Given that no game discussion is complete without getting hung up on semantics... aren't seeing and killing enemies two seperate goals?Originally Posted by Laralyn
Not if you distill them down into the single goal of staying alive which was what Mr. Whitta and Ms. Laralyn were saying. Seeing and killing enemies are merely ways to achieve that goal.Given that no game discussion is complete without getting hung up on semantics... aren't seeing and killing enemies two seperate goals?
I have a theory about DOOM 3, which may spin this thread in a new direction. Or it may just prove I'm drunk. Either way, this is simply a figment of my imagination, so enjoy.
-------------------
One day, a few years ago, John Carmack is working on some new technology when one of the other id guys drops by.
id guy: "Hey John, what are you working on?"
JC: "Our next engine. It does full dynamic lighting, so you can drop any object in the world and all the shadows are generated in real-time."
id guy: "That's sounds pretty cool. Do you have anything running yet?"
JC: "Not really, just one test room. Here, take a look."
(JC pulls up a single room with a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. He swings the light bulb around, which causes shadows to dance around the room in various ways.)
id guy: "Holy crap! That's pretty cool! Can we start using this tech yet?"
JC: "Not really. At the moment, the engine doesn't really like light. With every light you add to the world, the scene gets more complex and things slow down. There may not be a PC that exists today that could run levels lit the way most first-person shooters are today."
id guy: "Damn. Is there anything we COULD do with it sooner instead of later?"
JC: "Well, with some work, you could you could probably build a very dark, scary game with lots of shadows, but not much else."
-------------------
(Some period of time goes by, and eventually id Software announces it will be doing DOOM 3)
-------------------
Later, at a design meeting:
guy 1: "so what's the basic design? Do we do a straight-up remake, with hordes of enemies?
guy 2: "we really can't do that. With the new engine, if you've got 10 guys on the screen tossing fireballs or firing weapons with muzzle flash, it'll bring things to a crawl."
guy 1: How about enemies? How do we populate the world?
Guy 2: Well, we can't just drop all the enemies into the world for the player to discover, because there's the chance he'll go sprinting through and attract them all into the same area. They'll basically all have to spawn in so we have full control over how many enemies are onscreen at once.
guy 1: "ah, got it. What about the player? Obviously, we have to give him a flashlight, right?
guy 3: "absolutely. Since we can only have a few lights going at a time, a lot of the world will be dark, and he'll need the flashlight to find his way around."
guy 2: "Agreed. The only catch is that our design only budgets one light source for the player -- he can have the flashlight going, or fire his weapon, but not both at the same time."
Guy 1: "Won't it seem silly if, in the 22nd century, soldiers can't attach a light to their weapons?"
Guy 2: "The game's already dark enough as it is. Do you want to yank another set of lights from the game?"
Guy 1: "Not really."
Guy 2: "Well then, it's separate flashlight and weapons for DOOM 3."
Guy 3: "Hooray!"
-----------------
True story? No. Plausible? Maybe? It might explain a few design decisions.
I think I 'get it' now. It's Thief, except you're the guard and everyone else is using the Deadly Shadows.
sluggo i was thinking the same thing but i thought it was so obvious i didn't bother to post it. if this really is what happened that id let the technology dictate the gameplay that's pretty fucked up imo. yet, i could believe it and it does make sense. you could even say id did this with quake 1 and quake 2 which would arguably been much better with doom style gameplay. the engines along with the past hardware wouldn't allow mass monsters in q1 and q2. q1 and q2 had multiplayer that made up for crappy single player. it's questionable if doom 3's multiplayer will.
Only, of course, you can easily mod the game to stick a flashlight on the end of your gun, on the end of your nose, on the end of your dick, on the spiderbots, wherever the fuck you want. It's actually pretty goddamn easy, as they've made the game ridiculously configurable. It wasn't a technology limitation, it was a conscious decision to craft a particular style of game. Get over it, guys. Now you've gone from ranting about it to crafting conspiracy theories to explain it. SURELY THEY COULDN'T HAVE JUST DONE SOMETHING I DON'T LIKE! I TRADITIONALLY HAVE A VERY POTENT MIND MELD WITH ID! OMMMM....
