[flohofwoe]

I don't know... it's definitely a masterpiece of rendering technology, but IMHO not as a game. Compared to classic Doom or the Quake games, it took too long until the action started, and everything felt so slow and sticky! It was the first Id game I couldn't really get into, and the first I didn't play to the end.

[cpuguy83]

This was the first (only?) game that legit had me jumpy. I remember one part of the game where I was in this room and a monster walked across the window, saw me, then came around and started pounding on the door. Each time the door dented a bit more until it gave out.

I don't think I saw a game before Doom3 that was quite like that.

[int_19h]

The problem is that the whole "all doors close, light turns off, monsters spawn", or the lighter version of "door opens behind, monsters come from it", or sometimes "monsters teleport behind you" was the entirety of the gameplay. The first few times it made me jump, but then it just became boring. Pretty soon you could predict when it'd happen, too.

The other cheap trick was to make half of all maps so dark you need a flashlight, but make it so that you couldn't use a weapon while the flashlight was out. IIRC the very first Doom 3 mod was the one that fixed that, and it was called simply "duct tape".

[flohofwoe]

The classic Alien vs Predator (I think?) had me literally falling out of the chair when a facehugger jumped at me :)

[jasonwatkinspdx]

During the LAN party era my friends and I played the crap out of that series. The engine wasn't as sophisticated as what iD et all were doing, but worked perfectly fine for the gameplay. We'd spend hours trying to one up each other in deathmatch.

Another gem of a game I think a lot of people overlooked that has some similarities is Natural Selection 2. This is a sort of aliens vs space marines FPS and RTS hybrid. It never really blew up but still has a community.

[_carbyau_]

My friends and I only bot bashed. NS2 was much desired but fell flat for us.

[cptnapalm]

Only game I ever played where I remained unmoving in one corner for half an hour and was not bored.

[wmanley]

Something I loved about that game was that stopping didn't make you safe - if you stopped for too long the aliens would come and find you. This lead to a intense experience where you had to keep going - even when terrified - because stopping was even scarier.

[torginus]

I think it might even be argued its rendering techniques either weren't that revolutionary, or turned out to be dead ends.

Don't get me wrong, it's a technical masterpiece, but one of execution rather than innovation.

It's main feature was dynamic lighting and shadows, which it accomplished with dynamic lights, normal maps and stencil shadows.

Dynamic lights and normal maps were nothing new even back then, I remember multiple titles using them, but not this well and not to this extent.

Stencil shadows were kind of unique, they worked by extruding the geometry from the light's perspective, and figuring out what was inside the light's shadow by counting front and back faces.

Unfortunately, since they used geometry, they looked really blocky and sharp, with no smooth edges unlike shadow mapping.

Imo they looked kind of bad, a step down from the beautiful pre-rendered lightmap shadows we enjoyed years before.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yeah, the Doom 3 engine reflects sort of the last echo of the road Carmack hoped graphics cards would go down. But everything went down the other road.

From memory, what Carmack was advocating for in this period was like an updated version of SGIs hardware, fixed function and able to chew through a staggering number of simple triangles per second. Complex renderings would be built up by compositing lots of passes. Stencil shadows reflected that tradeoff. But shadowmaps with an increasing number of tweaks proved much more practical, and design wise no penumbra is indeed a tough one to swallow. And then GeForce came along and pretty much ended any debate on commplex shaders vs lots of simple triangles.

Using stencil shadows today, or their shader described equivalent, might be an interesting aesthetic choice for a horror game though.

[jamesfinlayson]

I think the original Half-Life used stencil shadows - I guess that was the most advanced option available in 1998? Counter-Strike on the other hand rendered a grey circle sprite under players (looked okay enough - approximated the vague shadow you get when under multiple light sources).

[poglet]

Unfortunately the game didn't end up shipping with shadows despite shadows being on the box art screenshots.

[jamesfinlayson]

I think early versions did but it was supposedly removed because shadows were cast through walls in multiplayer (which was unfair). The code is definitely still in the engine, behind a cvar which isn't exposed to players.

[giobox]

It's also a game that arguably was directly limited by its advanced rendering techniques; the number of enemies on screen at any one time rarely exceeds four IIRC, corpses vanish almost immediately to reclaim resources, most environments are quite small with few open or large spaces to explore. Id had to ship something that could actually run on customer computers of the era.

This is in sharp contrast to Half Life 2 released at a similar time, which had far more enemies and NPCs on screen at one time as well as much much larger maps to explore. I think in some ways Half Life 2s visuals have honestly dated better despite the less ambitious technology - the larger and more varied maps its lesser performance requirements permitted help a lot.

[bombcar]

Doom 3 wasn’t the same kind of game as Doom and Quake were. Serious Sam was more on that line - Doom 3 was an entirely different game type even though it had the same lineage.

[scheeseman486]

This is true, but unfortunately the game is a plodding horror linear corridor shooter with bare threads of sloppily integrated immersive sim/System Shock-style elements like NPC logs and safe codes, except all the supporting elements that facilitate player agency are removed.

It looks nice, when you can see what's happening, otherwise it's a collection of good ideas and tech executed badly.

[msikora]

Same for me, it looked nice, but never got into Doom 3. On the other hand the new Doom games, especially Doom Eternal, go back to the roots and are one of the best FPS games out there, at least for single player that is...

[retinaros]

to this day it is for me the only fps that i felt was art. almost like a very good movie. better lit than most of what hollywood produce now. sound design was awesome, it had so much style and atmosphere, and it was really minimalist to an extent that each interaction was important each enemy was a strugle. defintly different from all the other doom games hence why it was never as popular as the others but there was so much depth in its shadows than it reminded me of how great composers use silence in music

https://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/renderer.php at the technicql level there were some cool advances and the game in its production definitly felt like a leap forward that only a few game matched after (i could say mgs 4-5 and death stranding are close ones, final fantasy 15 while very weak story wise had others, but definitly no fps did what doom3 did)

[dvlsg]

I got super annoyed at enemies popping in behind me out of thin air, too. Felt like a cheap way to surprise the player, and it got old really fast.

Doom 3 as a game sure looked cool, though. The flashlight blew my mind back in the day.