Games are still relatively young and sound is hardly something that has been on the foreground of gamer's or developer's minds. Also if you consider that less than 10 years ago games were using 22khz .wav files and each level only had 3 to 8 ambient sounds--well, it's no wonder sounds in games are still pretty basic and rely on sensationalistic methods of appealing to the player (e.g. heavy bass). Moreover, I suspect that most developers still haven't begun to consider it as one of the better ways of communicating with the player (anyone remember Carmack swooning over how many ways they graphically communicated feedback to the player in Q3?) 

I remember Carmack mentioning a few years back though that sound is the only "dimension" games can be reasonably close to reality nowadays - graphics and controls are so basic still.

Someone mentioned the Trent Reznor-made d3 sounds that weren't put into the game in the end. If you guys didn't know, there was this pak/zip lying somewhere in the internet, I forget where and what was the licence for their use. 

'Reznor' pack sounded like arse too. Don't bother. 

pretty much given the shaft in most games as for quality/filesize. Especially when you bring in the console factor, I had an audio teacher explain to me the PSX games he worked on they were given only approx 1mb of space for all the games sound. If anyone in gamedev here can deny or confirm this that'd be swell. 

well, it's not so much that they are low quality or lacking in character, just that they sound odd and far off.

also, some of the wimpier hiss-ish explosions sound like they have mp3 compression on them... �_� but since they are in ogg format, i can only guess that that was intentional... 

...don't know about compression, but according to Sound Forge some of those .oggs have been clipped senseless. 

<speculation>might be true for sound effects per level/load</speculation> 

to compensate for average pc speakers that lacking his and lows and have messy mids 

...I finally got around to playing Doom3 over Easter break (yes, I've been playing with the sounds for a lot longer).

General Impressions

Nothing's new under the sun, but I did in several instances have "This is very Zer" or "This is very Insomnia" etc, moments. The obvious one was entering Hell and thinking "This is very Spawn".

Id went for immersive horror and by damn they achieved it. I pooped my pants twice, and my heart rate jumped on numerous occasions.

Good Things

1. The absence of both Beta and Gamma Labs (though I'm sure they'll pop up in either mission packs or addon levels - wherein they will hopefully be constructed using corridoors that are wide enough for two people to pass in and where offices aren't all the size of small broom closets).

2. As already mentioned, the soundscape is excellent.

3. Hell (though far to short, except for the excrutiatingly tedious combat with the guardian) was awesome.

4. The transition from new tech to older tech (square corners, no chrome, larger clunkier versions of the same things) in the older section of the complex was very well executed.

5. Starting the generator.

6. Incorporating concepts from the endings of Doom & Doom2 into this ending was a nice touch.

Favourites

Scheme - the first pump section. Approaching steam punk. Yum!

Demon - Mancubis

Monster Model - end boss obviously

Non-monster Model - the RV

Weapon - Shotty

Moment - realising you are standing between its legs. Actually the entry sequence to that bit is a hoot. Our man just nonchalantly steps aside as quarter ton blocks of stone tumble inward. I guess he's pretty cocky by this stage :)

Monster Motion - the Hell Knights kick you when they get close. r4Wk!

Kill - nailing an Imp mid jump and seeing it rotate and flop on it's back before disintergrating.

Crap Things

1. As already mentioned (so I won't drone on), most of the early gameplay. One moment that stands out was being lured into a short dead end duct to grab a weapon, ammo and health only to have three Imps take it in turns to stand at the open end of the duct and hurl plasma balls at me. Just fucking stupid! The gameplay did improve once the designers started giving the player room to move.

2. None of the weapons have stopping power. I get scratched by a Cherub and can't see for three days yet some Imps walk through the first rocket as if nothing has happened.

3. Speaking of the rocket launcher. It's a fucking rocket launcher. A direct hit packs the same explosive punch whether it occurs twenty metres away or forty metres away. Unless you're playing Doom3 wherein RL damage is apparently distance relative. I just stopped using it after a while.

Anyhoo, I'm now tempted to go back and see what happens if I don't call the marines in. This decision was built up to be of some importance, so I assume there's a whole different set of consequences.

Then I'll go map :P 

There are no consequences of choosing either to call in or not calling in the "fleet"...

AFAIK...

Of course, since you now know that Swann is the good guy and Sarge is the bad guy, you apparently made the wrong choice the first time around (but so did I) :P 

Unless you're playing Doom3 wherein RL damage is apparently distance relative.

Having been through the Doom source and guts a fair deal I can say you completely imagined this. 

Tef, pity there's no variation. Seemed like an obvious point to split the plot development.

Lun, hehee... I did say "apparently". Maybe I'm just a worse long shot than I thought. Regardless, except for the shotty at close range... the weps seemed to lack stopping power. 

i wish the cyberdemon was defeatable via normal weapons...
is there a way to h4x0r that? 

It's pretty easy, too. Open his .def file and set "finalBoss" to 0 - that makes him vulnerable again.

I just tested it and it works, but there's a problem. They never sorted out a normal monster death for him since he only dies cinematically. He ragdoll-dies when you kill him, which looks really weightless and fake, and his AF doesn't even look like it's finished. There's no death sound that plays either, and his body simply vanishes after it comes to rest.

All of that's fixable too, of course. 

I've played it. I've loved it.

What do you think, little man? 

I think I love you, czg. I think I love you. 

