Wirehead Studios

Both Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 now.  So what did I think of both games?

Doom 3

After much tweaking so I could get the game to be tolerable with my system settings, it was a pretty good game.  I played it a second time through with a modified shotgun that has a tighter spread and reduced damage, as well as changing the machinegun, shotgun, and pistol to fire from the gun's muzzle instead of directly on the crosshair.  I also sped the plasma rounds up to Doom's original projectile velocity.  The second time through, with the modified weapons, and the game felt solid.  The shotgun was effective but not overly-powerful, and was useful at medium ranges.  It felt more like a classic Doom shotgun should feel, and the other weapons felt much better.  The plasma no longer felt sluggish.

For all the criticism leveled at it, Doom 3 does what it sets out to do.  I did not find it excessively dark when adjusted to the proper brightness values.  Turning off any ambient room lighting helps - the game was meant to be played in a pitch black environment so what's on the screen can stand out.  Maybe some people are just really afraid of the dark, I don't know.  I have no problems playing a game in a pitch black setting.  I wished the hell sequence was longer, and that there were more puzzles besides the usual "read PDA/open storage locker with code".  So did I think it was scary?  I think it could be scary.  Having seen what I've seen in my own life it's rather hard for a video game to frighten me, but I think it could scare the bejeezes out of some people.

Gameplay-wise the monsters are fewer, though at some points you get rushed by several monsters at once - usually in an area just small enough to make fighting them uncomfortable and claustrophobic.  I do think the "imp-in-a-box" was used too often, and the Trites, except for scripted spawns, seemed to follow the same ground-limited walk paths as humanoid foes would as opposed to climbing on any available surface.  I think they could have been much more manacing and unnerving if they were able to actively climb on any surface in the game.

Half-Life 2

Again, some tweaking was required, especially in my SLI settings.  I'm using the old 84 series drivers right now due to an SLI quirk with certain graphics cards video bios (I'll flash the cards eventually) so I'm not sure if this has changed since then, but the default SLI profile for HL2 is for "SLI Antialiasing".  I modified the file containing the profiles so I could change this and found that setting it to Alternate Frame Rendering 2 doubled my framerate.  Why this was not the default setting I do not know, but it helped greatly.

The Havok physics engine allowed HL2 to do some things you couldn't do in a FPS before, and the water reflections and character rendering were very well done.  The physics, beyond the vehicle sequences and some obvious physics puzzles, seemed to play less of a role later in the game where it progressed more into a standup firefight in a lot of places.  The gravity gun was pretty much "pull in item/propel it at high speed as a missile" so physics there was mostly bouncing stuff off things or watching them break apart/get knocked over.  Physics did play much more of a role than in Doom 3, but it seemed to me there were actually fewer puzzles that required thought in HL2 than in the original.  The Source engine is solid and does what it's designed to do every bit, if not better, than what the Doom 3 engine sets out to do.  Now if only someone will make Trespasser 2 using the Source engine and let you play as one of the raptors...

Gameplay-wise I was really not as impressed with Half-Life 2 as I thought I would be.  It felt a bit disjointed, and I had plenty of gripes.  The vehicle sequences seemed overly long and the paths were laughably contrived with a lot of gimmicks.  The weapons, except for the pistol and SMG, had terribly low ammo capacities, so you end up either running out at a very bad moment, or else not using certain weapons at critical times for fear of running out at a very bad moment.  I did not use the crossbow or .357 in places I should have in retrospect because of the ammo scarcity.  Some of the firefights in the middle of the game seemed much harder than they should have been, while some later firefights seemed far too easy.  I did not like the fact that the Tau cannon - one of the iconic, most powerful guns from the original Half-Life, was unable to shoot down a certain annoying airborne foe when in the original you could blow the Apache assault choppers out of the sky with it.  The hand grenades were "toss and forget" as opposed to being able to vary the throw distance easily and time the explosions.  Yes, I found that you could roll the grenades with the secondary fire, but it seemed the soldiers were always smart enough to get out of the way when you threw one, so I usually relegated them to room-clearing tools when I suspected an ambush was close by.  I also felt the last chapter felt way too short, and I would have liked to have seen more freaky stuff than what I did.  Hopefully without spoiling anything important, I will say that disintegration pinball was absurdly fun and was a welcome payback to those bastards after some of the earlier firefights.

This is not to say I disliked everything in the game.  I did like the game to a large degree.  I think my favorite part was after "Sand Traps" where you get to have fun with the Antlions.  I wanted more of that, and to be honest the Antlions seemed to be much more effective against the Combine soldiers than the citizen resistance forces did later.  Maybe I'm just no good at keeping a squad alive, but it seemed like the resistance fighters had a very bad tendency to stand in the open, merrily gunning away at things while getting shot repeatedly, whereas the Combine troops knew how to duck for cover and fight with as low a presentably profile as possible in places.

So, which game did I like better overall?  The verdict must go to...

Doom 3.  Overall I found the game more immersive, the flow felt much more logical and well-defined, and I always felt like I was moving with a purpose.  The enemies were more interesting and the weapons all filled a different role, and I felt I could apply what weapon I wished to a situation as opposed to relying on the gun with the biggest ammo pool.  Surprisingly the story in Doom 3 seemed to be much more clear cut than in Half-Life 2.  HL2 I felt I was just being shuffled from one spot to another and it was run and gun without any real clear objective other than "don't let the Combine catch up to and kill you" and "find the level's exit trigger".  Perhaps this is because the story arc is being stretched out over Episode 1 and Episode 2, which I've not played Ep 1 so I'm not sure.

