DOOM 3 Preview

One of the biggest attractions at Quakecon this year was the Doom III multiplayer demo, at Activision’s booth. Due to a course of good fortune of meeting a few people, I was able to check out the demo this afternoon, and it is really good. There are a few things that made the game really stand out above the other First Person Shooter games out there, and if this proved true for just a deathmatch game, the single player experience will be something to die for.

The controls for this game is the standard controls that every FPS on the market uses. One thing that I missed, because UT2003 spoiled me, is its double jump feature. Other than that minor thing the game plays really smoothly and looks nice at the same time. Activision gave no specs on the PC’s running the game, but even though it was running at a very low resolution without Anti-Aliasing turned on the game was drop dead gorgeous. The physics in the game were really good; from glass breaking to moving barrels around, so far id Software has done a great job on this.

There were a few weapons available in this demo version: pistol, your fists, shotgun, plasma gun, flashlight, and rocket launcher. You might be thinking why a flashlight, it is good for checking out dark places, and good for melee combat if you are stuck without any ammo.

In this demo Activision revealed what the Berserker power up does to players. Once players obtain it, they will let out a blood-curdling screen, which might make you slightly jump because this was totally unexpected. The player then becomes lightning fast, and your vision is blurred, and it allows players to do a one hit kill. Other players will know who has this power up due to the red rings that surround the Berserker character.

One of the spookiest and most effective things in this game is the lighting. It is obvious that id spent a lot of time perfecting all of the lighting techniques to create an extremely spooky atmosphere. There are times when you are going down the hall and you see a shadow on the wall coming loser to you, following your every move, and then you turn around and it turns out that you were looking at your own shadow, or in some cases it might truly be another player. This whole thing makes the game surreal and really intriguing.

With the brief time that I was allotted to play Doom III, I can say that this game is shaping up to be one of the best first person shooters when it is released. Now if only Activision would release that demo for everyone to download …….