I have a few minutes at lunch so:

It seems to me that many of the people in this thread (including Shambler and Lun) aren't really disagreeing so much on how the game plays, but are simply disagreeing on whether they like it or not.

Lun, It seems to me (and I know you'll correct me if I'm wrong), that the whole concept of "Sorry, you're going to take damage (to at least some extent) no matter what you do." really seems fundamentally wrong to you, and that there should *always* be some way for the skilled/intelligent player to avoid damage.

In playing the game, I get the impression that there are particular spots where the designers said, "Okay, time to beat on the player a bit right here. They're going to be bloody and battered after this, so we'll throw in some health and armor in the next room."

Expect for the occasional bit of out-and-out prison rape where you are quite likely to end up dead--which I've only hit two or three times now (currently in Delta Labs)--I don't really mind inevitable damage. But. It is a very different game mechanic than many games I have played, and it's something I had to get used to. And I can really understand why some folks might simply just hate it. In a way, it's designed so there's no way to "win" (i.e. take no damage), and it makes no attempt to disguise it.

I haven't really found the game to be super difficult, but I'm certainly getting slapped around a lot more by monsters than in most games I've played. <--Those are two very distinct things. 

revenants are very easy to kill, even if you were in an large, empty room.

as the missiles approach, backbedal, say 64 units, the sprint forward, towards the missiles, and sidestep to either side (about 128 units). this way, the missiles don't have time to turn and hit you like they do if you simply sprint to the side -- same as in doom2.

they'll circle around back of you and usually hit the back wall or somesuch. 

play FPSs waaay too much dude O_O 

i remember making a doom2 map which was one huge open area, and doing that trick to see how many revenant missiles i could get following me. :) 

You win the thread. Have a cookie.

Quake encourages me to take my licks. If I come out of a fight and the quake dude's face at the bottom is grim and bloody, I'd sooner keep playing than reload because I know even without health I can get through the next bout if I just straighten my socks and pour on the effort. Doom3 I've gotta do everything right, because I can't leave a cushy margin. Thus, too much F9. I think Frib feels the same way.


I'm still going to have damage roll in Byzantine though. :P And if I do put a monster behind you there's gonna be so much god damned noise it'll vibrate your desk beneath your mouse and turn you around anyway.

Oh, and miles of crates. 

I mean, pjw. But, necros, I guess your posts were reasonable as well. 

thanks, i guess. :P 

Doom3 I've gotta do everything right, because I can't leave a cushy margin.

That's what I mean about options. The first time I wrote about it too :P 

I remember back in the hayday of CD Rom based games, there was one title that was literally a sequenced movie which you simply pressed buttons to go forward and you had no game based choices.

Now Doom3 was no where near that bad (and 'bad' isn't a word to associate with Doom3 evilness ('goodness', nevah!) either) but it is the most restricted FPS in terms of choices that I have ever played. I understand the argument that they did this for the purpose of emmersion, but look at System Shock 2; emersive and scary as hell, but full of options for the player to explore.

Lunaran's argument about the monsters boils down to the restrictions imposed in the fight scenerios. The AI can use some improvement so that it is flexible and less exploitable, but allows the player to figure out his own approach. 

The shotgun has enough of a spread that it's almost uselessly weak after a very short distance. Good luck hitting it enough to stop it before it gets to you.

For me the shotgun was a huge part of the game. Dancing around and getting into just the right range is my default method. 

shotgun became a staple midway for me. i was using the machinegun quite a bit, but was always short on ammo, and cells were becoming a problem too. then i noticed i had 140 shells. hehe. ;) perfect for imps, pinkies, revenants and mancubi. sg was ok for lostsouls too, but sometimes i'd miss and they'd hit me, then M.O.N. and so on... 

PJW - w3rd. Good points man.

Scampie - well thanks for proving my point further. BTW, in the general spirit of the game I have tended to avoid approaching any 12' high brick-shit-house demonic plasma-spewing badasses with just melee weapons =).

Necros - aye, I managed to dodge a rocket that way, by running towards it. Pretty damn cool. 

Okay, now that that's settled, here's something else we can bitch about. :D

look at System Shock 2; emersive and scary as hell, but full of options for the player to explore.

