Although I'm enjoying the game so far, and am exptremely impressed by the graphics, I can't help feeling a little let down by the gameplay at times. I'm not going to complain that it is too old school or simple, but id seem to keep throwing cheap tricks at me to take my health. There are so many instances where something will appear in front of me, whilst at the same time something will appear behind, and just far back enough so I don't notice it teleport in. Although I've grown wise to this trick, it still catches me out on many occasions.

This is a right menace when I get trapped in a corner, as taking damage makes attacking precisely very difficult. Usually, the only times I die are when I get trapped by a couple of enemies ina corner and can't see what's going on. I have been VERY wary of spiders since they first appeared, since getting crowded by them usually means curtains.

Also, although this doesn't seem to be happening (at least as obviously) nearer the end of the game, for the first few levels, just about everything I picked up seemed to trigger at least one imp to appear. This had the effect of me just ignoring a lot of items (particularly armour, since I never seemed to need it anyway.)

Also, I don't know how you guys found the difficulty, but to me it seemed much more difficult at the beginning when I just had the pistol and flashlight and was only facing the weak ass bad guys. Strangley the only bad guys that seem to give me any real trouble are the various marines and the whip and chaingun mutants.

Having said that, I think id have done a fairly good job with health and ammo balance. I'm usually switching between weapons and getting a fair bit of use out of all of them. Also, I'm usually getting low on health, then managing to survive until the next health boost - which I think means the skill level is balanced just right for me.) 

jesus, they piss me off. as soon as i got the rl, i just started blowing them up before they even got close. :\

btw, i finally finished it! what a great game, and a cool ending... plus the cyberdemon looks crazy cool. :) 

necros: whip demons are easy once you relieze they can't adjust to you ducking under their arm whips. just blow them away with the shotgun. 

It appears I am not meant to play this game. Crashes either during or a few seconds/minutes after the intro movie to the first level. Tried windowed mode, it got through the movie, but I didn't keep it windowed as I refuse to play the whole game like that. While I had it windowed I had my little asus probe utility displayed which had my cpu and motherboard temps at 27C and 25C respectively. As far as I know those are good temperatures.

Obligatory e-penis:
asus a7v333 motherboard
athlon 1900 cpu
512mb ram
geforce4 ti4200 128mb

Tried latest nvidia drivers and directx 9.0c. This system is defragged and was flattened/reinstalled just a few weeks ago (before i left to go to florida for a few weeks).

Any suggestions? This really sux :( 

by 'crash' i mean either 'lock up, requiring hitting the reset button' or 'system restarts', the former happening more often than the latter. 

necros: whip demons are easy once you relieze they can't adjust to you ducking under their arm whips. just blow them away with the shotgun.

jesus, i'm an idiot, apparently, because i never realised that through the whole game.
i never duck. x_x 

It was quite sometime before I caught on, so dont feel so bad 

I've also had success sidestepping to the right to avoid their whip things, but if you sidestep to the left you'll still get hit. 

oh yeah, and the chaingunners pissed me off quite a bit as well. fucking hitscan, roar. here's a rocket up your ass too!

i liked all the other monsters though. in particular, the pinky with it's forward curving horns and huge bulk is both cool looking and fun to fight, not to mention the hellknights and mancubi.

i wonder, is there a way to stop the game from disintegrating the corpses right away? i actually really disliked that... i'm guessing this was for speed... although only 'hell' monsters disintegrate-- zombies don't... 

If bodies didn't disintegrate, after a hectic battle with spawning demons you'd have a dozen or so corpses lying around. Not very good for the framerate. Also, demons don't gib - which means that they'll fuck up doors and lifts if their ragdolls get stuck in them.

You can disable the disintegrating by altering monster_base::state_Dead() in scripts/ai_monster_base.script (try if(!resurrect) stopThinking();), if you still want to. 

make a nice squishy sound when you give em the old "Chainsaw down the center of the cranium" move.

Ok, I am probably gonna get a shit storm of comments bitching at me here but... I thought that the levels in the game were poorly done from a gameplay perspective . As an example, getting back to an elevated health station was blocked by a door that wont open again? (With no explanation as to why I might add) Lame.

Another example. A crate falls over, and a doorway is blocked. Mind you, I can get on top of the same crate in the game anywhere else in the game.

Ect ect. Carmak screwed up by NOT getting the most creative mappers. But he did get a bunch of cookie cutter mappers that seem to toe the company line. I am sooo looking forward to seeing (and playing) user made levels (and mod's)

Before you give me a hard time. Compare the "Quake" experience with the "Doom 3" Experience.

