Doom 3 Final Version Hands-On Impressions

UPDATE (03-Aug-2004 9:09am PDT)--We've finished posting two dozen new movies (scroll down our media page) and more than 100 new screens (check the screen index) from the first several hours of the game--how far through the game are we? Let's say we're getting warmer. Stay tuned for updated impressions, and more!

Consider this scenario: You're in Los Angeles, it's Saturday night, and G-Phoria, one of the game industry's biggest awards shows (which will air on G4TechTV August 6), is happening all around you. What do you do? You hunker down in a darkened room and play Doom 3, of course. As the aftermath of gaming's answer to the Oscars raged behind us tonight, we spent a good 90 minutes with the final retail version of id's long-awaited shooter to get a sense of how it has turned out, four years after its development began and just days away from its release. Bear in mind that all the impressions following are taken from one brief run through of just a few levels of the game, and thus aren't intended as a final analysis of its quality. With that said, here's the short version: id hasn't reinvented the wheel with Doom 3, but damn, this is one good-looking wheel.

Check out some of the graphically intense action from Doom 3, and check our media index for over a dozen more. Click "stream" for a larger view.

The Doom 3 demo station at G-Phoria didn't subject eager attendees to the game's introductory segment, which is reportedly set before all the hellish action picks up. In fact, our experience with Doom 3 started with the second level of the game, at which time the nameless main character is tasked with navigating the labyrinthine research base and briefly traversing the Martian landscape in search of a missing scientist. Right about the time you find this scientist, all hell breaks loose--literally--as a terrible presence overruns the base and your former comrades begin to turn demonically against you.

But let's back up a bit, because even the segment that we played before the shooting starts warrants a detailed description. From the short snippets of Doom 3 footage that have been released so far, it has been difficult to glean exactly how alive the game's world really is; but play the game at length and this will quickly become apparent. When you first step off the lift and begin speaking with the soldiers and scientists who are performing their duties, you'll notice that the game's dialogue is both well-written and convincingly acted. As you walk from one grungy industrial facility to the next, you can't help but be impressed by the complex machinery that animates in almost every room. One television monitor even runs a perfectly animated video detailing the history of the Union Aerospace Corporation. In short, these aren't the production values you'd expect from an id game; they are, based on our brief experience, much more impressive.

In this first sequence, when you're observing business as usual in the Mars research base, Doom 3 feels very cinematic and very much like an adventure game. When you approach a character, your marine lowers his weapon, and his crosshairs are replaced by an onscreen element that displays the name of the non-player character as well as the "talk" function. Continue to badger the character after he has said his piece, and he'll either fill you in with further information or get fed up and walk away. There were no stock characters that we observed as we played; each one had completely unique facial and other features. You won't necessarily even encounter every character in this beginning area, since some of them are placed off to the side and simply exist to create further context in the gameworld. This degree of character interaction--at least, interaction that involves speaking to characters rather than pumping them full of buckshots--may seem odd for a game bearing the Doom name, but its effect on the atmosphere and believability of the world is substantial.

Doom 3's game flow seems to be set up in a goal-based format, as you'll periodically receive context-oriented mission objectives that will guide you onward. As mentioned, our first objective was to travel through an air lock, dart across the bare Martian surface, and enter an adjacent building to locate a scientist that has gone missing. Once this was completed, we almost immediately received a new mission based on the changing events in the story. As events in the game progress, you'll receive a new mission objective each time you complete the previous one and when an event occurs to provide you with a new purpose. We never had more than one mission objective at a time, so we weren't performing any optional side tasks before moving on to the next mission at hand. Therefore, we would imagine that the game is pretty linear in a point-A-to-point-B fashion, but of course we'll have to play more to say for certain.

Fighting Doom 3's monstrosities is a truly visceral experience.

Adding to the adventure-game feel in Doom 3 is your marine's PDA, which you can call up at any time with the Tab key. This PDA keeps track of e-mails, audio recordings, and video files available to your own character. More importantly, the PDA can also store the same sorts of data contained in other characters' PDAs, which you'll find scattered around the base. These e-mails and audio recordings seem to serve a dual function: First, they help to flesh out the storyline and atmosphere, in the style of, say, Resident Evil or System Shock 2; and second, they often contain passcodes or hints that you'll need to progress to the next area. You can get into and out of the PDA, listen to recordings, and read e-mails expeditiously. We don't expect that the use of this device will significantly hinder the flow of Doom 3's action.