Doom 3 in 2023

Do not play Doom 3: BFG Edition unless you want to get its achievements. The BFG Edition is worse in almost every way.

1) It might not be obvious at first glance, especially if you haven't played the original, but the BFG Edition not only increases the amount of ammo from large pickups by 50%, it also increases the amount of pickups in general (not by a large amount, but still noticeable). This makes a game where ammo is already hardly a problem even on Veteran have a very noticeable overabundance of it. You can just spam your guns how much you want without fearing of ever running out even on Veteran. It's ridiculous.

2) Even harder to notice, but the BFG Edition also slightly reduces monster count on some levels. Tbh, the original game sometimes spammed enemies in some sections, so it's not a big deal. Oh, at least one enemy (shotgun Z-Sec) deals less damage than in the original. Idk about other enemies.

3) In RoE, the BFG Edition removes one small area in Hell entirely, and also oversimplifies one other area (sewers). In that sewer area in the original you were meant to traverse it with a limited exygen, but the BFG Edition makes it a normal area and thus removes that part of the challenge.

And of course I have to talk about the flashlight. I know a lot of people hate the original's flashlight mechanic, but the thing is: the levels were designed with it in mind. By making you have flashlight and weapon at the same time, the game removes challenge and/or creepyness from some areas. But it gets worse: BFG Edition also increases brightness of levels (by adding more lights to the maps), which, coupled with the new flashlight mechanic, ironically, makes the game too bright. It's so stupid.

As for The Lost Mission, it just sucks. It's nothing but recycled content (and RoE did quite a bit of recycling itself already). IMO, it has no value whatsoever. It's not even more challenging than the base game or RoE, IIRC.

The only good thing is more modern settings (modern resolutions, etc), and achievements if you're into that. That's it.

I hate the BFG Edition, and I prefer to call it Piece of Shit Edition.

I like Lost Mission, You can have it as a mod for original Doom3 from ModDB. I enjoy combat scenarios, demons placement is good and well balanced, same for gun progression and pickup placement only big con is that maps are made from reused rooms and sections and last boss is reused from D3 too. Hell levels looks great. It is not as good as RoE or Phobos but still worth checking. 

@Li'l devil The Hell level is also completely missing the naked zombies, confirmed when playing it on Xbox Series because I had gotten every Doom game on it and a-then recent playthrough of the original PC version I was able to catch this. I only played the BFG Edition one other time in 2018 on PC which was my reintroduction to D3 and I was wondering why the game seemed worse than my memory of playing the original back in 2010. They also slowed down the chaingun for no damn reason which was something I did catch when playing in 2018 and I remember this bothering me. The BFG Edition has gotta be one of the worst and laziest remaster/re-releases before they started becoming the norm.

BFG Edition reminds me of the recent Ninja Gaiden re-releases on Steam: they changed a lot of shit for no reason. There's a difference between trying to improve on things on a technical level (or implementing things that weren't possible on a technical level when the game was released) and betraying the core vision of the original product. Granted, DOOM 3 is still okay enough even when the BFG Edition compared to the massacre of Ninja Gaiden, but still, I don't appreciate it. I played the BFG Edition first (only played a couple hours of DOOM 3 when it released) when it was released, and then played OG DOOM 3 years later. The original is better, but the experience wasn't the same since I already played the "same" game via BFGE. So it fucked up my first impression of the game.

On 11/4/2023 at 2:25 AM, Lila Feuer said:

The Reznor sounds are also great.

They were, but I remember playing it back in the day and there was some weird bug where the first soldier guy you speak to who just says some random introductory line ends up saying something that sounds like a trailer voice over. It was funny.

Somebody at id really should mod the original gameplay and content into the BFG engine and reissue it for all platforms.  If only there was a 20th anniversary of Doom 3 coming up...

good doom3 mods:

tested 8.1 (need roe)

"eldoom"

classic doom3

the lost mission (not from bfg edition, well in part, is the same campaign, but for the og doom3, need roe also)

On 11/5/2023 at 2:12 AM, Li'l devil said:

Do not play Doom 3: BFG Edition unless you want to get its achievements. The BFG Edition is worse in almost every way.

 

1) It might not be obvious at first glance, especially if you haven't played the original, but the BFG Edition not only increases the amount of ammo from large pickups by 50%, it also increases the amount of pickups in general (not by a large amount, but still noticeable). This makes a game where ammo is already hardly a problem even on Veteran have a very noticeable overabundance of it. You can just spam your guns how much you want without fearing of ever running out even on Veteran. It's ridiculous.

2) Even harder to notice, but the BFG Edition also slightly reduces monster count on some levels. Tbh, the original game sometimes spammed enemies in some sections, so it's not a big deal. Oh, at least one enemy (shotgun Z-Sec) deals less damage than in the original. Idk about other enemies.

3) In RoE, the BFG Edition removes one small area in Hell entirely, and also oversimplifies one other area (sewers). In that sewer area in the original you were meant to traverse it with a limited exygen, but the BFG Edition makes it a normal area and thus removes that part of the challenge.

 

And of course I have to talk about the flashlight. I know a lot of people hate the original's flashlight mechanic, but the thing is: the levels were designed with it in mind. By making you have flashlight and weapon at the same time, the game removes challenge and/or creepyness from some areas. But it gets worse: BFG Edition also increases brightness of levels (by adding more lights to the maps), which, coupled with the new flashlight mechanic, ironically, makes the game too bright. It's so stupid.