Doom 3 is not much like the original Doom, but considering the age of the original Doom, and that there were three Quake games with advancing tech inbetween them, it's very understandable.  The game does seem like "System Shock 3 by Id Software" in a sense, but after tweaking some of the guns to "not suck", and getting around the technical quirks (such as that blasted framerate cap), the game works and works well.  HL2, to me, lost the magic that the original Half-Life had.  There was an edginess to Black Mesa that City 17 just does not have.  You catch some of it at the beginning when the APC's with the Civil Protection goons roll up and you have to make a mad dash for it without weapons, but half-way through the game it seems like you're creeping around and watching every corner for someone to pop out and shoot you in the back - something people complained about with Doom 3 ironically.  Don't get me wrong, I think both are fantastic games, but I think blasting zombies and demons in the sinister, haunted halls of Mars just felt more fun than fighting Big Brother-esque thugs in a crumbling Eastern Bloc city.

Although I still find the whole idea of "picking sides between D3 and HL2" strange, I'll toss in my 2cts.

There's one thing in which I can and want to compare them, and that is looks. Doom 3 is creepy and dark, but it has the typical new-engine quirks. The normal mapping is a nice new gimmick, but it's typically overused and I can't help but feel like I'm running in a plasticy world with half-heartedly masked blurry pixels, and equally masked low-poly models. The way HL2 combines day-bright with underground-dark appeals to me and it really helps that they've been able to make very convincing skies and water effects. Between my old and new game rigs, I've found that D3 does not allow itself to be beautified much, as it are typically the new technical engine side-effects that cannot be smoothed over by high quality settings. HL2 on the other hand looks absolutely ravishing when it is given more to work with. So if I would have to pick, I would pick HL2, and wait for the D3 engine and game style to be taken beyond its experimental stages.

An unrelated bonus for D3 which is not to be sniffed at, is the EAX 4 system. It's wonderful and it really helps build atmosphere. HL2's sound is fine, but just not that immersive, in the sense that it does not do much to increase a kind of "environmental awareness".


I've also given S.T.A.L.K.E.R. a quick try, and I must say that looks quite fantastic too. Down side is that it is buggy and it takes some hard-core tweaking to even get the thing running without crashing perfectly stable systems. :]

I'd side with Half life 2 but... steam... on the other hand... yeah i'll side with HL2, dispite steam sucking so much.

Speaking of witch was someone hacked a workaround so I don't have to deal with steam?

Well, I have Half Life 2 on the Xbox (360 backwards compatable) and i have the original Half lifes and the expansions, and it just seemed like they dumbed it down and made it a lot more simple for HL2, it looked great, and was fun, but I agree with Pheonix about the ammo thing, throughout the entire game you use the pistol, smg and crowbar. And as for Doom 3, I dont have it, but my cousin does, and I played the deom, and a little at his house, HL2 seems better, but i would'nt know for sure.
And... i dont like steam.

Half-Life 2? I liked it a bit. It was fun for a while. I mess with Gary's mod now more than I play the game itself.

D3? I loved it when I first got it. Played the crap out of it then it collected dust. Once again I play a mod for it more than the regular game. CDoom. Bug tested for a while. Well, almost a year actually. Very addictive and fun.

I really haven't played either game recently. I guess it's time to dust them both off lol

I'm only doing this because of the whole "Doom 3 is going to pwn!" "HL2 is going to pwn!" hype surrounding both games, and the whole ID/Quake vs Valve/CS warring that's gone on in the past, as well as the ATI/Nvidia rivalry that's been tied to it as well.  Let's face it, they're also the two most expected sequels for any games ever, and I wanted to give my critique since I've played both of them well after the hype machines had shut down.  What's wrong with a little comparing?  I'm not really picking sides - I liked both games and I think they're both good games.  I just enjoyed one more than the other.


On this I must disagree.  I was able to configure the game to run with all settings turned on (I did need texture compression) except FSAA.  I just bumped the resolution to 1280x1024 to make up for the FSAA hit on FPS.  With the proper tweakage it was smooth as polished butter.  I did not get much on the lines of blurry pixels with the exception of Betruger's coat button, which I found kind of amusing.  Everything else was very high-resolution and I was able to maintain a near constant 60FPS except for a few spots with some extremely complex lighting and shadow going on, such as the hangar bay for the Darkstar, and one scene later on with a LOT of light shadow and steam confined in a small area with some mechanical equipment.

Now perhaps I had a setting wrong in Half-Life 2, but I saw my share of blurred pixels.  The word ASUS on the CD-Rom drives of the computers in Kleiner's lab and various other friendly localles comes to mind, as well as various posters and stuff tacked onto bulletin boards.  I do agree that the Doom 3 characters looked kind of rubbery at times, and HL2 did a much better job on rendering humanoid characters to look a bit more realistic.

I'm rather not surprised that more people prefer Half-Life 2's gameplay over Doom 3.  I kind of expected to be in the minority there.  I will say that engine-wise Doom 3 is much harsher on the hardware, but I also think Doom 3 is a lot heavier effects-wise.  There's always something glowing, beeping, moving, letting out steam, dripping, or doing something at any given moment in Doom 3.  Half-Life 2 has a LOT of more static material as far as complex visual rendering effects are involved.  I think one benefit I had playing both games that a lot of gamers did not is that I was able to play both with all the eye-candy enabled at a decent resolution without framerate degradation.  I will say this - I tried the Doom 3 demo with mediocre to low settings on my old system and I hated it.  With everything juiced up, and after fixing the damned shotgun, I liked it.   I can see where hardware could have a huge impact on what people thought of the game.  Without having all the effects in place, the game simply does not work.  Light and shadow, along with sound, have to work together for Doom 3 to make sense.  That's why I waited to play it until I had hardware that could handle it.  I think the engine was too advanced for the hardware of the time, but unlike the Doom 1 and Quake era, there are other games to play and Id isn't the only game company for FPS games so trying to run the latest hardware boundary-pushing game is not going to be as desirable now as it was back then.  Half-Life 2 you can get away with turning effects down and not really change the gameplay much.  You don't need the high-level environmental effects to the degree you do in Doom 3.

