[olivierestsage]

It will be interesting to see how this game's legacy will ultimately be viewed. For the first decade or so after its release, it got a lot of flak for certain design choices, like the limited access it gives the player to the flashlight, that don't seem like such a big deal anymore.

[spatulon]

Note that they remastered the game in 2012 as "Doom 3: BFG Edition", and that included the ability to use the flashlight while holding weapons.

I think Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal are far more successful as Doom games than Doom 3. Like the original 90s games, they're fast-paced, with wide-open combat areas and hordes of enemies on screen at the same time. The technical choices they made with id Tech 4 meant that a game like that wasn't really possible with the hardware available in 2004.

Maybe they just shouldn't have called it Doom? But its design as a slow-paced horror game, what with all the tedious monster closets, doesn't compare well to Resident Evil 4, which came out only a few months later.

[nailer]

It’s more the genre change from action to horror. Serious Sam felt more like a Doom sequel than Doom 3 did.

[rob74]

Well, if you paid attention, Doom 1 and 2 were "horror" too (the amount of "creatures from hell", mutilated bodies hanging around as decoration, enemies exploding into giblets of bloody meat etc. are pretty sure giveaways), but the technical limitations of the time prevented them from being as scary as Doom 3.

[IMTDb]

"Horror" is more than just the setting, it's mainly about the gameplay. Doom 1, 2 and eternal are more action than horror. You have lots of relatively "weak" ennemies to kill. The blood and gore just intensify that "happy trigger" feeling. Rooms are bigs, allowing you to move freely to avoid projectiles.

Doom 3 on the other hand is different; you very rarely have more than one enemy to beat at a time. That single enemy can absolutely shred you if you are not very careful, you have to consider each engagement carefully. The darkness and blood are tuned to intensify that "fear" feeling. Rooms are very small, limiting your ability to dodge, almost to the point of inducing claustrophobia.

Painkiller was released almost as the same time as Doom and was way more action oriented, even tho it contains its fair share of gore.

[darkwater]

> "Horror" is more than just the setting, it's mainly about the gameplay. Doom 1, 2 and eternal are more action than horror. You have lots of relatively "weak" ennemies to kill. The blood and gore just intensify that "happy trigger" feeling. Rooms are bigs, allowing you to move freely to avoid projectiles.

It might be just me being overly frightening but I clearly remember 14y old me playing Doom at night with my headphones on and begin scared as fuckin hell when something appeared out of nowhere making guttural noises.

[jerf]

If memory serves, Doom is sorta bimodal.

If you know how to strafe, and get to the point that you are habitually doing it almost every second of play, Doom is an action game where you are grossly overpowered compared to your opponents, more or less. To even slow Doom guy down you need tight corridors to cut his maneuverability down and enough enemies to clog him up even so. In open space the only real threat is being plinked away by the undodgeable hit scan weapons; high level play with speedruns involves a lot of managing that and hoping for decent luck. The non-hitscan weapons for them are, to quote a popular Youtuber, super easy, barely an inconvenience, which ironically makes the "weakest" enemies actually the most dangerous in the game in most places.

If you don't know how to strafe, which was very common at the time since we were all new to 3D spaces and even the ones we had used before may not have had a "strafe" option, Doom becomes much more a horror game. As others are saying about how Doom 3 gives you the choice of "seeing" or "shooting", but not both, Doom without strafing gives you the choice of either dodging or shooting, but not both. Shooting becomes a contest of nerves because you're committed for a second or two... to dodge an incoming missile involves turning, then moving. And that move is either "forward", vectoring into the oncoming missile, or backwards, vectoring away but heading away from your field of vision.

I remember both modes now, both playing it back when Doom I was the only release and I played the shareware, and I saw the "strafe" option and had no idea what it was or why I would use it, and playing in later years when strafing was simply part of my 3D "vocabulary" and I did it instinctively. It's almost two different games.

I suspect even at the time, the developers of Doom weren't used to strafing either, and in a weird way it has contributed to its classic status. If they were it would have been balanced much differently.

The same things that make it a gaming classic that people are still playing to this day are also gross violations of the current state of the art of game design and balance... the reader is invited to conclude from that statement whatever they like.

[int_19h]

Part of it was that keybindings were still in flux at the time. Strafe actually appeared in Wolfenstein 3D already, but the way you did it was by holding Alt while pressing left/right arrow; you used the arrows without Alt to turn around (and using the mouse to turn was very uncommon back then). The original Doom inherited that.

It wasn't really a good setup even in Wolf3D, but it took some time for the gamers to figure that out, and for those findings to percolate as the defaults in newer games. Even Quake (1) didn't have mouse look + WASD enabled by default. I think part of the inertia was that arrow keys were so ingrained as navigation by design (they're arrows!) that abandoning them just didn't make sense.

[laumars]

> I suspect even at the time, the developers of Doom weren't used to strafing either,

I don’t know if that’s fair. Doom had a timer in it and was built to have speed running in mind (even if that term hasn’t yet been coined).

[rob74]

Yeah, especially the first time when one of those near-invisible bitey things sneaked up and started gnawing on you, you were in for a pretty good scare...

[laumars]

That was intentional but it’s still a point about atmosphere and not game play.

Doom 3 plays very different to Doom 1&2.

[0x457]

Yes, but it's not that simple. Doom 3 is pretty "horror" compared to any other Doom game. I would put in the same basket as Dead Space games.

Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal gameplay is much closer to Doom 1 and 2. Both are very "push-forward" shooters.

[int_19h]

The later Dooms overdid the platform jumping part. Not that the originals didn't have that, but the trickier jumps were generally only necessary to reach fancier pickups, secrets, and secret levels.

[nailer]

That’s true, it’s more the gameplay shift (jump scares, less enemies on screen at once, no power fantasy) than the aesthetic shift.

[wussboy]

I remember playing around with the Serious Sam level editor. A buddy of mine made a map that was just a small hut in the middle and monster generators scattered over the next hill. Endless mindless hordes of monsters came over that hill and you and your buddies just needed to hold out as long as you could. Pretty amazing for, what, 1999?

[notjustanymike]

Downloading the duct tape mod was practically a requirement.

[pdntspa]

The flashlight mechanic really gave it a nice horror vibe the originals were missing. Like do you want light? Or do you want to kill things? Choose!

[skocznymroczny]

The originals had a lot of horror vibe. It might not seem like it nowadays because players are used to it and there's many mods like Brutal Doom trivializing the content, but original Doom was scary. There was no other game like it at the time, and the growls of the monsters, the flickering lights, rooms getting dark when you grab a key and monster closets opening, body horror elements on walls and decorations. Doom 3 felt actually milder, it just was more annoying with the darkness everywhere.

[pdntspa]

I played the originals back in their day as a wee lad, and while it was scary -- and aaah the old lights-go-out-when-you-grab-the-macguffin trick -- I don't appreciate it in the same way that I did with Doom 3. The latter seemed to take a lot of inspiration from Resident Evil/Alone in the Dark. The original Doom was just lots of cheap traps.

In any case, while I like Doom 3 I am glad the series didn't go in that direction afterwards. When lukewarm Quake 4 came out I was beginning to worry that id had lost its touch... luckily Doom 2016 saw a return to form.

[ovao]

Doom 3’s flashlight also took away one element from the original: a dark room was a place you really didn’t want to enter, but had to in order to progress.

I think it was E1M3 or something that had a large room whose lighting slowly pulsed at about half a hertz. With about 15 demons, that room was fucking unpleasant. In Doom 3, you’d just whip out your flashlight — no biggie.