I've been playing casually, every few days because I like to get really immersed in the game, hard to do with people in the same room talking away.

What I liked...

-- Blood on walls: floors, screens, bursting out the back of baddies when you load em with shotgun lead. I think the blatant overuse of blood in some areas was just fantastic.

-- Heartbeat sound: With the proper volume & bass, this was just a wonderful method to get the players palms sweaty.

-- Hell Knights, Mancubi, Pinky: BIG SOLID baddass mofo's that can take a beating (that Hellknight that jumps down a floor actually landed on me the first time and as a result the rocket I fired was pointblank)

-- The moment of the attack at the beginning: UNF UNF UNF!!

-- Hallucinations: Also UNF!

-- Large areas were well done, WHY NOT MOOOORE :(

Things I did not like

-- Machine Gun: I loved the gun itself, but the volume on it was alot higher than the other weapons... thus is kind of annoyed me, even tho I enjoy the gun and feel like a marine with it.

-- Spiders (Trites/Ticks whatever): Ok, these things sucked ass, for a few reasons, death animation w/ green splut... yawn. They felt like my progress was being slowed down because you just sort of sit back and wait for them all. I don't think the problem really was in the design as how they were used... and seriously...why so many spiders and no Pinkies!!

-- SoulCube: It got too easy once you get this. Even tho I employed it rarely (usually arch viles) I stuck with shotgun as much as possible right till the end... ran out of ammo several times.

-- 60 seconds in Mars Atmosphere: and the fact that they mention your SUIT has enough air... wtf.. a human can hold their breath longer without a 'suit' (which doesn't even have a helmet so that makes no sense that it would help you with air)I really wish I could of spent just a little more time enjoying the surface atmosphere , it was really well done.



These lists feel short, and there are undoubtedly more things I loved/hated...these just stood out for some reason.


SP MAPPERS MORE PINKIES... can they go up stairs? Or jump down from above... :D

so underused 

Mancubus vs Pinky: Which is the better monster?
Mancubus 

..between both your loved children... 

I think it's assumed you put on a helmet while in the airlocks. Too bad they never showed the animation of the marine putting it on like in the 'alpha' build. 

fists are used twice in this game with HIGH effectiveness: when you pick up that berzerk helmet. even hellknight gibs away after single punch ;) 

The volume of other weapons were a little low in my opinion (probably done that way so it didn't block out ambient and monster sounds). 

Whatever happened to that map? It was pretty decent and I wouldn't mind seeing it again at more than 0.4fps. 

You see bits of the alpha maps in the final release, it's actually quite interesting to see how the maps changed over the years in between 

I was pretty much a blithering retard when I got to that set up at the bottom of the cavern elevator with the hell knights, cacodemons, + revenent. I think I killed probably 5 or 6 hell knights and 7 or 8 cacos while standing directly under the damn revenent before my brain kicked in and I thought "Damn, that's a lot of monsters and I'm about out of ammo and health" and then promptly died.

LOL! I got to 3 hell knights and the same number of Cacos, and then found the Arch Vile....was cool, a great bit of gameplay in a great situation.


Of the latter, the one that damn near made me shit my pants was when you were inspecting some monitor display toward the end of the game with quite a bit of fairly small-print info/buttons on it, and one of those damn spiders came crawling up over the top of it about six inches from your face. Awesome.


I remember that, just as I was pressing one of the b0rked security camera buttons....made me quite wary of pressing the other b0rked button =).

In general, I could have used quite a bit more Cavern-y bits and a bit less Alpha/Delta labs.

Agreed, definitely. Just a bit more of the more varied sections in general.


Also, did this game seem unusually long to anyone else? Not that I'm complaining, just surprised.

Agreed, plenty long enough to me, I liked that, it ended up feeling like a regular sci-fi horror series =).

...

It's really a crying shame that the Pinkies and Mancubi didn't get used more. Yeah, they need more space, so build some bigger spaces, damn it!

Hmmm I don't think the spaces are much of an excuse - there are loads of spaces where they could have been used and indeed might have been scarier. I mean hell at the start of caverns I somehow got whacked by an Arch Vile and two Hell Knights in a pretty average size room...

...

Shambler briefly mentioned this, but it was one of my favourite parts of the game. I LOVED the security bots. The section where you are following one along in relative darkness and it as a flashlight. The two of you are fighting side by side, protecting each others backs. I was sad when the little guy stopped and went to sleep :( Even though they were only robots, it was a nice change to feeling so alone and isolated all the damn time.

Yes, pure class! Was great to be fighting along side something....and the little critters were well cool, their animations and stuff, and they way they kept coming back to find you.


The end of the game became too easy because almost every time I came to a big monster, I had the soulcube ready to do some damage.

Hmmmm, I didn't have that problem really, I really liked the gameplay at the end, with the beefier monsters. Sometimes I had the SC ready but often I'd used it to scrounge some health off something, or forget to switch to it or something... 