Now, all that being said, I am looking forward to playing Episode 1, and like I said before, I did not dislike Half-Life 2, just was annoyed with certain elements of it, the same as I was annoyed with certain elements of Doom 3.  I've also played Doom 3 through twice, and Half-Life 2 only through once.  Sometimes I like a game better on the second go-round, so that might have a bit to do with it as well.

I really enjoy replaying Doom 3 with higher quality settings, btw., but sadly very few areas are shocking now that were intensely creepifying the first time around. The same goes for HL2. There's nothing quite like being hunted with pumping music, or creeping through hideously deformed mars-base corridors without quite knowing what to expect.

Sad, but true. There's nothing like the first time...

Haven't played HL2 yet (my mate says I'm being a knob and Steam isn't all that bad, the fool), but I'm still discovering the delights of RoE. and I'm also replaying D3 on my TV comp (256MB GfFX 5500, AMD 1.5GHz) using what are effectively XBox settings (trust me, it works on a TV). To be honest, I don't think D3 deserved half of the stick it got, though some things did irritate me, like the Imps' apparent invincibility when charging up a fireball (ever got up close with the shotty only for the Imp to shrug it off?) and, of course, the very fact that Cherubs were in the game at all ...

But, hey, I thoroughly enjoyed it and, yes, CDoom is sheer class.

Invulnerable imps?  If you land a killing shot while they're winding up a fireball they can't throw it, but it does have to be a killing shot.

While I'm at it, I might as well repost my file with the modifications to the Doom weapons:

http://www.wireheadstudios.org/phoenix/mis..._shotgunmod.pk4 (http://www.wireheadstudios.org/phoenix/misc/z_shotgunmod.pk4)

I'm going to have to side with the majority here and say that I thought Half-Life 2 was better. I'm not real too keen on being startled a lot, which is exactly what Doom 3 did. I also didn't like the ragdoll physics in Doom 3, as they were too stiff for my tastes. There are some other key differences, but I could go on forever so I'll spare you the details.

As for your grenade problem, Pho...have you tried using the Gravity Gun in tandem with the hand grenade's secondary 'function'? This can give you much greater control over it, as then you can time it correctly and chuck it at some Combine. If you do it right they'll never have a chance to dodge. This also applies to Half Life 2: Deathmatch. Roll the grenade, pick it up with the Gravity Gun then chuck it at a random player. You can also turn your enemies' grenades into your own this way, and I always do it to the Combine in single-player. All the carnage without the price of precious ammo! :D

That must be why. It seems to happen when they leap at you too, but as long as there's an alcove nearby, you're in with a shout of them actually missing you.

Since my last post I've finished RoE. The end sequence of the Doom movie was longer, and that's saying something. Would have been nice even to see myself waking up in the infirmary back on Mars with Dr. McNeill looking down at me. White screen? Oh, please ...

In these days of games being bigger than the hard drives of old, GIVE US SOMETHING WORTH FINISHING A GAME FOR!!! NNNNNGH!!!

This should probably all be spoiler tagged, but oh well.  The white screen is an ambiguity - you don't know if you've lived or died, if you're in heaven or hell, or in a medical ward.  If you're alive, how did you get out of hell?  Ending didn't bother me so much.  Let's face it, Doom 1 had what, a field with a bunny that scrolled over to some burned up buildings.  Doom 2 had, um, text.  I don't need a fancy ending, just give me a good fight and let me kick the bad guy's tail.

I disagree, if the story of a game is enthralling enough the worst thing to do is end a game with a short  > 1 min. cut scene that hardly gives you any kind of closure, just a want of a sequel.

I think its alright if it kind of leaves you hanging, but i dont like it when i can Really tell their just trying to get you to play the sequel.
But if it just doesnt give you all the details and lets you use your imagination, i think i like that better... somtimes.

There's no sequel to Resurrection of Evil though.  At least, not yet.  Would be nice to get another Doom game.

I was under the impression that spoiler tags weren't needed in this case, so apologies to anyone ready to lynch me over revealing RoE's ending :shifty: I still reckon the game's worth playing.

I don't mind cliffhangers, and let's be honest, before Q2 all you got from an id game was a text message and not much else, but when you consider the effort that's ploughed into the opening sequences and cutscenes of most games these days (let alone D3) it can leave one feeling a bit empty.

And, yeah, D4 or a second MP for D3 would be very nice right about now. :rules:

 :offtopic: None for Q4 yet, I've noticed. What gives?

Maybe cause it wasn't made by id? Kinda sucks cause Q4 ended on a cliff hanger...

Lemme think of other game endings I didn't like...
VQ3 - well lets face it Vanilla Q3 sucks anyway
Oblivion - wasn't very memorable I thought
HL/HL2 - both half life games endings were a little abrupt I thought
Q2 - well you knew what happens to the marine but... that's it?
Tribes Vengeance - No seriously that's it?
Fear - Kinda sucked, can't say much more though since spoiler tags don't seem to be working.

I've not played Q4 yet, so don't spoil anything there please.  Ending on a cliffhanger is pretty much expected anymore (leaves room for sequels).