Heh. My post wasn't meant as some sinister conspiracy theory. It just seemed the focus on the flashlight mechanic was as a decision made solely from a game design perspective; I only wanted to suggest that several design decisions (like the flashlight) may have at least partially influenced by the new technology.
That doesn't seem too ridiculous, does it? :)
That would be awesome. Quick! A monster's coming! I need an erection! Instead of switching to a flashlight in your inventory, its a Playboy or a bottle of Viagra.
-Kitsune
The game seems to run just fine on my ATI 9800 128MB card with multiple creatures throwing their glowing bombs at me while I have the third version of the duct tape mod which puts a tight beamed flashlight on the end of the weapon, as well as having multiple light sources in the form of those overhead upside-down flourescent office lights and having manually doubled the flash radius of the flash of all my weapons to better get the strobe effect each time fire.
If anything, most of the time I get slowdown, it never seems to be light-related, merely the result of too many complext texutres on too many complex surfaces.
Anyway, there's a third version of the Duct Tape mod out that better serves both sides of this issue by making the flashlight beam on the weapon very tight and narrow, making the use of the full flashlight a viable requirement again in order to fully explore your environment.
I absolutely love the Duct Tape mod... in fact, I had installed it by the beginning of the third level. Frankly, my least favorite part of the original Doom games was when you'd walk into an area and it would suddenly go pitch black, and Doom 3 takes the most annoying part of Doom and expands it into the central gameplay conceit in the most obnoxious way possible: you can only see when you're defenseless, and only shoot when you're blind. I understand that Doom 3 is trying to be scary, and there is no doubt that a monster lurching out at you from the darkness is pretty creepy, but I find all that mitigated by the annoyance of it all.
Bizarrely, I find the game a hell of a lot scarier with the duct tape mod than I did without it. Watching monsters dancing in and out of a narrow beam of light in all encompassing blackness is a lot more effective of a scare than not being able to see them all. It is an optical trick that make Doom 3 feel a lot more claustrophobic - your gameplay universe is limited to a 6 inch cone in front of you in which you can aim and shoot, surrounded on all sides by encroaching blackness that could hold anything and can barely be penetrated. In movies like Aliens or The Balir Witch Project, the scariness of being attacked in total darkness is amplified by a visual reference point of light in the form of a flashlight beam, through which you dread suddenly seeing a monster move across.
Doom 3's default flashlight gimmick just annoyed me, which removed me enough from the game to not be scared. Big thumbs up for the duct tape mod here.
I'm about halfway through the game and DrCrypt has nicely summarized my thoughts regarding the mod. Not being able to see something is perhaps scary or creepy initially. By the fourth or fifth identical situation, it is no longer scary, it just gets annoying. The duct tape mod improves the experience for me without any sense that I am somehow "cheating" myself of a good scare like the designers intended.
As always, YMMV.
Crypt sums it up nicely, I'd also like to add how it's cool that the mod only works for one gun.
Two guns. Shotgun and machinegun.
Really?
How did I not notice that?
The initial version of the mod (which I'm using) only supports the machine gun. The current version adds the shotgun.
I like the mod, although I didn't hate the darkness, either. The small cone of light makes things just as scary, just less irritating.
And it doesn't help anything when those fuckers get right up on you.
Just added it and gave it a whirl.
Much, much, much, much, MUCH, much better.
If anything it adds to the fear experience, especially as the light flickers and dances with eadh pump of the shot gun.
I love how that light bounces around and flickers out of your point of view too. It's attached to the end of the shotgun, so every time you reload, the light points straight up at the ceiling, basically blinding you... quite nerve-racking when reloading in the middle of a firefight, only to come back fully loaded, ready to shoot and discover the guy you were shooting at is no longer where you thought it was.
