Doom 3 - 16 Years Later: An LGR Retrospective 

I remember seeing a picture of John Romero signing a Doom3 big box copy, and he wrote “I didn’t make this... John Romero”. Best shit I have ever seen

plot twist: the bloody fingerprint and bodily fluids in the manual are from the previous owner you bought it from

I played Doom 3 so much that that I visually memorized the first 3 levels. If I couldn't sleep, I just imagined hovering around the first two levels when I was a kid x) This game has a special place in my heart, thanks for making this video...

If I recall correctly, Doom 3's "gravity gun" was only a developer tool, not released in the first game because they thought that it would "give too much power to the player." However after Half Life 2 came out and they saw the success of the gravity gun, then that's when it was decided to include it into the Doom 3 expansion.

Man, 2004 was such an incredible year for gaming: Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, GTA: San Andreas, Painkiller, Battlefield Vietnam, UT 2004, Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Halo 2... the list just keeps on going. So many fond memories!

The game that people once upgraded their PCs to play on high settings, now easily playable on the Nintendo Switch. We've come a long way.

This still the only game where enemies like the hell knight felt as scary and intimidating as they were seemingly meant to be. Even imps felt intimidating, the first encounter has similar vibes to the first licker encounter in re 2. Classic atmosphere.

You really described it well. It is simultaneously Doom and not Doom. While it eschews the classic "run and gun" Doom game play for slower "crawl and maul", its atmosphere is really effective as a terror/horror movie/game. It still scares the crap out of me....something the newer (and better) Doom games just don't do at all.

I remember my older brother taking me to marching band practice one night. It was pouring rain, and he'd hooked up his laptop to the car speakers and played Doom 3 while he was waiting for me. I came back with my color guard flags wondering why the heck weird monster sounds were coming from his car... good times.

"I didn't get to play it that way (max settings) until years later." Sounds like us average gamers.

Dead Space and F.E.A.R are also in this genre of spookiness. I’ve also played DOOM 3 a lot. The time you take that elevetaor down to the “Excavation Site” was a great part

Jokes on you LGR, I waited 16 years and now I can play this in my outhouse, the way God intended.

who would've guessed that the Professor Betruger, who is literally called Professor Deceiver in german, would betray you, what a plot twist! love that game

I miss the manuals that came with games. Some had so much character to them, like Mechwarrior 2

I love Doom 3, but the developers really needed a lesson in pacing. Enter a room - Enemies spawn. Get half way across the room - Enemies spawn. Come back through the room - Enemies spawn. Cough - Enemies spawn.

Easily the most underrated Doom installment. I remember playing this gem on the xbox during Easter of 2005.

I remember this and Crysis back in the day when I was in 8th grade were pretty much the hot talk and if your PC could run them you were the coolest kid in school!

"They are coming trough the walls". I had never forgot that.

It's hard to look at Doom 3 screenshots today and explain to people how unbelievably gorgeous it looked at the time. It truly was amazing in the context of its time.

Carmack's reverse is still a good looking lightning technique especially compared to some of other games from 2004

I love how "Dr. Betruger" lends his name from the German word "Betrüger", which means "Traitor". Dr. Traitor^^

This came out 16 years ago? Holy crap, I'm old.

I remember how amazed I was playing doom 3 the day it came out. I was fortunate enough to be able to purchase a 6800 and was just blown away sitting in the dark playing this for about 4 hours straight

Loved this game. The change of pace didn't bother me at all as I loved both horror and fast paced shooters. Doom 3 still has my favourite Pinky design, and also my favourite chain gun, so chunky sounding.

Ah doom 3, the crysis before crysis was crysis.

I was 7 years old when this came out. I remember going to a local pc shop with my dad to buy a new gpu just to play this game. I still have that gpu, the pc that we played on, and the doom 3 disc set + Resurrection of evil

The thing about Doom 3 is that it makes perfect sense to have attempted what it attempted. Doom has ALWAYS been a key (if slightly less-frequently cited) influence on the survival horror genre, so in 2004, trying to retrofit Doom into a more straightforward Survival-Action-Horror framework seemed obvious. I think that if they'd tried to make the story a bit richer, instead of just re-telling the story from the manual of Doom 1, it would be more highly-regarded because, well, Half-Life had already remade the story from the manual of Doom 1. I love Doom 3, I really do, but it feels to me ultimately as though they never quite managed to get the storyline, the technology and the gameplay to be coherent. The game engine is good at stuff the game design never completely leverages off, you've got a story that doesn't really make the most of the game engine, and you've got level design that, for long stretches, seems to just repeat the same tricks over and over. Still great though.