What happened after Q2's ending was covered in Q3's instruction manual.  Bitterman was captured by the Strogg and experimented on after defeating the Makron since they wanted to see how a marine could have single-handedly beaten so many Strogg up to and including their leader.  After they were done with him and before they could terminate him the Vadrigar claimed him for the Arenas Eternal.  Of course it makes you wonder how Doom 3 plays into things with the Doomguy but Q3 seems to be the terminal nexus for the Id universe for all games made prior to Doom 3, whereas Doom 3, RTCW, and Quake 4 retcon just about everything.

I just finished Episode 1.  Very well done, though I had to turn off HDR (except for bloom) as it seems to like to eat framerate to an absurd degree, and I really didn't see any benefit from it.  I like it even though it was fairly short.  I did want to shoot Alyx in the head a few times though.  Other than having an infinite ammo automatic pistol and the miraculous ability to ninja-kick the headcrabs off of zombies, anyone else find her annoying?

And I think I've pinned down why HL2 feels so different from the first Half-Life.  In the first game you had to rely completely on yourself to solve everything, with the exception of the occasional scientist or Barney to get you through a locked door (finding them or keeping them alive was part of the solving things for yourself).  In HL2 you have people who actually do things and sometimes you have to sit back while they take care of something your theoretical scientific ass can't seem to be able to do - like work a control station.  You don't feel as isolated.  I think it's that feeling of pseudo-dependency that made the game feel so different to me.  There's a few points, and one specific section in Ep1 where you get put in a rather, shall we say, explosive or electrifying situations where you have to think and carefully plan your moves.  That feels more like what I'm used to and it was a nice break from house-to-house shootouts with grunts.  I also think they pulled off some "creepy darkness" more effectively than Doom 3, especially when that flashlight has so little battery power.

yeah i finished ep1 and hl2 reasonable quickly, sin episodes tho was fun

regarding alyx i kinda like her, she makes a change to the usual female helpers

still can't beat system shock 2 though, shodan forever

but which game do i like better hl2 or d3 hmmm

actually neither, hl2 does have stunning graphics and the physics engine is great bouncing crates around or using a manhack as a melee weapon is good fun

however there's no enough ammo ever and once you have the gravity gun, that's all you'll use ( i recommend playing hl2 with the substance mod gives more ammo and weapons)

d3 however has the familar doom charm, chainsaws, shotty's except they all seem nerfed. ever weapon in d3 is a lot weaker i had to double the values in most cases especially as the d3 bfg 9000 is weaker than most of the original weapons

d3 has a better story, and in my opinion a better atmosphere

where as hl2 doesn't really hava story and you are treated as an idiot at times

they both change when you add the expansions though d3roe has the ion grabber cough.. cough gravity gun cough... cough which gives you more scope in blowing up stuff and also comes in handy for the puzzles like hl2

and epi1 yes alyx can be annoying at times, but she's sweeter than most partners in fps games what i would have liked from epi 1 is more weapons and better puzzles which on this it doesn't deliver

the game i like best is SIn Episodes, it has a decent story the weapons are feel meaty and jessica cannon is a more of a distraction than a partner it's only a pity that it may be the only episode they release of it as it's far too short 4 - 6 and your done

q4, well i like q4.  there i said it, i don't know why but most people don't like it, ok it has it's faults like the vehicles sections and the tram ride (seriously how easy is it for your squad to die over and over again especially on hard) the guns were not impressive the lightning gun mehhhh, the nailgun yawn, and the dark matter gun is the biggest pile of poop ever

however the blaster is oldschool q2 (yay), the machine gun and shotgun are better than there d3 incarnations.

stalker wise though haven't played it yet

On the HL2 vs Doom 3 debate I'm just gonna say Gary's mod, HL2 players should know what I'm talking about, if not check it out, Here (http://www.garry.tv/) It's pretty entertaining.

The "Grabber" from RoE technically predates the HL2 gravity gun in a sense.  It exists in Doom 3 as a diagnostic tool.  RoE just weaponized it and made it a non-devetool item.  Besides... ANYONE with a physics engine is going to come up with a "find way to throw stuff around/bounce stuff" gimmick.  The exception would be Trespasser, which was the first physics-driven FPS to my knowledge.  You could throw stuff and sometimes you had to, but the throwing was more literal and certainly did not decimate enemies, though sometimes elements in the environment could be used to that purpose by knocking something heavy over so it fell on something chasing you.

The Doom 3 weapons I think are geared more for balance against the enemies you're up against.  You don't fight as many simultaneous enemies as in the original games, they move slower, and the fighting is more close in.  The shotgun was my biggest complaint because at 10 feet it spreads out 5 feet across a wall with the pellets.  You'd need a multi-barreled gun to do that - a real shotgun at 10 feet pretty much just blows a big hole in whatever you hit.  It takes distance for the shot to spread out.  It was useless for all but camping doors and headshooting things that came through, or running point blank to imps and wraiths teleporting in and blasting them in the face before they can attack you.  Medium range and out comes the machinegun or the plasma rifle.  I wanted my Doom shotgun back hence my modification.

I've been playing through Quake 4, and so far that game is alright.  I'm not done playing through yet.  The nailgun, once it's upgraded, actually becomes VERY useful for being sneaky or pounding on a dangerous enemy from behind cover.  I do agree most of the weapons can be a bit unfriendly and I dislike the gun models a lot.  You must learn to rely on the machinegun and snipe with it a lot, and early on you learn that blaster guards can easily kill you if you stand still and get hit by them while shooting.  Every enemy has a trick you can learn to beat them, and some guns are overall more useful than others.  The railgun to me seems woefully underpowered compared to the Q2 railgun.  Even after getting the penetration mod it still takes a lot of hits to hurt the bigger Strogg, and the tactical Strogg seem to always take two slugs before going down.  Now as for the Dark Matter gun... It seems fairly useful when swarmed by weaker Strogg and want to wipe them out with one shot.  Just line them up as best as possible, fire, and watch them go bye-bye.  I've not tried it on the bigger foes yet.  I will say that getting shot by one is not a happy experience.

