R.I.P. and Scare - Episode 3: Missile Blower
0Originally recorded: October 19, 2023
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Well, considering the fact that this was my first Thursday stream for Doom 3, I was really hoping to make it further into the game this time around. As of now, I've currently cleared 15 stages, which leaves 12 in the main campaign... plus the additional 12 levels of the Resurrection of Evil expansion. Oh well, if I keep going at my current rate, that should allow me to hit 20 stages by next time, which should put me at just about halfway through this playthrough.
At this point, I'm beginning to think it's more of a "stamina" issue on my end. This game is... exhausting to play. Granted, streaming in general's always been a bit more tiring than just playing stuff on my own. But I really don't think it's my problem with the game. Quite the opposite, in fact: DOOM 3 tends to veer from boring to annoying constantly, so seeing any sort of activity in the stream chat actually motivates me. Even if the in-game action distracts me at times and I don't see every message.
I ended up getting the Rocket Launcher this time around, which feels more like a liability than a help, given DOOM 3's claustrophobic world design. It's got the same exact issue I've got with the grenades, except way faster because the rockets explode on impact. I also encountered DOOM 3's reinterpretations of two classic enemies. The Revenants are... surprisingly annoying. Like, I always had the impression that Revenants fell into the "late level goon" category in DOOM II, because in 2016, they were essentially glass cannons... and Eternal made them incredibly weak. In DOOM 3, though? Holy crap, I think this might actually be the strongest they've ever been. And why are they such damage sponges? I also got to see the Mancubus return in a mini-boss battle. It's interesting that their designs are easily the most accurate to their classic representations, but I guess there are really only so many ways you can represent "a big fat demon with rocket launchers for hands".
The game also added the Zombie-Commando, which seems to come in two flavors: a melee-focused variant with a tentacle arm that it uses to whip you and one wielding a chaingun. The former is generally pretty easy to take out with the shotgun, but the chaingun one is sort of a nightmare, requiring some pretty heavy fire to take down. On the plus side, when the game decided to throw two of them at me at the end of the last level I played this time, I finally managed to find a situation where I could use the rocket launcher without killing myself with splash damage. There were also some Zombiemen with Riot Shields, which were kind of annoying... but the plasma gun made short work of them. So, I almost forgot about them. Those little cherubs were annoying as hell, though.
KI warned me that I'll run into Archville equivalents later in the game and that I should watch out for them, because they'll just spam infinite enemies at me. KI made sure to warn me because... honestly, that seems to be the core tenet of DOOM 3's level design at this point anyway. Like, it sounds like they were warning me because I might not be able to tell the difference when that enemy type *does* finally show up.
Speaking of which, I'd say that while KI didn't think that the BFG Edition improved DOOM 3 enough to bring its quality up to par with the other games in the series, I think the issue is that they went in the wrong direction. If they had decided to ramp up the actual survival horror aspects of the game by limiting enemy encounters and replacing most of them with those weird "visions", it probably would've led to a better game overall -- even if it wouldn't have necessarily been a "good DOOM game". Instead, it seems like id Software wanted to have their cake and eat it too. I'll keep repeating this until I'm done with the game: spawning enemies in front of and behind me at the same time isn't scary, it's annoying. Most of DOOM 3's environments are comprised of narrow hallways, which isn't conductive to the series' aggressive combat. Meanwhile, you're essentially forced to defeat enemies to progress through the game, which breaks the first rule of survival horror. Like, DOOM 3 doesn't really work in either direction. I just think that it probably would've been simpler to transform it into a competent survival horror game, simply because making it into a classic DOOM game would've required a full overhaul of pretty much every level in the game.
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