 

As for The Lost Mission, it just sucks. It's nothing but recycled content (and RoE did quite a bit of recycling itself already). IMO, it has no value whatsoever. It's not even more challenging than the base game or RoE, IIRC.

 

The only good thing is more modern settings (modern resolutions, etc), and achievements if you're into that. That's it.

 

I hate the BFG Edition, and I prefer to call it Piece of Shit Edition.

Your main argument is that the BFG edition is too easy, but they probably made it that way after they created the hideous monster that many know as the “Doom 3 Shotgun” and pitted you against literal hell with it

Stop memeing Doom 3 shotgun. It's perfectly good considering almost the entirety of the game takes place in very tight corridors. Reducing its spread would make it overpowered.

7 minutes ago, Li'l devil said:

Stop memeing Doom 3 shotgun. It's perfectly good considering almost the entirety of the game takes place in very tight corridors. Reducing its spread would make it overpowered.

To be honest, imma just take the shotguns from the former humans. Theirs is much better than ours.

The unclipped exit on Delta Labs - Level 2a: Union Aerospace Research Division is still impressive to this day.

I didn't know that. There's just random trigger there?

We might want to update this to be "Doom 3 in 2024" - 20 years later... Well, maybe a new thread would be in order.

As someone who has recently played the game after a few years off - it's still worth it, because it's a unique experience in the Doom line of games. It's very distinct from the others and I wished the BFG edition would have embraced its nature and enhanced it, instead it (unsuccessfully) tried to move it towards the others in terms of gameplay.

That being said, I'd recommend playing it using some fixes. You can mod widescreen and modern resolutions easily enough for the original engine, but there's some bugs with EAX. For this I'd recommend using the Dhewm 3 source port. It gets rid of some bugs, does a good job at emulating the EAX effects, and all in all it's hassle free.

A player could also also try the Esential HD Pack . It also works for RoE with is a good bonus, updates the vast majority of textures, effects, fonts as such so that there's little in terms of elements that look out of place.

Apart from this, my current play-though has some changes which are of course personal touches but to me they bring the game closer to that "survival-horror" type atmosphere that it seemed to be going for but didn't quite reach. I modded the health and ammo to be about half of the original Doom 3 values, I upped the health and damage output of some enemies (my Pinky is now a tank that will wreck players in three seconds if they get cornered, ZSecs hurt plenty so cover is needed, all boss fights take longer) to make them slightly tougher and give them a greater chance of hurting.

Regarding the shotgun: I played with the original setup. It's okay, indeed it forces the player to get up and personal which can get scary, but it gets very repetitive after a while. It's only one strategy that works with it. I found that improving the accuracy by reducing the spread of the pellets while also reducing damage output works well. It's more reliable at taking down smaller enemies in two shots maximum, while not being that useful against larger ones. So, it's more dynamic.

Ultimately I do hope there's going to be a proper remake of Doom 3 with modern capabilities in mind. A proper ray traced setup with ultra quality textures, effects, high-poly monsters would be quite something. But then I'd rather they either leave the gameplay alone (so we can mod it all over again) or understand that Doom 3 is its own thing and needs to embrace the elements that make it unique. It would need to be a tense, rather slow moving horror experience where players need to use pretty much all their weapons to survive, be it due to ammo scarcity of the way monster encounters are balanced. I wouldn't want to see a remade Doom 3 where a Doom 2016 or Doom Eternal type game-play is shoehorned in. It won't work.

Doom 3 is the most realistic, if you will, of the Doom games. It takes itself seriously, has some outstanding design when it comes to monsters, weapons and even levels. It just didn't have the guts to go all in. It needs to go all-in, fully embrace what it is and further distinguish itself from everything else that came before or can come after.

One change I made on a recent playthrough was to mod the engine so that the Run key was a toggle; instead of needing to hold it down you just hit it once and you have Always Run on.  I kept the Stamina feature, however.

It completely changed the dynamic of the game, and for the better IMO.  Instead of a slow, deliberately-paced game it was more frantic, but in a stop/start manner.  That was very enjoyable and I might play it again like this.

I remember all the hype and anticipation for Doom 3 back in the day with GamePro and other magazines.

The game has always lived up to the experience with atmosphere and ambience. The sound design is some of the best to this day in a game, as well as the lighting. Carmack was onto something 20 years before the raytracing stuff came out.

I wish the newer Doom games had kept the horror elements and scare-factor of not only D3, but Doom 64 as well. Doom 3 at least feels like a Doom game to me, whereas Doom 2016 and Eternal feel more like Quake reboots than anything else.

On 12/1/2023 at 5:57 AM, Li'l devil said:

Stop memeing Doom 3 shotgun. It's perfectly good considering almost the entirety of the game takes place in very tight corridors. Reducing its spread would make it overpowered.

To this day, I am convinced most of the complains about the shotgun are from the expectation of it being a workhorse like in the original games. It is unfairly criticized for not being the same as the old. It's interesting how much hate it gets, but we're OK with the weapon differences from Quake 1 to 2. 

Close quarters combat or how I learned to love the Doom 3 shotgun; once you stop being scared to get up close and personal with the enemies, the 1 shot kills start piling up. All those Z-Sec zombine marines that love to run up in your face can be taken out with 1 shot.