Evil Empire Gaming

Doom3 Multiplayer Impressions

Hmmm for a multiplayer game, Doom3 sure is a great single player experience...

Continuing on from my other pages (pt. 1, pt. 2) , here are my impressions of multiplayer Doom3

The server browser seems to have trouble sorting by ping unless you sort another column first, and it seems to incorrectly report player numbers, so that full servers appear to have free spots. Servers only support a small number of players. But the HUD and scoreboard only show the top 4 players. I was in a 4 on 4 TeamDM match and the 4 red players were on top and we could not tell how many players were on blue team! Someone had to ask "Who's on blue?" and wait for the responses to find out.

The gametypes are well played old faithfuls, nothing new there. The gameplay is extremely hectic, like the original Quake. Players run around at high speed. I noticed that ramps give quite a boost if you jump.

Weapons are wildly unbalanced, again, back to the days of Quake. Everyone grabs the rocket launcher because everything else is ineffective. The shotgun is useful in close quarters but the other weapons just get you fragged. Grenades seem very bouncy and if you lob one into a room it's likely to bounce right out again back at you!

Levels are very clautrophobic, and are fairly static and uninteresting. I'm reminded of DM4 from Quake. There are a few gimicks to raise the interest level like light controls, squishing chambers, teleporters and powerups.

There's a beserker powerup that doubles your speed blurs you vision, disables your weapons, raises your fists and sends you howling like a maniac around the level. Which is funny at first but it's totally useless. The combination of speed and blurred vision make it very hard to actually hit someone. You might get 1 kill in if your lucky. There's also an invisibility powerup, which is useful, but nothing we haven't seen before.

As expected performance is worse in multiplayer than single and I found myself turning off bump mapping, shadows and other eye candy in favour of smooth framerates.

I think Multiplayer Doom3, out of the box, can be compared to Quake 1 DM with nicer graphics.

I'm trying to work out where the Doom3 multiplayer component fits in with the game. I don't think it does anywhere. You are, after all, a Marine, surely there could have been some multiplyer games using that theme? OK, in Doom and Quake, the multiplayer component used the levels and let you run around with the weapons blowing each other up. It was great fun, but often because it was also often our first multiplayer experiences.

It's clear all the creative effort went into the single player game, and that part is awsome. I would have liked a little more of the Doom 3 single player story to overflow into the multiplayer game.

And there's one big question hanging over this game which no one has answered; This is Doom, where is cooperative multiplayer ???

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