Doom 3 is out!

noel · Post by **noel** » August 2, 2004, 3:30 pm

Doom 3 is available. Anyone pick it up? Is it more than just an engine demo?

I don't have it yet, but I might pick it up this week. Curious to hear how it is.

Kluden · Post by **Kluden** » August 2, 2004, 3:43 pm

Best Buy near me is having the midnight sale. I'm not going to attend...well...maybe I will...but I will be buying it tomorrow none the less. i don't see the use in buying it at midnight if I have to go to work tomorrow...so...anyways...I will comment on wednesday

Psyloche · Post by **Psyloche** » August 2, 2004, 4:06 pm

Kluden wrote:Best Buy near me is having the midnight sale. I'm not going to attend...well...maybe I will...but I will be buying it tomorrow none the less. i don't see the use in buying it at midnight if I have to go to work tomorrow...so...anyways...I will comment on wednesday

Simple, don't go to work tomorrow!

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » August 2, 2004, 4:06 pm

People still get excited by Doom?

noel · Post by **noel** » August 2, 2004, 4:10 pm

I'm personally not excited by Doom, but I am excited that the engine is going to be available for upcoming games.

Janx · Post by **Janx** » August 2, 2004, 4:24 pm

You should be excited. After playing it last night the story is great, the atmosphere is astounding and quite spooky. And of course the engine owns.

XunilTlatoani · Post by **XunilTlatoani** » August 2, 2004, 4:36 pm

EBGames said I can pick up my pre-order tonight after 7, so I'll hold comments until then.

Personally, I haven't been following this at all throughout its four years of development (or however long they've been working on it) until this last month or so, but I'm still looking forward to giving it a try nevertheless.

Trek · Post by **Trek** » August 2, 2004, 5:36 pm

Aslanna wrote:People still get excited by Doom?

Sure why not? I was excited to see Return of the King as well.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » August 2, 2004, 8:09 pm

Trek wrote:
Aslanna wrote:People still get excited by Doom?
Sure why not? I was excited to see Return of the King as well.

How is that relevant?

Trias · Post by **Trias** » August 2, 2004, 8:25 pm

the game is pretty damn intense so far hah...after about 20 or so min into it you are at the edge of your seat

turn the sound up too!

Trek · Post by **Trek** » August 3, 2004, 3:59 am

Aslanna wrote:
Trek wrote:
Aslanna wrote:People still get excited by Doom?
Sure why not? I was excited to see Return of the King as well.
How is that relevant?

You sound as if Doom 3 is the same as Doom. I see it as a different game then the original as I do with LoTR. Yes many Games/movies get stale after a couple rounds, but a few stay good, Doom is one of them so far.

XunilTlatoani · Post by **XunilTlatoani** » August 3, 2004, 11:25 am

I got my hands on this last night and played for about 5 hours or so. It's very fun and challenging, and I wouldn't classify this as just a demo of the new engine. The environment is very creepy, and I got chills and jumped back in my seat a few times when monsters jumped out at me in a dark room.

The graphics and animations are beautiful of course. The sound is definitely an underrated feature of this game. It's very spatial even with just two speakers and a subwoofer, but if you have a 5 speaker setup you will probably get a better experience (I noticed a lot of monsters come at you from the back, and having that rear channel would help to not only freak you out more, but also to tip you off to their location).

If you are worried about the game not looking good on your system, I would say that if you had a decent system for the DirectX 9 EQ engine, you should be ok with Doom 3. I'm running an Athlon XP 2000 with a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 and 512 MB PC3200 RAM. The game launched with its recommended settings of 640x480 w/ medium quality graphics for my system. With those settings I was constantly around 40-60 FPS (they capped FPS at 60, so I probably could have got more from my hardware). Even at that setting the game was very playable, but I figured I could get a bit more and stay around 30 FPS. After some experimenting, I found that at 1024x768 with medium quality, I was in the 20-40 FPS ballpark and decided to stay there. Just for kicks, I bumped the quality up to high, and my FPS dipped to about 10-15 (I got the same FPS, btw, when I bumped the resolution to 1280x1024 with medium quality). Honestly, I didn't notice a huge difference between medium and high, so I was happy to stick with medium for the higher FPS (even though the game was still playable at 10-15 FPS).

