damerell

Puff pieces about Doom 3 are appearing with increasing frequency.

Of course we knew that the Doom name was simply going to be used as a marketing device for a game that would bear no resemblance to Doom, but there's a difference between knowing it's going to happen and actually seeing Gendo Ikari thrusting his [deleted for good taste reasons] into the [likewise] of something you are attached to.

Doom 3 is going to use its sophisticated graphics engine to create a tense, suspenseful experience with ultra-detailed enemies, of whom we will presumably see about three at one time if we're lucky. It'll be full of tedious puzzles and set-pieces, and the only way to play it well will be to know the encounters by heart.

This is completely unlike Doom. More so than almost any subsequent first-person shooter (including the sadly flawed Doom 2), Doom's a game of general tactics, not learned situations. Plunk a decent Doom player down in the middle of a third-party level, and they'll stand a decent chance; it's easier when you know the levels, but the game is more about mastering the techniques of the weapons and monsters than about prior knowledge.

Doom is also about mayhem, not puzzles. I don't want to maneuver a crane to drop a zombie body on a gas leak from some barrels and all that nonsense; I want the room to have monsters in so I can shoot them - and decent numbers of them. Three is the bare minimum; later in episode 3 you're often being attacked by twenty monsters at a time.

This is what made Doom work; that rolling adrenalin rush from clearing area after area of beasties - sometimes unexpected stuff happened, but always in the basic format of terrain and monsters. If you had to stop and puzzle, or if you had to constantly creep along because monsters kept surprising you and even one attack hitting you could be disastrous (hello, Half-Life!), it wouldn't be the same game at all.

Bleh. If id want to do another thinking FPS, fine. But do they have to call it Doom?