The vehicles sections didn't really bother me except not finding out the walkers are not even a tenth as tough as the hover tank until getting shot while in the thing.  A numeric readout on the shields and armor would have helped give a better idea of the toughness of each vehicle.  They could have taken a clue from Wing Commander there - you find out the Scimitar is tougher than the Hornet by seeing it has 6cm of durasteel armor as opposed to 3cm, and you fly the weaker ship first.  Q4 does it the other way around - you're godlike and fast in the tank and a slow-poke wimp in the walker.  I know that may seem spoiler, but anyone who hasn't played Quake 4 yet, believe me, you'll thank me for this tidbit of info later.

As for Q4 enemies, there are two I dislike so far.  The first is the Berserker because it's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to get away from one.  If they get close you're going to hit the quickload key because you cannot avoid their attacks.  The second is the flying sentry things in the Nexus because they chew the hell out of you with their machineguns, do not miss, do not go into a "pain" mode while getting shot (they just keep shooting) and take a severe beating.  So far those are the only ones who have proven problematic.  For Berserkers the only thing I can recommend is keep them in your sights, back away while shooting, and rocket their feet if you can, otherwise don't let off the trigger until it's dead.  if you have to keep a squad member alive around one.... good luck.  Draw its attention, try to sidestep his mace attack, and hope there's a medic nearby.  The sentries, if you can get them to come a door, shotgun peekaboo at point blank range seems to work best on avoiding damage.  I will also give a hint on another enemy with a melee attack.  If you play it right I've found that you can take advantage of an AI quirk actually kill them with the blaster pistol and save much needed ammo for other things.  I won't say which one so you all figure that out. :)

Overall Quake 2 is a lot more fun than Quake 4, I don't think Q4 is a bad game but it does not carry the charm and personality that the original Strogg had.  The first Strogg were cool, and the hyperindustrial look to their tech was more interesting than the excessive "Doom 3 steel-gray" plating of the new Stroggos.  These new Strogg are just nasty.  They're also pretty disgusting.  More on that I will not say, just see for yourself.

Mostly in agreement with Pho here. I would like to add to the downside-list the ugliness of the game. It looks like its designers didn't understand much about limited use of primary colours, coloured lighting and any kind of subtlety (that's exactly what ID got right with Quake2, and even to some extent for Doom3). The human armors look pretty good allround and enemy models don't look bad, but their skins are horrible. I'm replaying it off and on, but I find that I still can't precisely put my finger on why the whole Q4 world just feels wrong, though..

Haven't finished Q4 yet, but for so far I'm with the general consensus.

Q4 is a decent game, but it ain't Quake. Woodsman was right - Raven would have done better to use the D3 engine for a new Hexen game and for id to handle Q4 themselves.

You know, Scal I think you hit it right on the head there.  It doesn't feel like a Quake game.  Even going from Q1 to Q2, though they're drastically different, have that Quake feel to them.  Raven is damned good at making games using other people's engines, and they did some incredible things with the Doom 3 engine don't get me wrong, but I think only Id can properly do an Id game and have it feel right.

After (re)installing stuff I have this to say,

Half Life 2
First: I fekking HATE headcrabs, specifically the black and fast kinds, they're like huge assed spiders, I hate spiders... and zombies... so of course I'll hate them,

Secondly: Outside of what you see in game HL has no story progression, hell in the first one I didn't even know the name of some of the enemies like the vortigaunt or barnacles.

Second point five: just what the hell is the relationship between the combine, the vortigaunt, headcrabs and, whatever the hell was the last thing you killed in HL1? maybe I'm not thinking it through enough but I don't quite get it.

Third: ANTLIONS! best freaking part is when you're kicking combine/zombie ass with these things, how many FPS games have you take command of a group of your enemies?

DooM 3
First: How many different storylines will ID make around DooM? I might be able to understand somehow retconning all the games before D3 and Doom RPG, but I doubt there is a way to do that, Nerds demand continuity dammit.

Second: I think maybe D3 has the right amount of story, not too much exposition and you can tell what's been happening through PDAs or ignore them.

RoE: Haven't finished it yet but...
First: Can you say revanant? can you say way to frikking many revanants?

Second: Game starts after the shit hits the fan, I'm not sure if I like that...

Third: It just isn't as freaky as D3... I didn't feel as paranoid or frightened... untill a certain point, then the freaky-ness that's been brewing just blows up in your face.     

Fourth: Grabber? the Artifact? Anyone else think ID took these concepts from HL2 and FEAR?