A pistol and a flashlight and you can't use both at the same time. Best start to a game really.

I still remember the screams of my poor old PC when i tried to run this thing back then

16 years later: Doom Eternal - 16 Years Later: An LGR Retrospective

I love doom 3. I know it isn't "Doom" gameplay, but man, what an immersive, beautiful game where you are on the edge of your seat.

Your content is like an enhanced artificial drug embedded in nostalgic crack. It takes you and revives some really old and nice memories of better times. I need more!

Back when doom 3 came out i was in high school. I remember thinking WOW, these graphics are amazing. I had a surround sound speaker system on my PC and when the Imps would try to sneak around it would literally sound like there was something behind you. Great game

I still find it impressive how the looks of this game hold up today even without modding, great (and scary) memories from playing this as a kid

9:04 A PDA makes perfect sense. It's tough and rugged, which you'd want it to be with all the machinery, crevasses, objecys it could be damaged by. It's big and has a bright, making it all the more easier to see if you drop it in the darkness or misplace it somewhere around you. And its big display makes it much easier to navigate with the touchscreen, perfect for all the videos, PDA downloads, emails, audio logs, shipping manifests, and other things critical to Mars City's functioning. And since it's the future, its touchscreen and body could be made from super tough yet light glass-like material and some form of alloy respectively, making it way less bulky than it actually appears to be.

This game scared the piss out of me as a teenager and I loved every minute of it.

I play this game every three to four years. There's just something strangely magical to it.

One thing missing from this review is the sound design. I love that the sound effects are also the background music.

Id tech 4 is rad. Those lighting effects are absolutely insane, they're so over the top and I love it. Games really went so far in the 2000s

This game was one of the first shooters outside of Halo that I played on the original Xbox. I had a friend that was obsessed and bought it on PC too and we modded it.

I went from being a Doom 3 detractor (since my first experience with it was unfortunately the BFG Edition) to absolutely loving it. The stencil shadowing and dynamic lighting on top of the sound design creates a feel to the game that even the most advanced technology today doesn't really scratch, and how you hover your cursor to interact with screens and things rather than just pressing a contextual prompt is a subtle touch but it adds to the immersion. Moreover, I've grown to love the text and audio logs you skim through. Having people talk about playing D&D, or social reunions or how far the game goes to explain the chainsaws on Mars gives Doom 3 a standout dedication to it's world. I loved this retrospective. Being born in 1998 and not being able to afford games as a kid, I kinda missed all of the stuff with physical editions and these boxsets and manuals that really added to the experience. Convenient as digital is, seeing all the stuff you sift through gives me a sense of wonder. Good work, LGR.

This game still looks really acceptable honestly.

This really brings back memories. I built my first PC with an Athlon XP 3000+ and ATI 9800 Pro as well for Doom 3.

The voices match the characters perfectly in this game, it's crazy.

I still remember when me and schoolmates were discussing about this game. Time flies...

Wow, it's been 16 years since Doom 3. I feel extremely old now.

I was 11 when I played this. Got it the day it came out because my dad was a huge Doom fan. Picked it up with him at Circuit City - which in itself is a very dated sentence haha. When I hear gamers tell their nostalgic stories, I'll hear about their "It cant get better than this" moment where the graphics just look so real, it feels like photorealism is the next step up. This game was that moment for me. I just couldn't believe how good it looked, and I thought "this is almost life like" and its funny looking back... it still looks fantastic. But if only I knew how many more steps there would be before we even approached photorealism. But this game is very special to me! Nothing really scared me in the gaming space - even at 11 years old. Except Doom 3. Scared the crap out of me and I loved it. Miss my pops! Whenever I play the newer Wolfenstein or Doom games, I think about how stoked my pops would of been to see how far the bar has been raised. I think he would of really liked the newer games. Doom 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein were the last two we played together. Those memories are priceless to me!

I replayed this about a year ago, and the goddamn spiders still scare the shit out of me. I kept having to reload when one managed to jump me.

One of my most memorable PC upgrades was when my friend who worked at Best Buy let me use his discount to purchase that very same GeForce 6800 Ultra. The first game I tried on it was Doom 3, and it was glorious.

16 years ago... W T F

DooM³ is horribly underrated. Excellent game.

Have you thought of making a Descent Retrospective? It was my favorite series in the 90's when I was a young kid.

I always thought of Doom3 as an interactive action horror film. Playing with headphones and with the lights off really is creepy as.. well, hell. I'll always remember the scene where you look at your reflection in the bathroom mirror, everything goes red, and you see yourself being zombified as the audio gets more and more intense until .. *silence*. And you wonder what happened. And then the door is blown in by monsters attacking you. Such a good creepy moment punctuated by a moment of relief broken with a jump scare.