IMO Quake had way more "Scare" point's than Doom 3. And Doom 1-2 had way more scare point's than Q1. I really do miss John Romero's levels.

D3 had a bunch of "Shit, an imp teleported in front of me, and then another imp teleported behind me at the same time" moment's. So did Q2. Q2 dumped after less than 2 years.

D3 is nothing more than HL1 with updated graphics. Ok there is the Hell vs. Xen debate, and overall I see it a a split. Both suck as a gameplay variant in some way.

On the plus side, I can see no nice posts coming from this soon. 

Disjointed? 

i jumped way more times playing d3 than q1 or d1/2.

sometimes i'd jump when i'd get hit by a monster i could see. it's just the way the whole screen shakes and that flesh tearing sound.
and the spider things gave me shivers almost every time... must have to do with the slow movement speed and the clicking of their legs.

and the map just before hell where you can use the teleporters was pretty neat: it had you visiting old places or using the teleporters to get to previously locked areas. i didn't think the maps were that bad in regard to gameplay.

i will admit, i wasn't very fond of some choices like having jumping imps right behind a door so that it is nearly impossible to avoid damage except by knowing the monster is there and triggering the door from the side.
also, the whole beginning was kind of annoying because of the same reasons some one else mentioned: nearly every item spawned in a monster so it got very predictable.

still though, i think it's an excellent game. those monsters would feel at home in a wide variety of maps, and now that i've seen them all in action, i want to see (or make) a runic style map even more now. 

tailed off quite a bit near the end, and I found some of it quite boring since it was just the same thing over and over... I mean, open door, enter room/area baddies teleport in front of me, along with one behind... repeat again and again.

The final boss might have looked cool if I had the graphics settings turned up, but I wasn't that impressed. Some of the effects during the final level before the boss were quite nice though - especially the wall that gets swept back. Bloody easy though.

Yes, I found the brick and the pda. 

I just felt that torwards the end it got repetitive. Nothing really suprised me and I just began to run and gun. Which wasn't all that bad, it was nice to start just not caring, felt a little old school. Still the ending left me bored. The end boss wasn't that impressive. I had it on Ultra mode and his textures still appeared extremely washed out.

The brush work was rather cool, like Than mentioned the stones moving back and away from the coffin was a cool effect. But you had already seen that in hell.

The actual gameplay of the boss seemed frantic and unorganized. Maybe it was because I beat him after 2 tries, and not replayed since, I just felt like the whole thing was slapped together. That and the difficulty really was to easy. I found the Guardian to be a much more difficult foe for some reason.

Also, as I think I mentioned before, the ending sequence was a complete let down. Yes there will be a mission back, but to leave the plot completely unfinished like that felt like they were cheating us. I just played the game for how long and all I get is 60 sec? (or short) in game cut scene and that's that?

Still as poor as the ending levels were, I can see where this engine leaves lots of creative space for us to exploit. The movable brushes, lighting, and fairly balanced weapons/monsters should really give us the building blocks to create some truely great experiences. For me personally I'm excited about crafting my own story and telling it through this engine, should be fun.

And the hidden id pda didn't feel like a secret, I stumbled into it and just did what made sense. 

yeah, I stumbled into it too. I was just looking at the blocks and the marker stood out quite clearly.

I wasn't too bothered by the end sequence to be honest. It was just a bit meh.

I thought the guardian was a bit shit. VERY easy. I had WAAAAY more trouble with sarge, although I hadn't noticed the health lying around (but luckily I had the soul cube powered up :)

Generally it was enjoyable, although perhaps a bit of a let down (but as you might guess, I had pretty high expectations.) 

I had no problem with Sarge at all. He was a cool looking baddie and all, but when I reached him I had my sc charged. I shot down the bfg cell, gave him the sc treatment, and then he goes down quicker than inertia in a truck stop. 

I forgot I had the soul cube when it came time for Sarge, figuring it wouldn't work on him anyway... Died a few times from falling in the pit on the side of his room, but otherwise a decent fight. 

Maybe the mapper forgot about the soul cube as well. It's the only excuse for how easy it was. 

pushplay: 'the mapper' is applicible here. the game was designed by a committee and fully storyboarded and designed. they should have seen this and somehow designed a loophole or something so you had to fight the boss. 

isn't applicible 

The cube kills sarge? 

:) 

a good way of fixing the sarge vs soulcube problem would have been to treat sarge the same way the cyberdemon was. it would take multiple hits from the soulcube (say two, one less than the cyberdemon (i think)) so you could use the soulcube to get some damage in, but you'd still need to inflict more damage via normal weapons... 

You could have just used the BFG. I believe that is the only time I used the BFG, maybe besides once or twice. But really, the Sarge was easy.