I thought Doom3 was pretty disappointing in that category as well. The PDA's, emails, and audio logs could have done so much to add to the experience, but all they wound up being was joke spam, guys worried about scary voices, and the code for a nearby supply locker.

They had this awesome vehicle for relaying information to the player and hardly used it at all. Workers could have made little notes to themselves to remember where they left certain keys or necessary inventory doodads, made reports about repairs/malfunctions in machinery that the player would need to be aware of to get through/past them, all sorts of stuff. What little story was given across with the PDAs was obvious and had no consequence to the game anyway.

Aside from opening lockers and doors, the PDAs are basically non-essential. They could have done so much. :( 

I think that was the whole point. Not everyone wants to have to read through text to play an fps game and I don't blame them. I liked the fact that they fleshed out the world and rewarded the player for caring without forcing all kinds of back story on you. 

With both points of view. Although the spam email and reports of hearing voices were cool. 

But it is kind of annoying to have to listen to a whole minute long audio log 2 or three times because you miss/forgot the keycode and its mentioned only during the last few seconds. That only happened maybe two times though.

shotgun became a staple midway for me. i was using the machinegun quite a bit, but was always short on ammo, and cells were becoming a problem too. then i noticed i had 140 shells. hehe. ;)

Seemed like I've had to use the shotgun all the friggin time, mostly from lack of other ammo, particularly chaingun ammo seemed very hard to come by (I'm about 2/3rds into the game). I don't think I've had any less than 225 shotgun shells. It's seriously ridiculous.

Plasma gun does rule though. I really love how the ammo is some sort of glowing jar you shove into the back of the rifle, and makes that little humm when its reloaded. 

Because MG ammo was so damned hard to come by.

Don't feel bad Ray...I don't think there's enough Chaingun ammo in the entire game for you to ever get a full load, even if you don't fire the gun once. 

Mainly SG (due to ludicrous amounts of ammo), with MG when ammo was available (there's quite a bit. it's usually with the health, under the stairs. yes, there. you missed some) and PG when things Just Needed To Die. CG wasn't that useful - it'd be great for hosing down roomfuls of monsters; pity there weren't any. RL, of course, was dead handy vs chaingunners, and anything more than four feet away. Pistol was surprisingly useful against Lost Souls, Trites, and zombies.

Ducking vs tentacle commandos works with one of their attacks, but they have another where they jump into the air and whip, and their tentacle drops below crouch height when it comes back. Also, the sight of corpses with bloody shotgun wounds to their groins is slightly disturbing. 

I played on veteran and it was rediculously easy. Most of the guns were maxed out on ammo, so I had to leave clips, shells, and cells laying about at times. After hell you are also almost swimming in chaingun belts... And what's with the fucking overload of armor. I was rarely under 80 armor since on veteran skill the protective factor is only 0.2.

And after getting the soulcube it got just silly. You never were in a real risk of dying, unless something dealt you close to 100 damage at one go. Don't get me wrong here tho, I loved the game, good running & gunning, but it could have been more challenging. 

the thing with the soul cube was that you knew you could always take out 1 very powerful monster, so it reduced even hellknights to nothing. after the introduction of the cube, they should have started to really throw the powerful monsters at the player, so that one would always be taken out by the cube, but the rest would have to be dispatched as normal. 

I cubed imps for kicks. Hellknights are funnier to shotty-dance to death. :) 

yeah, imps don't give much health though, so it's why i generally restricted my cubage to stronger monsters. 

I always figured the idea was to scare veteran players of FPS's. Usually in games when they give you lots of armour suddenly, it means that you're in for a tough fight fairly soon. The more subtle scare factor comes from having plenty of armour, but low health. You can start to worry that you're missing obvious caches of health and only finding the armour ones, so you'll be too weak to deal with the upcoming combats. Well, that was my rational for the armour, it certainly wasn't needed for survival... 

i always feel nervous when i'm low on armour. in fact, i got so used to have 80+ that when it was dropping below 60, i'd because very cautious while playing. infact, half of the time it was 100+...

maybe i just found a lot of the armour secrets? 

There just is a _lot_ of armors in the game.