Also I love the effect on all the floors ceiling and walls that you see when things first go to hell in D3

I'll probably have more to bitch about after I beat RoE and if I get Episode 1

Remember, the release date of Episode Two is nigh.. :]

The relationship is like this.  The Vortigaunts were enslaved by the Nihilanth.  The Nihilanth, while its origins are unknown, appears to be the last of a dying race.  It took residence on the border world of Xen, possibly fleeing the Combine aliens, and it is possible that Nihilanth's ability to control portals made it impossible for the Combine to follow it there, or perhaps they were unaware of Xen's existence.  When the incident at Black Mesa occurred, it caused portal storms between Xen and Earth and possibly elsewhere, as the fabric of space between the two dimensions was thrown out of balance.  This attracted the attention of the Combine.  The destruction of Nihilanth by Gordon Freeman also attracted the attention of the Combine, and it caused two things to happen.  First, it ended the Nihilanth's control over Xen.  This liberated the Vortigaunts who had until then been slaves of the Nihilanth.  Second, it opened Xen up to the Combine for exploitation.  This may explain why when, after killing the Nihilanth, the G-Man tells Gorden that "The Border World Xen is under our control, for the time being, thanks to you."  It is possible the G-Man fully understood the Combine would take over that world after the Nihilanth was killed.

The headcrabs are simply a kind of fauna native to Xen.  How and why they developed their zombification behavior nobody knows - or at least Valve hasn't presented a definitive explanation yet.  What is known is the apparent life cycle of the normal headcrab is to go from crab to zombie to gonome (only seen in Opposing Force) to (eventually) gonarch.  Of course, very few headcrabs ever reach this final stage, and the fact that gonomes build a kind of "lair", which the gonarch also is known to construct a lair, it may be that the gonome, after gathering sufficient biomass to feed it, undergoes a metamorphosis, implying that the headcrab-zombie-gonome sequence are all forms analagous to a larval stage of insect.  How headcrabs reproduce is entirely unknown, though the gonarch appears to be the parent creature and it may be surmised that the process is entirely asexual and that baby headcrabs are simply genetic clones of the parent.  It may also be possible that headcrabs acquire and cross their dna with that of the host creature in the zombification process, initially only altering the physiology of the host creature during the larval stage.  Once entering metamorphosis (if surviving long enough) the crab would then be participatory in genetic reciprocation.  In this sense every crab zombie would be the unwilling "father".  Perhaps this explains why there is a conspicuous absense of female zombies?

The "fast" and "poison" crabs are more difficult to determine as to their life cycle.  Fast crabs seem to reduce the zombified human into nothing but muscle and bone, as though the metabolic rate is elevated to the point of consuming the internal organs of the host.  Unlike the "mawmen" zombies of Half-Life 1, there's no apparent method for these zombies to consume anything.  It is possible that all three forms of headcrab are produced by the same gonarch.  Since headcrabs and headcrab zombies of differeing origin do not fight each other this seems plausible.  In this case the various crabs would fill differing roles, much as there are soldier, worker, and queen ants in an ant colony, so there are fast (soldier) crabs, venemous (guard) crabs, and the standard (breeder) crabs.  This would lead one to wonder why Freeman never encountered the other types of crabs at Black Mesa, but two things need to be considered.

First, the role of Nihilanth in governing and controlling the headcrab population is unknown.  It may be that during the time it was in control of Xen, the life cycle of the various gonarchs on Xen was manipulated and so only breeder crabs were produced.  Once its control was released, the normal life cycle was able to be resumed.  Second, it is also possible that gonarchs produce different crabs at different times, and that the portal storms only involved crabs from a gonarch that was producing only breeders at the time.

Lastly, one might note that the "mawmen" of Half-Life 1 appeared to have mouths running vertically in their midsection while in Half-Life 2 there only seems to be a hole in the chest cavity exposing the internal organs.  It may also be noted that mawmen of Half-Life 1 could be seen "feeding" on dead scientists and security guards, while in Half-Life 2 they simply mill about or are found slumped over.  I would say the most obvious reason for this is the Combine's control and influence over the crabs.  The Combine, after taking over Xen, did what the Combine always does - adapts creatures it ensnares to fill roles in its expansionist conquest of other worlds.  Having crabs breeding into gonarchs wherever they want would be contrary to the Combine's plans so it seems fairly obvious that they have simply weaponized the crabs, and in doing so removed their ability to completely mesh with the human hosts.  This would explain why the crabs can jump off their hosts if the host is killed whereas they could not before, and also would explain the inability of the hosts to develop a mouth and become proper "mawmen".  Eventually the zombified host would die and the crab would find a new host or eventually starve to death.  This would in effect make the head crab shells a very effective smart bioweapon.  The crabs are self-guiding, stealthy, and once they zombify someone they continue to be a weapon in the form of the zombie.


As for the Combine's further relationship with the Xen creatures, it is simply one of master-slave.  Much the same as the Combine has used humans for its own use in controlling and subjugating the population of Earth,  it has presumably done the same with the Xen creatures.  It's more efficient to use the local population for control of itself when possible, hence the use of humanoid Combine Overwatch soldiers and Civil Protection, but the use of offworld life forms - headcrabs from Xen, the Striders and Gunship synths, etc, is invoked when necessary.  One can only guess at the plight of the Vortigaunts on Xen now that the Combine is on control of the Border World, but it is obvious that the Combine has enslaved them as well.  Curiously they seem to be either unable or unwilling to use them as soldiers as the Nihilanth did, and also they have as yet not used the Alien Grunts encountered at Black Mesa either.  This may stem from the fact that the Nihilanth's control was telepathic while the Combine appear to need or prefer some level of coercion and voluntary submission from intelligent forms of life, hence the progression from Citizen to Civil Protection to Combine Overwatch.  God knows what they do to the unwilling subjects, though the stalkers give some clue as to what might be their fate.  It is possible that, lacking the immensely powerful telepathic ability of the Nihilanth, the Combine simply cannot control the minds of the Vortigaunts and Alien Grunts from Xen and have to resort to more conventional means of control.  The Nihilanth's mind control might also explain why the Vortigaunts sounded very different in Half-Life 1.

