Gaming Retrospective: What Set Doom 3 (2004) Apart as an Exceptional Game - Episode 1 

So this is what the bionicle narrator does now awesome vid

I LOVELOVELOVE Doom 3! The world building is strong, the atmosphere is strong, the gameplay is unique, and I personally believe that the flashlight is not needed at all in gameplay. I certainly never used it much. And I am a huge fan of John Carmack, whose engine id Tech 4 I consider to be the best he ever made.

As a horror fan, this was a favorite of mine.

A masterpiece on all fronts. The lighting, the sound, the ambience. It was the first doom i finished it is my favourite along side doom 64. I love it so much i bought both version the pc and xbox version and the book "the making of doom 3". These days with hd packs the game truly shines and still looks amazing. Its immersion matched only by a few games. It aged perfectly, better then most of the games that came out in the same year and years after. It has the best plasma gun in a video game ever not to mention how satisfying the bfg is to fire. It was the best selling doom game for 12 years until doom 2016 came out. The barriers it shattered in terms of technical achievments where huge, nothing looked like it i mean the difference between Doom 3 and the games that came out even the year prior is insane. I love it its just perfect

In Doom 3, you are basically playing a normal Human with no special powers, thus there is no "Power fantasy" like in the Doom Reboot and Doom Eternal where you are basically playing a powerful marine so there wasn't any anxiety like in Doom 3

Doom 3 was such an incredible game. The atmosphere and story telling was superb - I loved the PDA audio logs. I hadn't played system shock or any other games featuring audio logs, so it was very new to me. Also - the in game mini-UI when using computer screens or passcode entry was really really novel at the time, and hasn't really been replicated. The lighting and graphics were phenominal for their time.

Excellent video. Compelling narration and pleasing voice is a brilliant combination, it was almost like listening to an audio book, well done. You have my thanks and my sub. Keep up a good work!☺ And to answer your question: Yes, i like Doom 3 very much. Despite some flaws you mentioned in the video, i love the vibe and overall feeling and atmosphere that this game provides. I play doom 3 almost annually. And also enjoying many map packs and mods. "Doom 3: Phobos" is a mod, which is more like an unofficial expansion and it is absolutely brilliant. its final episode is almost finished.

Doom 3 is one of my favorite video games. It's so good with how it does horror that people still make videos about it to this day. By the way, I'm working on a mod for the game now.

Doom 3 is a masterpiece and this is an amazing video, thank you.

The ambience, sound design and detailed texturing was so meticulous designed in this game. The newer dooms are fun but this one was cinematic and an overall unique experience. The best representation of hell I've seen as well, that area was just plain scary.

I think Doom 3 is just a brilliant example of immersion. I remember playing this as a teen and just the intro area is so chock full of lore and details. When I read the report the admissions guy was doing and then he types about you staring over his shoulder reading every word he types had me rolling on the floor. This is one of my favorite horror games

This TV narrator voice adds weird but very interesting vibes to the videos. Keep it up.

What i love and adore about 3 is your not doomguy your not the slayer just a random marine experiencing a demon invasion the small encounters made it feel more tense since you werent fast or a blessed god you were just human. Also for those we dont know there is a mod pack for doom 3 on pc that upgrades the graphics SIGNIFICANTLY and makes it look like a late xbox 360 game it looks ridiculously good.

This is the kinda of video i needed from RU-vid

I never played the earlier doom games and loved this game just the way it was released.

Story and immersion are where Doom 3 outshines all other Dooms. And this is why I enjoy this game so much - I don't just play it, I live it. The sound ambience alone is mind-blowingly good. Ironically, I also was one of those people that didn't initially embrace change. I was quite skeptical of this game at first. But it definitely managed to earn my respect and change my mind over the years, so today I admire it.

This is a very cool idea for a series, analyzing similar games and inspirations. Looking forward to checking these out

i enjoy these love letters to the id game D3 and Q4. When the games originally released, i played them to no end. branding on the box saying to lock my door and turn off the lights was exactly the kind of thing i wanted at the time. and then the D3 theme song performed by Tweaker came on. the rest is history.

Awesome video and great channel. I'm gonna binge your stufd and share it around. I have several communities of people who'd love this. Great naration and voice btw.

I love Doom 3, mainly for its atmosphere, it's portrayal of the Mars Base and the progression in level design and gameplay.

I love your narration and analysis of the game. Instant subscribe.

Thank you so much for these documentary series. Man, it's a pleasure to watch your work! DooM 3 is the best Doom ever created. Has the best sound in the videogame industry! Top notch horror, top notch shooter, the last masterpiece from id software.

Great vid, thank you! Looking forward to watching the next episode.

I remember playing Doom on PC with my cousin, and then Doom 64 on N64 with my dad and brother on Friday nights, and then my dad told me about how they are coming out with Doom 3 (he wasn't really a gamer at all but he liked playing that game with us as kids and I think it was a way for him to connect during that time in our lives to talk about the new Doom game) we rented it from the video store every weekend for at least a month and it's all I did was play that damn game. It captured my imagination like no other game (maybe Ocarina of Time is tied) and no game since then has terrified me as much as Doom 3. Idc what anyone says I'll always love it. When it released it wast he most technologically advanced game engine in history and it revolutionized horror games for a decade after.

