DOOM 3
FROM THE TWISTED MIND OF TIM WILLITS
no one’s tried doom 3 more times than I have without successfully finishing it. my vanilla copy shows five attempts in the last decade alone, while just as much time was inexplicably spent with bfg in the same period. I’d wanted to provide a comprehensive window into this particular derangement, but upon loading bfg the game said there was an error, refused to elaborate, then took the liberty of solving it by deleting my saves without warning. nevertheless, it’s time to finish what I repeatedly started
despite its lineage, doom 3 often closer resembles a tactical shooter than a traditional doom game in the early hours. doesn’t have a lean function, and it isn’t particularly tactical, but it has that same sluggish room sweep cadence where you’re peeking around doorways and cover, breaking line of sight, constantly checking your six for satanic tangos and charlies, and occasionally switching to your flashlight to see if you’re still in the alpha labs (you are)
there are two types of sequences: the kind with a parade of monster closets, and the kind where it apologizes for the first kind by dumping a trove of health and ammo in your lap. in some ways it beat half-life 2 to the hyper-atomized punch where all events exist without pasts or futures. next to no persistence or permanence occurs from one sting to the next. no sense of longform resource scarcity or planning. none of doom’s anxious mazejumper energy. hardly ever even see two enemies on screen at the same time cos the second one’s always riding your ass
the major culprit responsible is the design being cloistered not only by its geometry, but its direction. that is to say, by the constant presence of the director. what they’re directing.. who knows.. it’s too fucking dark to tell most of the time, but hours with the corkboard and twine trying to crack the case suggests.. some kinda haunted house?
with levels this cramped there’re only so many ways to establish encounters without turning every hallway into a bottleneck, so use of staggered scripting was likely considered a means of circumventing this by having enemies inhabit linear spaces non-linearly, effectively creating space out of time. similarly, being limited to so few enemies on screen at once (both for technical & spatial reasons) likely encouraged the frequency of sucker punches as means to provide even the smallest amount of challenge, leading to the need to account for an unusually high volume of damage being difficult to avoid, the abundance of resources, and so on in a series of elaborate attempts to staunch the bleeding
if anything the ostensible “horror” elements feel like post-hoc justification for the compromised design rather than the other way around, as little here functions as horror should despite the constraints of said design being far better suited for it than a shooter where you carry five hundred plasma rounds, sixty shotgun shells, and thirty rockets at any given time
but when it’s cool it’s cool. it commands a strong enough atmosphere to coast on the whirring of fans, the moaning of dismembered jarheads, and the blips and bloops of martian touchscreens for longer than you’d think. aside from the guns most of it sounds fantastic and looks even better: the stencil shadows, monsters, those little planetary surface jaunts; I even like having to choose between seeing things and shooting them. contrary to how it might come across, this isn’t always an easy game to dislike. put me in a room with duct tape mod truthers long enough and I’m gonna come out saying vanilla’s a stone cold classic
and, really, I do admire the lack of taste or restraint. the prank fuck scripting. the blackest black shadows. the todd macfarlane redesigns and gnarly hellraiser cutscenes. it’s all very obnoxious, but god hates a coward. if this released any other year it would’ve been the most deranged shooter by far; it’s just too bad far cry exists and was made by germans. regardless, it should remain a point of pride for the team that the american shooter would seldom feel this unhinged in the decades that followed
shame then that bfg edition capitulated to both vocal and imagined criticisms in an impossible attempt to have the game conform with the rest of the series. you already know my opinion on the duct tape mod, but making it not only official but mandatory shows a complete lack of spine. reading over tim willits’ interviews from bfg’s marketing blitz gives the impression that the man doesn’t have the nerve to stand up for a single creative decision in his own game. they raised the gamma, added more ammo, increased your movement speed, reduced traps and enemy counts, boosted healing stations, and more or less scrubbed off as much of its dna as they could. I won’t pretend to know whether these choices were brought on by insecurity, pandering, or both, but it reinforces the notion that there’s always been something incidental and apologetic bubbling below the surface. there are probably worse things than a bad game with big ideas being reduced to a bad game with no ideas, but none that would credibly apply to doom 3
one of my main motivations for finally finishing this was getting to seeing its depiction of hell, which everyone told me was sick. and yeah, it’s alright.. for all of one level. 1/27th of the game and two decades later everyone’s still talking about the time they got to take a thirty minute break from lab duty as a treat. but I get it: it looks good, has more traditional “arenas” than much of the rest of the game, and fending off hellknights and mancubi is an oasis compared to the monotony of being ganked on catwalks by imps for the millionth time. still don’t understand why the cacodemon’s so underutilized when it operates in the only space in the maps that can reliably host enemies, the fucking sky, but whatever. beggars can’t be choosers
after this unprecedented home run you’d expect them to quit while they’re ahead and leave on a high note, but no. in an act of inhuman cluelessness, you’re sent back to DELTA LABS 5(!) and treated to seven more levels of can-of-snakes bullshit
terrifying