There are a few other unanswered questions.  One is, where are the other Xen creatures?  We've seen crabs, barnacles, zombies, and (briefly) an Ichthyosaur, leeches if you're unlucky enough to fall into the ocean, but no bullsquid.  We've also not seen any of the X-race aliens from Opposing Force.  Their fate and presence is a complete mystery at this point.  Perhaps these questions will be answered later.

I hope that helps.  I just wonder if Valve really has gone this deep into all of this or if they just make it up as they go. ;)

Woah. Great read. :]

When playing HL2, I always just assumed the Combine know how to make proper helmets/masks that were crab-proof.

I've also had a bit of fun with this:

I just about fell over when I saw that.  And it's so true!

Wow... that's a long assed read there Phoenix, but informative and kinda entertaining. Maybe the reason you don't see any ichthyosaurs (outside of the first teleportation sequence) is because all the water is either too shallow or is like... sewers, places too cramped for one to live?

And G man... seriously anyone know WTF he is or does? or how/why you see him watching you every now and then?

All we know about the G-Man besides his known appearances (and his tendency to appear in cameo) is something the Nihilanth had a sound recording of but was never used in the actual game:

"Man you are man he is not man he waits for you".

So it would seem that the G-man is not human.  Who his "employers" are and what his goals are remain as mysterious as he does.

Welll doom 3 owzn hl 2 imo sure hl2 has some real cool moments but after a couple of lvls i found my self just running towards the end so i could finaly place the game on the shelf.

Regarding Quake 4 well sadly that game is not good at all..not even close to doom 3 if u should compare those games.

I agree with Pho on most points. Doom 3 was fun, the presentation was impressive, and the darkness didn't bother me, but I was annoyed by the imp-in-a-box level designs and the inability of the AI to do anything besides walk without a script. Also, I was very bothered by the level progression, and the fact that you spend the majority of the game in science labs instead of in hell. I go into more detail into these issues here:

http://juliangnam.wordpress.com/2007/06/27/future-of-fps-ai/
http://juliangnam.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/future-of-fps-environments/

I had fun with the game, but I wish it had been more ambitious. It was impressive at the time, but Id were to make the same game with a Rage level of graphical detail today, it would still fail as a next gen game due to the simplistic gameplay.

As for HL2, I was really underwhelmed by the game's structure. Rather than giving you a full environment to freely explore, they essentially just chased you through confined set pieces for the whole game. It felt too linear and scripted to me; I didn't really feel like I was running around in a city or roaming through the countryside, I felt like I was just stuck moving through a constricted level.

I also felt like the game didn't have much else going for it...the firefights felt mundane as the weapons and enemies involved were not terribly interesting. The jump puzzles and crate puzzles were more annoying than compelling...all in all a good looking game with an ambitious story but weak gameplay. I wasn't gripped enough to play all the way through the game and just abandoned it part way through.

You know that was one thing that some of the older games had going for them.  Sure, you had specific barriers - red key, special door switch, etc, but how you fought was entirely up to you, and a lot of times you could go to various rooms before other rooms before encountering a specific "hard" barrier like a locked door.  You didn't have to follow a narrow, cramped hallway.  I think games like Quake IV and HL2 made it worse when they saddle you with an idiotic squad to get in your way in the already confined spaces you're having to fight in.  I don't mind "find key/open door", or an overall linear progression in a game, but having some more freedom within that progression is kind of nice.

One thing I liked about the original Wolfenstein and Doom games was you could fight monsters one-on-one by luring them around if you wanted, or just charge in, guns blazing, and mow everything down in sight.  Quake 1 and Quake 2 you could still do this to a large degree, and even in Half-Life.  You also didn't have to kill everything to finish a level if you didn't want to.  I can't think of a single place in Doom 3 where you can get away with not killing just about every monster you come across, and in Half-Life 2 it's even more important that you kill absolutely everything - except of course in the places early on where you have endless soldiers potshotting at you and you have to move.  It seems to me that statically placed monsters has been replaced a lot with "wave rushing", like the Combine Overwatch assaults in HL2 and the scripted monster teleports in Doom 3.  Waves work in Serious Sam because Serious Sam is extremely open.  The parts of Doom 3 that seemed to "work" the best were when you'd open a door and round a corner, and there's some zombie roaming around and you're not entirely sure where they are and what they might be behind or what they might be doing.  Unpredictability is what I think is lacking most in some of the newer games.  I want monsters to get pissed off and fight each other, too.

For me, the whole 'too scripted' thing doesn't feel so bad, at least most of the time. I know that most things that look simple to the player are in fact very hard to simulate (without at least something as powerful as a pigeon's brain to power the AI that has to make it work). I can forgive game companies for taking the 'easy' way out in most cases, since that is pretty much the only way in which games can improve their likeness to movies.
What strikes me as odd, btw, is that players so often shrug at the sight of rather amazing feats, such as HL2's face animation and real-time voice-wavs based lip-synhronization. It's so easy to get used to good stuff, and so hard to forget the bad. I just do what I do when watching sci-fi or fantasy movies: allow myself to be immersed into something like a dreamworld. And quirks don't drag me out of that in a hurry, unless they're really obnoxious.
But then, I'm a pixel prodder, so I usually focus on graphics anyway -- I find it a lot easier to accept annoyances like level loading, script bugs and AI problems, than to forgive texture repetition or downright ugliness.