Great video, I'll stay tuned for the next ones.

Great video and narration!

Great vid. Really been enjoying your stuff. Good blend of nostalgia and critical examination. And a voice like warm butter. Subscribed

Thanks for mentioning the flash light lol. I think that while it was really dumb to think there werent any torso or head mounted flashlight technology available on mars in fking 2095, that I was willing to suspend my disbelief because it genuinely worked as a mechanic to amplify the horror. I know there was that mod to add a flashlight mount to guns, but that might as well be considered very-easy mode , this game's horror elements rely on sound and lighting moreso than any other element. Great videos, you deserve more subscribers. EDIT: Also, ah, 2004... when I was smol and interacting with that same computer screen that would be in EVERY SINGLE OTHER GAME TO THIS DAY was new and interesting. I am probably at the point where I'd skip them like a heathen if i replayed it now.

Retroactively, I like to theorize that that warrior on those Martian murals is actually the Doom Slayer wrecking Hell's s*** during one of his incursions through the multiple dimensions. This one being the universe of DOOM 3's distant past. Using the Soul Cube to once again put the demons in their place.

Amazing voice and great video. I hope your channel grows, my friend.

doom 3 was what got me into scifi horror alongside Alien. without those two i can’t say i would have fallen as hard i have for the genre.

Awesome game, awesome review, awesome narrator. what a treat! edit: oh wow, a whole series even, god bless :)

Doom 3 was truly ahead of its time but for such a massive game it pretty much got lost in the shuffle as far as critical reception went due to all the hype about the imminent Half-Life 2. Doom 3 deserved *much* better. If only it could have made release six months earlier.

Doom 3 is an amazing Doom game, too bad most people on the internet can't seem to understand it, and just regurgitate what others say about it.

You have the voice of an up and coming David Attenborough

Dead Space series always reminds me of Doom 3.

Great video - looking forward to the next 😄

Keep going

Doom 3 is like a horror fun house.

I remember buying this game on launch day and it was one of the first mainstream PC games that cost $10 more that standard pricing at launch. I didn't even finish it. Enemies would constantly spawn BEHIND you and it was an added chore due to the flashlight mechanic. I finished it many years later after someone modded it so that the flashlight was both wider and always on.

So finally people actually started to see Doom 3 as a good game, after so many years? Cause, I remember how people were hating on it. How they were saying that, this is not the Doom, that Doom was never a horror game and that the gameplay is slow and boring, that kind of stuff. Even one of my friends back in the days, when he saw that I was playing Doom 3, he said to me straight away something like "Why do you play this garbage? Just play Fear or Prey, or any other good game, but not this piece of shit". I don't remember his exact words, cause it was long ago, like back in 2008 or so, but he hated the game. And now, no matter where I look, everyone seems to start saying that Doom 3 is a masterpiece. I wonder, what did changed people's mind? As for me, I always enjoyed Doom 3. I never saw it as a bad game and I never understood, why people are hating on it. Cause, the game looks good, it plays good, it has cool story, it has interesting characters and that kind of stuff, but for some reason people were hating on it. So yeah, I never was on board of the hate train.

I´ve played Doom 3 so often it has become a comfort game for me. Something to relax by, listen to audiologs while exploring its well designed "lived in" levels. Not much of a fan of the BFG rerelease and its lost mission, as the amount of asset reuse is out of hand there, plus the esthetics of the hell level felt more live Clive Barkers Jericho.

Doom 3 is an excellent game and it stands up as unique in the Doom series.

The FPS scene from the original DooM movie is what I think Doom 3's gameplay should have been. Like a Brutal Doom 3.

Always loved this game. And Doom as a more horror focused game just makes sense going by the setting. Not that I don't love the classic games too, but its kind of a shame to boil down this epic horror concept of portal experimentation gone wrong unleashing literal hell on a futuristic humanity to Grrr green man angry, green man kill demons grrr.

Doom 3 is best doom game, i love it, as much acs quake and quake 4

Aside of Pinky the enemy design of doom 3 was good/okay. Pinky just looks way to much like an mutated Bulldog instead of an demon

Not gonna lie, your videos are far, far more entertaining than their subject matter.

there really are no good first person horror action shooters it seems. I just want a game like doom 3 and no matter how hard I look, it seems to just not exist. i hate what 2016 and eternal did to the doom platform so much..

