Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

Doom 3: The Review

Ars reviews Doom 3, and as it turns out it's one helluva ride. Too bad Ars …

A History of Things to Come

The original Doom was the first game to really mess me up. You can talk about what Doom did for computer gaming, or for putting shareware on the map, or for kicking open the door for better game engine technologies or for FPS games in general, but who cares? When I played Doom I, I was a kid with a computer in a dark room, fighting my way through Hell. As I played, I knew I was seeing something new, something a lot different than any other game I had played before. Not only was it scary, fast, and good-looking, but it felt dangerous. In fact, it felt like a game I had better hide from my parents.

After the success of the first Doom, Carmack and Co. spent the following years making the Quake series, and creating the engines and ideas that fueled a whole horde of first person shooters from more companies than I can name. I played the hell out of Quake 3, and I still get a kick out of Quake 2 on occasion, but nothing had that spark that Doom had. I'm a single player gamer at heart, and even now I can go back to the Doom games and enjoy the level design, enemy placement, music and ambience. For its time it was genius, and in our time it has held up amazingly well.

Developer: iD Software
Publisher: Activision
MSRP: US$39.99 ? Shop for this title
Minimum system requirements: Windows 98SE/XP, 1.5 GHz P4 or equivalent, 384MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce3 or ATI 9800, 2GB hard drive space.

Don't believe me? Dig up your floppies. See if the "click-click!" sound that the shotgun gives off when it's cocked doesn't still do it for you. I'll wait. There was no shotgun before Doom. Doom invented and perfected one of the best weapons in gaming history, and in my eyes, the Doom shotgun is the best boomstick in a videogame EVER. Is it possible to improve on perfection?

I personally wouldn't have thought so, but back in 2002 id software announced they were going to try. After an internal battle that bitterly divided the company, Carmack announced that id had decided to make a third Doom game. And now id software has, after years of development and rumor, unleashed the new Doom upon us: Doom III.

Everyone is wondering if their system can handle the new engine, or if the game has that same magic that the original had. I bought Doom III not really knowing what to expect, because other than the normal screenshots and a few interviews id has managed to keep the core gameplay elements surprisingly under wraps. There was as much talk (if not more) about the tech than about the game itself.

So are you ready? Turn on your computer, turn out your lights. Pour a drink and shut your windows. Take my hand, let's go back into Hell.

But first, a technical note

When I reviewed FarCry I got a lot of emails. The one that sticks out most in my mind was a simple "Your rig sucks." Of all the feedback I've ever gotten that one was probably the most spot on. My aging rig, based on an Athlon 1700+ processor, just wasn't up to snuff anymore.

I know a lot of people were like me, with computers that were getting long in the tooth, but frankly, who cared? They still played Counter Strike well enough, and I had enough RAM for realtime strategy games. FarCry ran passably on my system, and Joint Ops and Battlefield looked pretty good, so there was no real compelling reason to upgrade.

All of that changed when id announced that Doom III had finally gone gold. Doom is going to be the standard by which the power of a gaming rig is measured for a long time to come. Most mid-level gaming systems can run it well, but to run with good performance at its most demanding and detailed settings you'll need a video card that most likely isn't on the market yet. This is a game that will grow with you, and it'll most likely be the game you install every time you want to show off a new component.

So I decided to build a new rig for Doom III, Half-Life 2, and all the other next-generation games that are coming onto the market. My new system, which includes an A64 3000+ chip, a solid gig of PC3200, and a 9700 Pro, will hopefully prevent any more "Your rig sucks"-type emails.

As for the game's performance on midrange systems, Ars' zAmboni pitched in with the following notes from running the game on his Athlon 2500+ box:

I have a 2500+ Athlon XP (barton), 512MB RAM and a Radeon 9800Pro. The game is running pretty smoothly at 10x7 and medium detail, but it starts to thrash the hard drive too much at high detail. To me, it doesn't matter if I had high detail going on, because even at medium the game looks pretty damn good. Besides, any differences in detail are probably masked by the darkness of the entire game :P. I still had momentary chugging when moving into a new area, or when something new popped up, but it really wasn't that annoying. Also, no crashes here so far on my system, although the flashlight did cease to work correctly in a couple of the early maps (hasn't popped up since).

If you want to know more about how the game performs on different types of systems, check out [H]ardOCP's official Doom 3 hardware guide.

Finally, I should mention that while playing Doom III, I also made sure to keep FRAPS running in the background. So in every screenshot you can see the bright numbers on the upper right hand corner showing you exactly how many frames per second I'm pulling at that moment.

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