14 years later: thoughts on Doom 3?

[curl-6]

Pemalite said:

curl-6 said:

Yeah that seems to be pretty much the consensus, that it's good for what it is, but what it is isn't what people want/expect from a Doom game.

As well as being crazy powerful for its time, the Xbox was also much closer to PC architecture than the PS2 and Gamecube were, which helped a lot. Doom 3 also plays into a lot of the console's strengths, leveraging shaders and per-pixel lighting over high polygon counts.

That Geforce 3/4 Hybrid chip in the OG Xbox really did push things along, makes me wonder what "could have been" if that console sold better and was on the market for a couple years longer.

I guess maybe it could've been pushed a little further, but surely games like Conker, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Riddick, Halo 2, etc were pretty close to its limits? I mean, we're talking about a circa 2001 GPU with 64MB of RAM to work with. I never got the feeling that its install base stopped the devs behind games like those from pushing hard to maximise the hardware, they already looked almost unbelievably good for the specs they were running on. Plus they already seemed to be hitting hard walls with things like Half-Life's low framerate, Doom being divided into smallers areas separated by load screens, and Halo 2 being downgraded from its E3 showing.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 26 November 2018