Now DOOM 3 is DOOM not like that strange game called doom eternal what is that even

As someone who saw the potential in Doom-3 and later during several years (on and off) fixed all the blunders, design holes, idiocies and other abhorrent lapses of the game, eventually modding it to near perfection, - i can tell you this much. Doom3 has enough evidence to have been made by two drastically different halves of the team, where one half was working their heart out, painstakingly polishing each and every detail, while the other was most likely just smoking pot or what have you and doing nothing, literally nothing. Worse than that, sometimes even derailing the efforts of the creative and diligent half of the team. When the time came to deliver, the ID "slacksters" have quickly stuffed the development holes with placeholders and other worst-case-scenario "solutions" to create a true disaster. It went down something like this: "Jack, did your department finish the testing and balancing for enemies, resources and weapons?" Jack, half-conscious replies through a stoned haze : "Say whhhaaaa??? Ah, fuck you....Ohhh fuck this shit! Just put in more of everything and it'll do..." And thus we have what we have. A game with nonexistent balance, nonexistent player actions sound design, ZERO action-related visual effects (even though the code and materials are there!) And a few more self-goals, the kind which gets you into deadly trouble in some places. However, we can't blame "Jack" for everything. After all, somebody hired him. And that somebody was there all along. The big dogs, - that is who is ultimately at fault. By the time Doom3 was released, a number of successful horror-action games were already on the market, and these titles have tested and showed what works in the genre and what doesn't. What is to be expected and conversely - what will only account to a sheer idiocy. But Carmack & Co wouldn't learn from that. They thought themselves to be gods and would doubtlessly reinvent the wheel and with a particle accelerator attached to it, no less. The reality, however, proved to be the opposite. The conventional wheel remained as it was, and the only thing Carmack managed to spew - was a skewed, collapsing ox-cart-without-an-ox dragging its cube-shaped rotten wheel-likes through the pitch-black mud of its own manure. At the time of the release, Doom3 was in a state of being absolutely irredeemable. Not because of previous Doom games, or even the superlative Quake 2 - but because in comparison to literally every single FPS (or survival-horror) game on the market that wasn't dead on arrival - Doom3 looked and played like something that was conceived in a vacuum where common sense, knowledge and past experience - simply do not exist. A disaster. And yet, it was not all bad. The potential was there. Like i said earlier - one half of the team did work their hearts out. The levels were ultra-gorgeous. Every single one of them - absolutely unique. Massive, ultra-detailed set pieces with huge, intricate mechanisms and hi-tech machinery constantly in motion, combined with some truly fantastic texture-work and detailing - created a tangible world that not only felt alive, but was magnificent to behold. It was wonderfully complimented by enemies that would seamlessly come out of the environment, ripping floor boards and wall panels as they try to ambush the player. Ambient sound design (contrary to the player actions) was like no other. Even the superb Dead Space didn't quite achieve the same effect, while it did get close. Enemies design - top notch. It was never matched (let alone surpassed) ever again, no matter how much ID Software tried. In fact, neither of these aspects was successfully replicated in the recent Doom reboots. So the potential was there. It was not impossible to fix. An average-plus sound engineer with two functioning ears and an understanding of how these things work and what they should be. A reasonable mind that is willing to learn from the greats that came before. And a persevering quality and test control that is not going to just let things slide. That's all it takes. And it's all it took(!) to pull Doom-3 from the murky swamp that it was born in, and into the league of quality games like Dead Space. To achieve the feat impossible for the huge greedy corporation, yet possible for a no-name joe-shmoe somewhere under a rock. A fixed Doom3 does exist. As a mod, for the ID's fancy tech demo a.k.a. Doom3. And as for the flashlight, beside it effectively nullifying and mocking all the hard and amazing work that the graphic artists, animators, designers and 3D-modelers did - it was an idea of a sheer idiocy, completely ignorant of the concept of how to use darkness in horror/horror-action games (let alone gun lights). According to an urban legend, when Carmack was testing Doom3, he had one hand down his pants (guess why). At the end of the "experience", he concluded that "it was good" and thus decided to equivalently amputate one hand to the Doom Marine as well (and half-a-brain apparently too). That's how we allegedly got the one-handed gameplay in D3. Players do not get scared by pitch-black darkness. Instead, they just anticipate being cheap-shot or cheap-killed. The actual thrill comes from completely different factors in (the fixed version of) Doom3. It is the way each enemy encounter develops. It is like speed chess meets speed checkers. You only have a few options that may lead to victory, and because the enemy is much faster, with every next move - those opportunities shrink and dwindle. Every move you make has to be strategically sound, or else. While the protagonist in D3 may move and shoot slower, but the decision-making process is as fast as in any of them crazy-running modern aquarium-shooters. Including Eternal. It is also constant action. There is no downtime looking for toy figurines. Every few steps there are enemies. The encounters are more meaningful and memorable, the enemies have weight and tangibility to them. Nothing like in them click-click-click shooters. Doom3 had a lot of potential. And it was realized, eventually. Just not by ID Software. BTW, great video. Love the movie style Stacy Keach-like narration.

hey what a coincidence, whenever diversity is brought up in the real world it also brings grotesque arrays of beings

I don't even know why I watched the video, I don't really like DOOM³. Don't get me wrong, I think it is a good horror FPS, but it's just not DOOM for me. I wished they would've called it something else, like HELL or something, a new IP. People were already interested in the game for its graphical technology, it would've sold anyway, they didn't need the DOOM name.

Quake 4 is better

AI voices are lame I wish people would stop using this for video narration.

These AI narrorators are starting to get annoying now. I hear them on everyrhing. Learn to speak english. Im sorry but i cant get on board with AI "content crators". And for that im unsubbing.

I loved this doom

Quake 4 was better