Siji · Post by **Siji** » August 3, 2004, 12:27 pm

If I can withstand motion sickness, I'm looking forward to playing it..

Assuming I can ever stop playing Gothic 2..

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 3, 2004, 1:39 pm

noel wrote:I'm personally not excited by Doom, but I am excited that the engine is going to be available for upcoming games.

The Unreal series of engines seems to translate better into other games. Of course, Doom 3 is a completely new engine but the new Half Life 2 engine may be better suited for multiplayer gameplay which is ultimately what everyone wants.

I'm talking out my ass mostly about the new HL2 and Doom3 engines but I recall an article early on about the new HL2 engine being preferred at least for multiplayer type games.

I don't like horror type games. Doom 3 alpha was very creepy so for it's purpose, it gets the job done.

TheDarkreigns · Post by **TheDarkreigns** » August 3, 2004, 4:29 pm

Doom 3 is freakin incredible.

Best way to play it is at night with all the lights out with at least 4 or more speaker surround sound.....

1000 miles....pickin up some speed.....right on.....

Trek · Post by **Trek** » August 3, 2004, 4:56 pm

Finally got it, so far it is incredible. Cant wait to play more tonight

Kelshara · Post by **Kelshara** » August 3, 2004, 5:46 pm

hum maybe my computer can run it after all then from what I read here.. been waiting to upgrade but it has to be on hold for a while longer unfortunately..

Shanter · Post by **Shanter** » August 3, 2004, 7:45 pm

I've been waiting for a friend to make my new computer, so far it isn't ready so I shall not ruin my experience until it is complete (but I'm holding the game in my hands right now

)

Menelaos · Post by **Menelaos** » August 3, 2004, 9:59 pm

The graphics are great and the sound quality is awesome, but what the fucl is with the super low-res text and menus? The main menu looks like it came out of a Nintendo 8bit graphic system! And the in-game HUD and text is ridiculously terrible, bordering on illegible altogether!

What in god's name were they thinking, when they designed such terrible-quality text. Unless it's just a problem my X800XT is having with rendering the text, I'm highly disappointed in this aspect of the game. Oh well. Other than that, the game is pretty sweet so far. Good storyline, nice atmosphere.

edit: I think that the game wasn't designed to accomodate the X800's too well. I can't even set any anti-aliasing above 4 or it reverts the res to 640x480, and stays there, until I turn AA back to 4 or lower; at which point I can set the res to 1600x1200 again. Hopefully will be fixed in a patch soon

Tenuvil · Post by **Tenuvil** » August 4, 2004, 1:11 am

Damn it, Fry's here LIED and said today was Doom 3 "ship day" and "release day" is tomorrow at 4 PM. I'll be checking Gamestop and EB tomorrow early before battling the hordes at Fry's tomorrow...

Zamtuk · Post by **Zamtuk** » August 4, 2004, 1:34 am

i have never been scared to play a game with the lights out, until now

simply put, this game is infuckingcredible

Sartori · Post by **Sartori** » August 4, 2004, 8:29 am

This game fucking owns. I haven't had my heart race playing a game like this since the original.

Avryce · Post by **Avryce** » August 4, 2004, 11:23 am

Menelaos wrote:The graphics are great and the sound quality is awesome, but what the fucl is with the super low-res text and menus? The main menu looks like it came out of a Nintendo 8bit graphic system! And the in-game HUD and text is ridiculously terrible, bordering on illegible altogether! What in god's name were they thinking, when they designed such terrible-quality text. Unless it's just a problem my X800XT is having with rendering the text, I'm highly disappointed in this aspect of the game. Oh well. Other than that, the game is pretty sweet so far. Good storyline, nice atmosphere.

edit: I think that the game wasn't designed to accomodate the X800's too well. I can't even set any anti-aliasing above 4 or it reverts the res to 640x480, and stays there, until I turn AA back to 4 or lower; at which point I can set the res to 1600x1200 again. Hopefully will be fixed in a patch soon

'

Menu's look like ass on my system with a radeon 9600 pro but fine on my roommates with a ti4600 go figure. Hopefully it will be addressedi n a patch.

Kluden · Post by **Kluden** » August 4, 2004, 11:37 am

I hooked the sound up through the surround speakers and turned all the lights out and all that jazz so that you could not see anything except by the light coming off teh computer screen.

Scariest experience ever (speaking of entertainment type fear that is...not like murderer in my house type fear, ie, real fear).

The game runs great on my machine. My specs are as follows:
2.4ghz P4
1g ram
128mb Geforce TI 4600

Runs super fast on the default (suggested) settings, runs ok on settings a bit more racked up. So yes, you can run at higher than what the game suggests for your system, and you won't experience slow down.

Mort · Post by **Mort** » August 4, 2004, 12:45 pm

Hands down, fucking bad ass.... played with the lights out lastnight as well and about shit myself.

Doesn't hurt that I just upgraded to these bad boys either.

Kilmoll the Sexy · Post by **Kilmoll the Sexy** » August 4, 2004, 3:37 pm

are you fuckers trying to get me divorced?

Janx · Post by **Janx** » August 4, 2004, 4:21 pm

From what I've read the problem with the text on ATI cards happens if, in your display settings you've set the D3D quality to "High Performance" while using High Quality in doom3's settings (not sure if it affects Medium quality as well).

Change it from High Performance to Quality (high quality?) for text to look normal.

Avryce · Post by **Avryce** » August 4, 2004, 4:47 pm

I'll give that a shot I do have it set at high performance currently but was running doom3 at the medium/recommended settings.

Trek · Post by **Trek** » August 4, 2004, 4:51 pm

Has anyone played mutiplayer yet? Any good?

Menelaos · Post by **Menelaos** » August 4, 2004, 9:39 pm

Ah HA! Thank you Janx. I had my settings on high performance in order to beef up my 3DMark03 score, and forgot to change it back to default settings, which are "High Quality". Thanks again!

Ebumar · Post by **Ebumar** » August 5, 2004, 12:36 am

There's a neat little tweek you can do to the cfg file for doom. Go into Doom 3 > base, then go to doomconfig.cfg. Next look for "seta image_cacheMegs "32"". Set it to like 128, or even 256. It will run much better. I've only tested this on my machine, but if you trust some random fools, go to: http://www.forumplanet.com/planetdoom/t ... id=1438663 To see what they have to say.

Btw... anyone else notice a pattern of how when mobs "spawn", its always after you pick something up? ^_^.

Menelaos · Post by **Menelaos** » August 5, 2004, 3:10 am

BTW, anybody know how to view your frames per second in Doom3? There did not appear to be any console in doom3, so I couldn't try the standard commands most games use, to display fps info.

Pengu · Post by **Pengu** » August 5, 2004, 3:26 am

Press [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[~] to access the console.
Type com_drawfps 1 to show FPS.

Shooting dark things in the dark is really starting to annoy me now after playing a while. Boring weapons and no alt. fire sucks too.

Akaran_D · Post by **Akaran_D** » August 5, 2004, 9:22 am

I'm playing on Rookie mode to get a feel for it, and imo, the darkness is the difficulty level incarnate.

Anyone else have trouble putting down the machine gun zombies before they do some agressive damage? I can't tell that anything other than just concentrated firepower kills them; headshots don't seem to matter all that much.. or am I wrong?

Sabek · Post by **Sabek** » August 5, 2004, 9:33 am

I have taken a zombie's head off with the pistol and they still come at you.
The machine gun zombies seem to be a matter of shooting them first and it kinda stuns them. Then you can just light them up.

Dups. · Post by **Dups.** » August 5, 2004, 10:33 am

Kilmoll the Sexy wrote:are you fuckers trying to get me divorced?

