your gun. It’s worth experiencing at least once, you can swap to the BFG edition if you really want after that, but I’ll think less of you.*

The Current Deeply Underexplained Ranking of DOOMs:

1. Doom 64
2. DOOM³

That's right, I decided to go ahead and commit the sin of ranking the DOOM games. At first I was like "oh I should play through them all to completion before I rank them" but if we are being honest I ain't got time for that and anyway I have played them all through to completion multiple times at this point (with some games it is maybe better not to admit just how many times I have beaten them because I do not wish to be thrown into prison). Rest assured, however, that in the interests of Scientific Rigor or whatever I do fully plan on dumping at least 4-5 hours into each game before I sit down to write about it, in a state as close to the original as I can. Yes, that's right, I have a copy of Chocolate DOOM and I am not afraid to use it (I will probably just use gzdoom or whatever the Bethesda releases are running on though).

Next time: Now that we've dealt with the lesser known one (DOOM 64) and the black sheep (DOOM³), let's take a look at DOOM 2016!

*I will not actually think less of you