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Todd Hollenshead defends Doom 3
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 9th July 2008
Doom 3 was mainly criticised for not evolving the gameplay much as time went on.
Or not, if you listen to Hollenshead, who defended the game in an interview with Kikizo recently.
"I think there are three people on the internet that keep making these posts that Doom 3 was 'bad', and they get no credibility from any other people... there's some mass-misperception out there," he said when asked if there were any 'weaknesses in Doom III that need to be corrected.'
"I get this occasionally - why don't I think Doom III was successful? We sold over three million units! It's the most successful game in id's history," continued Hollenshead.
Doom 3 was well-received when it was first released, but was criticised for the repetitive gameplay and limited selection of environments and enemies - there's only so many times you can fight an imp in a dark hallway.
Personally, we reckon Doom 3 was an excellent game which only really failed in the later levels when it became obvious the bar wasn't really going to get raised. The graphical side of the game is excellent though and the title can still hold its own with the big boys of this year.
What did you reckon to Doom 3 - was it over-rated or under-appreciated? Which was your favorite id game? Let us know in the forums.
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Comments (47)Stats: 0.056 seconds
Lets see if we can find 3 more ppl to disprove his theory
Hey Todd -- yes, I thought it was bad. Boring, repetitive and samey. Yes, the graphics and visuals were good, at least those that were visible as most of it was in very dark hallways. Which I guess allowed for the overuse of "swinging overhead lights"
But graphics don't make the game -- gameplay does and I found it far too repetitive. Sorry :|
Doom 3 was an awesome game, the first game that truly made me jump and made me nervous of what may be round the next corner.
To fully enjoy the game you needed a nice size screen dark room and a 5.1 speaker set up. The amount of times I span round quickly in game because I thought something was behind me... or the cries and screams around you made for some tense gameplay
this
:o
really, the only way to tell you where going the right way was if you ket getting jumped by the same imps all the time, one wrong turn however and you end up running in circles with nothing to shoot anymore... great concept really, atleast if you consider getting lost with nothing to do anymore except uninstalling the game in frustration something great.
...same here.
I was happy enough to play it and hell, I might just dig it out again and see how it looks on my widescreen monitor.
I didnt want a story, I didnt want to fight 2 or 3 imps at the time in a small dark room. I wanted the original but better small enclosed areas that disorientated followed by expansive outside areas where you knew some heavy shizzle was going to go down.
Bioshock on mars with imps would of done me tbh, without any of the story....just really big guns and shed loads of monsters. Think a scary serious sam on crack
She would...but in my head, she's a hottie and thus scared of me
Doom3 was really beautiful and it was too dark to see anything.
I...don't like scary games, well not the ones that rely on shockeffects alone. Blood and Gore, bring em on. But sneaking around in the dark just to be jumped at...nah. (Maybe I'm a little :'(baby?)
Skipped FEAR for the same reason too.
Played quake4 through in one session though
Howcome these nasty NPC come to jump (and scare) me but I don't get to chainsaw them till their head comes of and spray their in-the-dark-hiding-fellow-scoundrels with intestines?
Aahhhwel, back to the toothfairy-chick RRRRRRR!
You should try system shock 2 again, that game doesn't jump to scare you it just shows you that you are about to die and for me it really freaks me out.
However, I would say that it could have been one hell of a lot better, there were many, many things it missed out on that it could have included. I think the only reason I enjoyed it so much was that I made absolutely damn sure I enjoyed it. Never played it during daylight, never in company, always in the dark with the sound turned up. I made sure I got totally immersed in the game, and as such I thought it was brilliant.
On the other hand, I know Joe didn't think much of it when he first started playing it, but I discovered he did in the middle of the day, on a PC that could barely handle it, whilst next to him his younger sister played Monkey Island 2, and he kept stopping to help her out. If there was any a situation that was going to totally ruin the experience, that was it. A lot of your experience of a game depends on how you approach playing the game in the real world.
It was just pitch black so often that it just felt like one gray, uninspiring hallway followed by a mustard yellow hallway, then some more gray. Duct-tape mod made this easier to deal with, but eh. Should that really have been a mod rather than something that was there from the get-go?
No. No. No. The duct-tape mod totally pissed all over one of the main gameplay points of the game. Light or firepower, but not both, that's the choice. By combining the two you utterly undermined half the excitement of the game. It always has annoyed me when people admit they've only ever played the game with the duct-tape mod.
Cough
Fanboy
Cough.
Bauul at least understands the concept behind why you couldnt have both, you just strike me as a ****.
go back to halo numbnuts, pc games are not for you.
:O
Easy there tiger - I was merely poking fun at Ben. PC gamers are very much my bread and butter. Ben's just lucky I didn't remind everyone of the time I beat him 50 frags to none in a epic match of Doom 3, back before he learnt all my moves through the co-op mod.
Personally, I too can see the reason behind the choice id was presenting. I can see it, understand it and appreciate it on paper. However, that doesn't make it great game design straight off the bat and the reality was that it annoyed far, far more players than it should of because you spent half the time switching between the two. It's the same complaint people make about Oblivion - it shouldn't require a player mod to make the game accessible and enjoyable to 90 percent of the players.
That said, I didn't mind the flashlight thing so much. I was more critical of the vastly disappointing weapons and the obvious padding that meant the game was essentially four times longer than it needed to be.
And they had such a good game planned - RPG elements, level hubs, the works. Shame really.
It did lose the flow later in the game, but I still played through it.
Aproach the next doorway till it opens.
Flick on the torch and examine where the walls/doors/ammo/health in the next room are, flick torch back off.
Enter room, spinning to face lights/glowing things/noises that have now appeared from likely places.
Shoot monster(s).
Repeat (for 6-8 hours?)
While I've played worse, it did feel very repetitive and predictable and wasn't particularly scary, maybe a 5/10 or 6/10 overall game if I had to score it. (and an 8/10 for the engine, which would have been 9 or 9.5 if it could do believeable hair and/or more than what one light source at a time so they didn't need to cheat with light painted onto the floor in places?)
Could you explain which Oblivion Mod you mean? ...I quit Oblivion after a few hour's so maybe I'm among these 90%
Thx
Xir
Any of the re-levelling mods, such as Francesco's.
Yep -- that's the way the game should've been played -- with the duct tape mod. Otherwise i could have turned the lights off at home and walked around the hallway.. same effect LOL :)
Damn you!!!! Will I never be rid of the memory my one, solitary moment of weakness? :'(
But you're right either, they had SO much good stuff planned, and then went and dumbed it all down for some reason. id were always good at engines and second by second gameplay, but have never been good at looking at the larger picture of a game.
Still, at least they look like they're trying something new with Rage. As far as I can recall, no-one really made an FPS/Racing game before.
Quake 4, which I *did* play through (and fairly quickly), was created by Raven Software, which I still think is best at using id's technology to make games (with the exception of Valve). I, for one, always found Raven's Heretic and Hexen series more entertaining than id's Doom and Quake.