I'm looking through some of the mods listed on Fileplanet. Pretty cool stuff. It reminds of the DeHacked mods you'd find for Doom/2.
Now if I only didn't have to rely on FilePlanet to try them.
Ok that was damn funny. :) (but you forgot to add ...of death!)
Where can I get the third version of the mod without having to sign up at Fileshack?
Go go gadget dick light!That would be awesome. Quick! A monster's coming! I need an erection! Instead of switching to a flashlight in your inventory, its a Playboy or a bottle of Viagra.
-Kitsune
Right here (.zip, 27KB)
Viele danke!
I definitely agree with Dr. Crypt, et al, about this mod. I get what id was trying to do, and it didn't bother me the way it seems to have bothered others. However, with this mod the game now annoys me a little LESS while being every bit as scary. Hard for me to complain.
I'll make a slight logical leap and compare Doom 3 to another game that uses a flashlight and dark-rooms gimmick - Silent Hill. For me, the creepiness of SH's monsters cannot sink in unless you can clearly see them in all their gory glory. Yet at the same time, an added level of dread is instilled when you can't always see the monster, since the beam from your flashlight is so narrow and you're usually attacked from multiple angles, thus you'll see one monster coming at you... but you'll hear others. It's the same sense of frantic tension-feeling that Doom 3's muzzle flashes gave me, but it's less annoying.
Really, what do I care that this imp or whatever looks hella-cool and evil, when I can't get a good view of it until after I've killed it? It needs to look scary WHILE it's attacking me. For some reason seeing the monster attack thanks to muzzle flashes didn't do anything extra for me that I didn't already enjoy with Silent Hill's flashlight gimmick. No, wait, the muzzle flashes added a (small) level of frustration that is now gone.
This is something that bugs me in Doom 3 -- with the exception (thus far for me, anyway) of the zombies, all of the monsters you kill vaporize almost the very instant they die. You don't even get a second to gloat over a shattered corpse. I still haven't gotten a decent look at a cacodemon even though I've been attacked by at least eight of them by this point.
Here's another fun little mod for those looking to change up their current Doom 3 experience.
The features:
- Increased dynamic lighting for muzzleflashes for all weapons. (Lights up about 10 ft.)
- Restricted gibbing to only the RL, Plas Rifle, BFG, and Chainsaw.
- All melee zombies (Not deamons or commando zombies.) come back to life after a short period of time unless gibbed. (Which means to keep them dead after shooting them you have to pull out the chainsaw and dismember them. Big Grin )
- Doubled the refire rate for the pistol and machine gun. (Didn't double the ammo pickup for them so use short bursts with the machine gun.)
- Increased the clip size for the Chaingun from 60 to 200. (60 just didn't seem to justify a "chain")
- Increased the kickback of the shotgun by 5x. The enemies now fly back about 10ft when killed with it. Big Grin
- Increased the shotgun damage slightly.
- Halved the bounciness of the grenades so they don't act like a "superfunball."
- Added a blue aura eminating from the Plasma Rifle extending about 5ft.
- BFG explosion now has dynamic lighting that would brighten up a warehouse as it should. (Before it didn't brighten at all.)
- Included Cryect's Flashlight Pistol with his permission.
Have you tried the Ungibbable mod?
I tried the Ungibbable mod last night and while it did provide what I wanted -- the opportunity to see the fallen bodies of the demons I had whacked -- I felt oddly cheated by no longer being able to chainsaw the zombies into bits. This is probably best for my mental well-being, anyway.
The monsters will still eventually disappear but you're only likely to notice that if you linger in the same spot for a long time.
The mod I listed above makes it so that only certain weapons will gib an opponent, it certainly seems possible to make a mod so that only the chainsaw would completely destroy a corpse.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote