[QUOTE="ASK_Story"][QUOTE="Teufelhuhn"][QUOTE="cos_vanquish"] It was and still is a great game. But, you can't really compare it to the newer games, because that's just unfair to it. By comparing it to today's AI and gunplay wouldn't be fair, because they have made breakthroughs in how it's developed and by today's hardware standards.
Teufelhuhn
We're not even comparing it to games of today, we're comparing it games that came out in that time period. Half-Life 2 came out a few months later, and FEAR came out a year later. Far Cry came out before Doom3 and still makes the latter look silly in comparison.
Doom isn't silly at all. You have to give a lot of credit to its technology and design. I think Doom 3 had some of the best uses of lighting and uses of shadows and darks in any game.
I was talking about the gameplay, but even in terms of graphics it wouldn't be a stretch. Far Cry managed to have huge outdoor environments in addition to well-detailed interior levels. Doom3 only managed the latter. Even Half-Life 2, which used tech with much more relaxed requirements, often managed to put Doom3 to shame with its superior art direction. Plus I don't personally consider keeping the entire game too dark to see to be a good use of lighting and shadows.
You can't have stark shadows and lighting without darkness,so there's a good reason for the darkness in Doom.
Sure, the flashlight thing is annoying, but I don't see the game played any other way. And one has to understand the cinematography and purpose in how lighting is used. You just don't throw around light and shadows just anywhere. You don't just punch it in a program and say that the lighting is done. It has to be carefully used as a tool to magnify what the game is trying to do with the darkness and shadows.
It also applies to art and film as well, like storyboards and comics for example. Shadows and light used in comics and storyboards has a purpose. It's not just thrown in there for the sake of realism or just because your instructor tells you to cast shadows this way because the sun is on this side. It's much more than that.The shadows tell the story. It's carefully incorporated within the drawing. For example, the art in The Walking Dead graphic novel is horror and has astylistic noir look that is a mixture of Sin City and 100 bullets,where as a book like Alex Ross is super highly detailed with amazing architecture, perfect figure drawings, and photo-realism. But just because The Walking Dead art doesn't havephoto-realistic renditions, doesn't make a Alex Ross book more superior in terms of art direction. My point is that Doom 3 is a different game than Far Cry or Half-Life 2, so it's a unfair comparison. For one thing, Doom takes place in Mars, so unless Id set out to make a Mars planet invasion on the planet's terrain itself, than it'd be a different game and the darkness parts wouldn't factor in.It'd be a red game!
So I think Doom 3 is on par with Half-Life 2's art direction. It's a different beast. One's horror, the other is more of a urban sci-fi setting based on realism and gritty detail. Half-Life 2 is obviously a superior game, but it doesn't shame Doom in art direction, maybe in gameplay. I think for Doom, for what it was trying to acheive, had excellent lighting, atmosphere, and shadows. There were some real cool genuine moments in how these elements were used. It's supposed to be a dark game. So it set out what it wanted to do.
In other words, like carefully crafted uses of shadows and darks in storyboards and comics, Doom had this. Maybe more so than more games because the game was dark,but the whole foundation of Doom's design is around those darks and lights. So in that sense it set out what it was trying to achieve.
And I do agree with most people, in terms of gameplay, it's not a revolution like Half-Life 2, Far Cry, or FEAR's of today. But I'm giving it credit where it's due, and just because one didn't like the game doesn't mean that the design is terrible.
Log in to comment