I was just thinking the same thing

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » August 5, 2004, 10:33 am

Pengu wrote:Shooting dark things in the dark is really starting to annoy me now after playing a while. Boring weapons and no alt. fire sucks too.

Well it is Doom afterall.. What did you expect!

Menelaos · Post by **Menelaos** » August 5, 2004, 11:14 am

Thanks Pengu.

Dregor Thule · Post by **Dregor Thule** » August 5, 2004, 12:54 pm

Ok, this game is making me seriously fucking twitchy!

Avryce · Post by **Avryce** » August 5, 2004, 1:22 pm

Lack of co op and my ability to jump on to/into objects and get stuck having to reload is the only downside!

Tried for a good 5 minutes to get off a pipe I had jumped on to with no success.

Sabek · Post by **Sabek** » August 5, 2004, 2:21 pm

From what I understand the Xbox version will have co-op out of the box.

Dregor Thule · Post by **Dregor Thule** » August 5, 2004, 3:21 pm

Already stuck! hehe.. level one of Alpha Labs. I need some security clearance, but I tried going back and there was a stairwell that the steps fell.. so can't get back up

TTTT

Menelaos · Post by **Menelaos** » August 5, 2004, 3:47 pm

Yes, I wondered about that, that there must be an alternate way up. I didn't need to backtrack so I didn't run into your problem, but I thought hmmm, if I had to go back to get some health or some security clearances, htf would I get back up? You may need to reload from the autosave at the beginning of the level

Trek · Post by **Trek** » August 5, 2004, 4:11 pm

Dregor Thule wrote:Already stuck! hehe.. level one of Alpha Labs. I need some security clearance, but I tried going back and there was a stairwell that the steps fell.. so can't get back up TTTT

Do this:

[Show]: go through the other door across from where you want to go, it has computers and crap. There is also a open type closet, go in there and to the right you will see a ladder on the right wall, go up that there is a pipe room, to the back and right of that room is a way to slide through and you find a scientist working, you can talk to him, but what you really need is to go through the door there and find the pda on the floor as I recall.

Dregor Thule · Post by **Dregor Thule** » August 5, 2004, 4:26 pm

Yea, finally found it, but thanks! They're hard to see :<

Krimson Klaw · Post by **Krimson Klaw** » August 5, 2004, 5:40 pm

I have a bad heart, discharged from the military for it. I am teetering on the brink of a heart attack playing this freakin game, but it owns. I only play it at night, my 13 year old son will only play it in the day or when I am playing on the comp beside him (seeing him make excuses is funny, but I won't call him on it because I can barely keep myself from turning on the light when I play myself). This is the only game that deserves an M rating that I have seen. No alt fire is kind of annoying though.

noel · Post by **noel** » August 5, 2004, 8:12 pm

Krimson Klaw wrote:This is the only game that deserves an M rating that I have seen. No alt fire is kind of annoying though.

I didn't find it terribly interesting, but did you ever play Manhunt?

Truant · Post by **Truant** » August 5, 2004, 10:18 pm

noel wrote:
Krimson Klaw wrote:This is the only game that deserves an M rating that I have seen. No alt fire is kind of annoying though.
I didn't find it terribly interesting, but did you ever play Manhunt?

No, but I killed my next door neighbor who happened to own it!
err

Menelaos · Post by **Menelaos** » August 5, 2004, 10:24 pm

Strange, com_drawfps 1 doesn't seem to be working on my machine. "Unrecognized command". Wierd.

Siji · Post by **Siji** » August 5, 2004, 10:24 pm

I guess I haven't gotten far enough to be as scared as people here seem to be. But I'll definitely agree that being in the dark.. all the time.. every time.. is really, really fooking annoying. If I wanted to go blind, I'd just masterbate as much as sparty.

noel - Manhunt seemed cool, but I couldn't get over the funky camera angles on the uh.. XBOX I think it was that I played it on. The Suffering was a much better game imho.