Was very short imo, I beat it over the weekend. It was fun, it was great, but defintely not long enough. I'll just have to wait for the expansion I suppose. 

On my second playthrough I got out the flashlight and started abusing one of the cameras. After a few hits I managed to knock it down. Later I got to the security room and when I selected the associated camera it had really moved with the model. Except the portal was a few units below the model and so was actually in the floor. VISing no long applied of course and frame rate took a hit until I changed to another camera. 

very short

Have you been giving yourself a crack enema AGAIN?? WTF are you talking about, very short my arse, it's the longest FPS game I've played since, I dunno HL probably. I can't see how you could possibly make it short given how many places you have to explore....FFS the only other comments I've seen about the lengths are that it is LONG. You must be a freak - well, okay, I could have completed it in a weekend too if I'd played from like 10 - midnight both days...

Then again maybe you ARE a freak and your eyes are supernaturally adjusted to the dark as evidenced in your maps and you can see through time and space to progress ultra-rapidly or something... 

Productive and useful, as always. No, I played it about 3-5 hours per day, not 14 hours as you suggest (at least I assume you mean 10:00 AM to 12:00 AM), starting on Friday and finishing on Sunday. PCGamer (USA version) said the same thing about it being short if I recall. Yes, I played on Veteran, and yes I explored as well. Maybe it's just because you and I have different ideals of what's long and short (that's a penis joke about you, Shambler, in case you didn't get the subtlety.)

But in any case, most games in general seem to be short to me. Its as if right when it begins to be interesting the game ends. There are some games that I think had a good length; Silent Hill 3, for example, but I won't go into that.

In short, pun intended, the game just didn't leave me satisfied and I thought there would be more game.

And yes, my eyes ARE adjusted to the dark. 

Is anywhere from 9-15 hours...That sounds about right for D3. Any rate, that's the longest SP story-driven FPS I've played in a while either. I think I got about 12 hours in it.

Something that I think we're over-looking is that the story and environment, and overall 'hook' of the game, was good enough to keep us playing until the end. I know there have been other SP FPS offerings that lasted longer, but to be honest, I couldn't have been arsed to sit through the last half. Something about the 15th Egyptian locale I've been through, I just got sick of it and lost interest. 

Well I thought it was pretty long, well at least not to short, but hey, I wouldn't have minded if it was longer. At least it was longer than Unreal Poo, I mean Unreal 2, that was about 6 hours, and rancid crap from start to finnish. (I only finnished UPoo for the sake of completion) 

ZWiffle, you are bonkers. Please, the next time you play something that has demo-recording ability (Doom3 / Quake custom map, for example), could you record a demo of yourself doing so - I'd be interested to see how you manage to play so fast. I'm guessing it's being very skilled, but even so just progressing through new levels surely takes time.


Wildsnoke, I agree with the last point, definitely kept me hooked the whole way - which was how I was feeling it was both LONG but still interesting. 

I will do that with Quake 4, which is supposed to come out pretty soon from what I hear. PCGamer has 10 page preview next issue, so that should be cool. 

WTF happened to the night vision goggles? Doom 3 is practically the darkest game I've ever played and all we got was a poxy torch. 

...just wanna say, if it wasn't obvious already, I thought DOOM3 was great. Really immersive, really gave the feel of being in an isolated and now-rather-fucked-up outpost, good gfx, decent gameplay, great monsters, just a good feel overall.

It's been quite exciting playing it now, when all the hype and stuff is still around =).

w3rd. 

(I originally intended to post this in the D3 DM thread, but thought this was off-topic to that discussion, so I posted it here instead.)

Maj: What about Quake 2 did I forget?

Nonentity: I didn't mean that my personal preference of gameplay should be the end-all decision of what to make; I merely wanted to make it clear that SP should be a larger part of the D3 mapping community than DM because of the focus of D3. By all means, make as many DM maps as you want, or exclusively DM as far as I care.

But, the focus of D3 was SP and as far as I'm concerned I will play nothing but SP, simply because it's the intention behind the design and the effort of the design was concentrated almost in this area exclusively. To waste (guestimating) 90% of the effort of id for generic DM seems ... Well, to put in different terms: To utilize 90% of id's material and design seems far more practical. 

That Q2 was intended for single player too, with the multiplayer pretty much an afterthought. So extrapolating your comment, all those Q2 maps are "useless". 

No, not really. Q2 was intended for Single Player, but not nearly as much as Doom3 was. Q2SP was just an attempt to make-up the poor Quake single player that many fans griped about. In Q2, I'd guesstimate about 65-70% was made for SP, possibly less. Quake was obviously built with a balanced, fast DM in mind, with some cool monsters thrown in to make it SP. Q2, well, it also has a balanced DM in mind, but with a little more thought added to the SP. 

I was pretty sure q1 was built sp first and then MP. 

I'm pretty sure it's the reverse. qtest shipped with dm1-3 in almost final states what... 7 months before retail? 

I read in an interview w/ someone at id that Quake 1 was who-could-make-the-best-DM-map, then strung along with an improvised story.