Too short. Vulgars look rubbish - like an Alien(TM) sprayed white with a joke-shop skull mask for a head. New/old-style lost souls have featureless grey surfaces with little apparent normalmap detail. Grabber a poor cousin to the gravity gun. Terrible script. Emails from scientists who have doctorates are littered with spelling errors. Very few PDAs have audio logs, no ingame videos I can recall, very few collectable ones which are all a bit half-assed compared to the ones in the original game. No chainsaw! Not enough variation from the original in the environments. Utterly flaccid final boss and ending. Wholesale copying of chunks of levels from the original game. Lead character looks plain wierd, main supporting character is a ginger[1]

On the plus side, the first artifact power is great (but the other two, while potent, are dull), slowing time and walking up to a stupid Vulgar with a double-barrelled shotgun is satisfying.

To be honest, it lacked polish and felt like playing a fairly good mod rather than an Official Licensed Product.

It comes on one single CD. One CD. That should give you an idea of how much content you're getting. Unless the CTF is absolutely the bestest CTF ever made for any game ever, I feel a bit ripped off...




[1] Sorry, I used to read Viz and I couldn't help it :) 

Vulgars look rubbish - like an Alien(TM) sprayed white with a joke-shop skull mask for a head.

I'm not sure that is any different from the existing Doom 3 monsters. 

In short I loved it. Here's a quick review:

New weapons - totally awesome, in fact now I don't think I could face playing the original Doom3 without my trusty Grabber and DBS. Both these weapons were spectacularly well done, and the Grabber especially added a whole new dimension to the combat.

The Artifact was cool - but I feel the same way about it as I do the Soul Cube - it justs feels a bit cheap and "cheaty". I'd rather do all my combat in the traditional way, like a real man - but this is a criticism that can be levelled at the original doom3 too.

New monsters - well, they looked awesome as always (they're still Kenneth Scott models, y'know) Vulgars were surprisingly hard to take down due to their skinny build - they had to basically be humping my leg before I could feed them the buckshot satisfactorily (although the DBS went some way towards alleviating that problem). I liked the way they teleported in with a blueish effect - that gave you a good warning.

The Bruisers were absolute bastards though, and I always ended up Artifacting their arses before I could really get an idea of what they could do.

Forgotten (Lost Souls) would have been pissy and annoying (like the original versions) were it not for the Grabber - that almost made fighting the little buggers fun! Same goes for the cherubs - the most annoying monsters in the game can now be dealt with in a rather amusing fashion. Shallow - I've no idea what you're on about with the Forgotten's skin - maybe you're playing it on a low detail setting or something - they looked great to me, much better than the original tortured female face design anyway.

Bosses - The Hunters were all extraordinarily well done and awesome to fight. The Betruger boss was not so fun, but I guess being the final boss he's supposed to be a bit of git.

Level design was spankingly good, exceeding the quality of the original game in many places - the various sewer and outdoor sections were particularly fun (and the envirosuit rocked bigtime). I felt the weakest levels (or rather the least fun) were the final two - Delta and Hell. The uber-fucked Delta level was just dark and annoying to play (like in the original game :P), whilst Hell was just bland, and offered nothing new over the glimpse of it we saw in the original. Oh, well at least the game up to that point was golden.

I really liked that there was less of an emphasis on cheap scares and monster closets in this XP. There were still some cheap moments (after all it can't stray too far from Doom 3 can it?) but overall, I found the gameplay to be fun rather than overly tense.

Cutscenes/Story/Presentation/Blah - the cutscenes were really nice, and I think I prefer this Doomguy to the original one, he just looks grittier. The animation/mocap in the cinematics was exceptional and the intro to the game was amazing. PDAs seemed just as abundant as the original, but they seemed to be mainly used for storage locker codes and security clearance, not loads of story stuff (which makes sense, as the story was pretty much told in Doom3).

Overall, I think this is a more-than-worthy follow up to Doom 3, correcting most of the gameplay criticisms I had with the original, adding some indespensible weapons to the arsenal, and making some devilishly good additions to the bestiary. 

The hunters/final boss:
Hunter #1 was kinda stupid, like playing pong.
Hunter #2 was awesome! Fuck yeah!
Hunter #3 kind sucked because I had no idea how to make him go into charge mode. I left that fight with 6 health!
Final boss was pure rockage. The way bosses used to be made. Attack patterns, attack modes, voulnerable periods, pull-trick-to-not-die periods. He totally rocked. The actual ending was suck tho.

I agree that delta labs was teh s4wk.
I do not agree that hell was teh s4wk. (Although, the 9 BoH's + 500 Mancubii arena was kinda hard if you didn't have a full stock of souls when you went in.) 

Kinn, are you being sarcastic? Honestly, are you?

That's not a review, that's... that's marketing. 

I almost had my credit card out ready to order the expansion after reading your review! ;)

not loads of story stuff (which makes sense, as the story was pretty much told in Doom3).

You can ALWAYS expand a story to encompass new material, unless your name is Chris Carter. 

Mulder and Scully investigate a PICK ONE:
man-eating aberration of nature
alien abduction
government cover-up
mulder's sister Samantha who we swear is the real Samantha in this episode and not more alien clone bullshit this time I mean really 

were some moments where they instead of giving you a cheap scare tactic, they would use a monster (usually a crawling vulgar) to lure your attention away... leaving time for another to get close to you without notice, or even just a zombie... if you're not paying attention WHACK... and on nightmare thats life you can't afford to lose most of the time. One more memorable time was watching a vulgar climb up a diagonal pipe to the left of a hallway, so you kind of keep your attention on the left hand side, then another jumps out from the right, it was good because both are directly in front of you, but it still manages to catch the player off guard... i really salute these kinds of things instead of the tired old, grab item teleport monster in. 

Any mappers on the credits whose names we may recognize?