I'm going to say it, Doom 3 is my favorite Doom game. It is not the best one, it's just my favorite. I miss the Half-Life era of shooters.

hey mate just wanted to say thanks for making this. it really brought back memories. waiting for this game to come out. and then it being really slow and so dark with the flashlight. waves of nostalgia. cheers!

Doom 3 is easily the best Doom game to come out in the 2000's.

It's worth mentioning that Chris Vrenna was a member of Nine Inch Nails, so Trent probably helped put them in contact with one another.

this game was "the forbidden game" that was on the pc when we got it, I was a kid and I wasn't allowed to play it (except when I snuck a play and I was blown away by the intro) Also as of 2 years ago this game with the VR mod absolutely slaps, if you have a headset I highly recommend it as its one of the best and fully fledged vr games out.

I played through Doom3 during a hurricane running my LCD and PC on UPS. I removed the battery and used a car battery to keep going all night with the power off. At the time I was running a lower power use AMD dual Core 45watt CPU and Radin 9800 overclocked with Artic cooler and had NO issues with frame rate. It played so smooth.

15:30 - "like those bad dreams where you're stuck in some invisible sludge while trying in vain to outrun your killer" yeah, yeah sure dude everyone sees that

Maybe I'm stuck in my old man nostolgic ways, but LGR, you are my favorite youtuber because you capture the feeling of growing up during the digital ages of the 90's and the 2000's. Thank you for the effort you put into these videos and capturing my feelings.

I always felt Doom 3 fit with the other games but I was also a teen just getting into horror games, and two years prior I'd gotten my first pc with which I played doom 1 and 2 and they terrified me to the point where I dreaded entering new rooms and areas, and I felt anxious whenever I heard demon noises because it meant that they knew I was here, and they were coming for me and I couldn't hide from them forever, so when I got through an area and the sounds of demons fell silent I let that silence soak in as it meant I could take a few breaths and muster the courage to go further. So yeah it always felt natural to me that Doom 3 was a horror game!

People these days laugh at it but these scared me to know end back when it came out.

LOVED Doom 3. I like the others too but they are more of mindless shooters with only a story slightly better then Serious Sam. Kinda wish they woulda kept a branch of version of the doom series with this.

One thing I respect the hell out of in Doom 3 is how they did screens. God DAMN are they cool to look at and read, both from afar and up close. TV Tropes actually has a point about the PDA design in their Data Pad page: why should it be fancy and full of features when it can be utilitarian, responsive and utterly bombproof? It even looks like a Caterpillar device! For those that, like me and unlike Cliff, ABHOR the unbarreled travesty the game calls a shotgun, here's a fun exercise: 1) when you install the game, open pak000.pk4 with WinRAR or 7zip; 2) go to the shotgun folder under weapons; 3) in the def file, immediately alter that _ridiculous_ 22° cone of fire under "spread" down to 7; 4) in the script file, change the amount of projectiles fired down to 7 pellets like classic shotty; 5) enjoy a *way* more balanced boomstick that feels good to use at close and mid range, with the same effects of the vanilla gun but way more consistent and even able to one-headshot an Imp if you're both lucky and precise, just like classic Doom. (You can also alter how many shells are loaded at a time, but the vanilla 2 is a good compromise, because the animation is very slow - put it down to 1 and you'll spend more time reloading the shotgun than firing it. No bueno.)

Playing late at night, in the dark with headphones on, the toilet mirror bit scared the absolute shit outta me, haha good times.

2004-2005. Was a great time, playing UT2004, Doom 3, Halo, Far Cry, and FEAR. The Pentium 4, 1GB of system RAM and 9600XT brought back so many memories

Great channel man. I can just play you in the background and listen while I am putting something together or coding. I hear the past and talk about it today. Greatness.

I remember being a kid and always being scared of this so I only ever played the Turkey Puncher machine, then again when I got back around to it, I absolutely loved it

My childhood right here. I remember being scared to death playing this lol.

When I first played the demo of D3 the graphics blew. my. mind. It was actually unbelievable how far ahead it was to other games visually. (And then FEAR released) The intro where you walk around the space station, taking the daily life in... absolutely amazing. It blew my mind even more that I could play it on high settings on my Nv 6600GT (what a value card that was)

Seeing DOOM 3 requiring a “monstrous” 500 megabytes of VRAM made me chuckle when I remembered that my current card has 4GB of VRAM and DOOM Eternal on Ultra Nightmare settings requires 6GB

For those wondering "Betruger" means betrayer in german.

This is one of the few games I've re-played from start to finish multiple times. It still looks phenomenal with the right mods and has a unique feel that no other game I've played really matches.

To hear this with EAX is pretty amazing

Doom 3 review that it deserves,Extraordinary job there dude.From Romania with your channel since 2015!!!

I was born in the 80s. I loved this game. The game felt like Total Recall with demons. It was awesome.

I remember back then hearing a lot of people say this game was crap and I would wonder why, the game is amazing! Now, all these years later, I understand its flaws and the origins of such criticism, but it's still a fantastic game in my book. Id has done a great job so far creating Doom games that stand the test of time, and Doom 3 was the one I think was the furthest ahead of time from it's contemporaries in the series. Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal thrive on past glories and fan service to work, while this one thrived for a different experience that was quite uncommon to be pulled off as effectively as it was here

How nostalgic you talk about the magazine and time. It really set me back to those "good old times". 👍😊

I played this for the first time based on this video and it quickly became one of my favorite shooters EVER. Great video LGR, absolutely excellent review. I cannot believe I waited so long to play this game.

Its pretty spooky in VR, recommend to everyone who has a headset and some nostalgia to go check doom3 again.

Doom 3 actually did have tons of secrets like in the original games, it requires to activate it by using some monitors like in MC Underground like theres a LOT of secrets that many players didnt find

Over 19 years later it still looks great, and it was incredible at the time. As a fan of the horror genre in general I loved the atmosphere of Doom 3. I haven't played it in many years, perhaps I should revisit it as the game approaches its 20 year anniversary.

I loved this game! I remember being able to play it back in 2006 when I got my first gaming PC. I can only imagine how amazing this game would look if they were to completely redesign it with modern graphics!

True story: I was so scared while playing Doom 3 that i quit halfway and never looked back. To this day i am happy that i don't have flying flaming skulls chasing me around.

I was 20 when this came out and it still is legit most terrifying experience I had and puts every dedicated horror game to shame. The shadow tech was truly next gen for the time. No game scared me more since then, which sucks, cause I'm a huge horror fan.

For me this is the best Doom. What everyone else gets wrong about the comparison is that the previous ones were really "Arcade games", Doom 3 is really "Doom In Place 3D". Dropping you into the hellish world itself, completely "Inside of it". An awesome playing this one back then with a Core2Duo, 8GB RAM, and the Geforce 8800 GTX.

There is something about the games from that era. It ain't just nostalgia but Doom 3, Half Life 2, Condemned, F.E.A.R. etc still look good to me after all these years.

When this came out I was about to go to college. My parents gave me a fixed amount of money to buy a PC for my studies and told me I can upgrade it as much as I want but I'll have to pay for that myself. Of course I used the opportunity to build an absolute beast with an AMD Radeon X800, the Geforce 6800's direct competition at the time. Had my copy of Doom 3 installed and ready to go by the time the card arrived. :) It was amazing.

7:48 first though hearing the sound "ah EAX", then quickly confirmed by LGR too.

What really bothers me about dying is not that I have to, but that I have to do without all these wonderful games and cats, I will miss that very much. I am very grateful for the hours of fun I had with all of the Doom games. What fun all these years have been! Thanks Id software! Good Vid! =)

Nice video as always, I love the new intro too!

The VR mod for this game is awesome, it compliments the slow pacing and cramped areas of this game so well.

Trying to get my eMachine up to snuff to run this exact game, was what introduced me to PC hardware. It will always hold a special spot in my memory.

Greetings Mister LGR Clint sir. Been watching your content for a couple of years now and absolutely love it. I was sitting here scrolling through your playlists and older stuff and nowhere do I see anything on Quake 4? Would love to see your take on that game. Keep up the good work!👍👍

1:55 I love that these monsters can deform and knock down a foot-thick steel door like it's made of paper, but a hand fun of buckshot can bring them down...

I've been away from this channel for so long, wild to see how much it continues to grow. Good job LGR!

I remember clearly at the time how there was this race between Doom 3 and Half Life 2 on which would release first.

I remember seeing the demo for the first time (probably the Macworld video) and being absolutely blown away. We were going from blocky character blobs in Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 directly to what looked like a CGI movie but was an actual game! Real-time shadows and normal maps were an absolute game changer. I don't remember a bigger, more shocking jump in game graphics technology since then. The more recent jump to raytracing seems quaint compared to how much more advanced this game looked than other games when it came out.

Doom 3 is one of those games that you have to play at night in the dark, with the volume cranked up sky high to become immersed. To this day, Doom 3 has me impressed on how detailed it is and how damn fun is to play today.