Seeing the lack of brilliant A.I. and such as a display of 'how far games didn't get', although perfectly true, is like going over space exploration results and focusing on the fact that we haven't even visited Alpha Centauri (or, Nemesis, for Asimov-fans) yet. :]

I don't shrug at the good parts.  In fact, I think it's rather amazing that games are what they are, considering that a few decades ago there were no such things as video games.  I think the bar has been raised so high now that being innovative is becoming harder for the designers.  That's probably a fault of the gamers, but then, gamers are a fickle audience by their very nature.  How do you keep the interest of people who, by and large, have exceedingly short attention spans coupled with exponentially increasing expectations?  How do you do what hasn't been done before?  Before Wolfenstein, first-person gaming was almost unheard of.  You had a few simulations, like the old Star Trek, and Battle Zone, then Hovertank, but everyone knew Wolf.  Everyone wanted to shoot those Nazis.  Then came Doom, and the world of gaming changed forever.  Then Quake, and online gaming was born.  Half-Life came along and made a war hero out of a physicist who had never handled a gun prior and showed the world that "yes, nerds can kick ass".  And the game kicked ass and moved the FPS into a more real-world setting with an edge of uncertainty and unease about what might happen next.  It introduced a bit of subtle problem-solving as well.  When I played Half-Life 2 the puzzles seemed obvious and contrived.  Episode 1 I think brought back some of the feel of the original in some places.  I want a puzzle to make me have to think and not be overly obvious.

The effort it takes to make a game like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 is staggering.  I do think it's underappreciated the effort that goes into making them.  I'm not trying to knock that.  Detail in games does get my attention.  I remember playing Unreal and drooling over the skyboxes and the environmental beauty.  Here was a whole world, complete with a populace that actually had a culture behind it and in the process of fighting the bad guys you were, in essence, saving someone else's world.  To me, Quake 2, Half-Life, and Unreal represent the pinnacle of single-player FPS gaming where you had rock-solid gameplay, impressive (enough) visuals, interesting enemies and weapons, and a large amount of freedom within the overall linear progression of the game.

Visually what can be done within a game is fantastic now, but what about the gameplay itself?  That's where my primary concern is now.  I love eye candy, but if a game stops being fun I'm not likely to continue playing it. It just seems anymore that at one end of the spectrum you have very narrow, scripted gameplay where you have to follow an exact path and everything's always going to happen the same way or very close to it, at the other you have an open mosh pit.  I just think games like Doom, Quake, Quake 2, and Unreal had a much better balance between what the designers intend for you to do and how you can choose to go about doing it.  I look at new stuff coming out like Rage and wonder, after all the effort that's going into making the games look interesting visually, what's the gameplay going to be like?  Is it something I'm going to want to play over and over again?

Consider this.  I could pay $5-$10 for an Atari 2600 game cartridge when it was new, and play it over, and over, and over, hours and hours of fairly repetitive gameplay that visually was as primitive as you could get, and yet I still find a lot of these old games entertaining.  Today new games cost around $50 and perhaps they are worth one or two replays.  So does the complexity of the technology make games better?  I think it just makes them more realistic to some degree, but to me that's only valuable up to a point.  I'm not willing to shell out $50 for a potential disappointment, especially when the hardware to play them is very costly.  Why do you think I wait for "next gen" games to hit the bargain bin?  I sure as hell wouldn't have paid more than the $10 I paid for Quake 4, and that was only because it's the DVD copy that has installers with patched copies of Q2 and the Q2 mission packs incase I ever have to do a from-scratch reinstall.  To give you some better idea, I first played a demo of Quake 2 in software mode at 320x200 after picking up a copy of Wolfenstein 3D (the demo was on the Wolf CD) because I lost my Spear of Destiny disk and I wanted to play Spear.  The gameplay in the demo impressed me enough to buy it outright and play it on outdated hardware - and I never did get around to playing Spear, come to think of it.  After getting a voodoo 2 card Quake 2 became my second favorite game of all time after Doom.  I have yet to see a game since Quake 2 that would convince me to "go out and buy it right now".  I'm wondering if I'll ever see that property in a game again, or if I've just become too jaded and hard to impress.  I do enjoy the newer games to some degree, but not to the degree I enjoyed the older games.  I'm still trying to pin down exactly why that is.

I think a large part of the deficiencies in gameplay these days come down to AI and level design. One of the great things about games like the original Doom and even Marathon, was that if you ran away the enemies would follow you all over the level trying to get you. Sure, they weren't very smart about it, but you had a level of emergent gameplay there which is lacking in games like Doom 3, where the enemy will just chase you to the end of the room, then turn around and go stand in his spawn point. It felt like the enemies were actually living in the environment and doing their thing, and you just happened to walk in on it.

By comparison, everything in Doom 3 is obviously set up. The enemy always comes out of a closet, or just plain spawns in. Spawning was the worst part of Doom 3, because it was obvious the designers were just too lazy to think of a creative way of encountering the enemy. This is where I think games like Stalker and Bioshock will make a huge difference, because enemies will actually live and roam around in the environment rather than just being tossed in the room to fight you when you walk in.

Also, as far as level design...come on, we didn't need to be stuck in those stupid science labs for 90% of Doom 3. Doom 1 was a journey into Hell...in Doom 3 you dip your feet in Hell for 2 seconds then you go back to dicking around the military base.

One of the things I enjoyed in Doom 1 was that it gave the Illusion that you were set free to roam around the Phobos moon base as you pleased...if you wanted you could take alternate routes to different builings (ie the secret levels) and try to exterminate every last monster or you could just head straight for Deimos and Hell. It would be great to see a Doom game that actually achieved that; essentially gave you a whole base you explore as you pleased...though you could still just head straight towards the end if you wanted.

Furthermore...I want to see a shooter that takes you into hell the way Pan's Labrynth did, the way Barlowe's Inferno did, or the way 2001 Space Odyssey took you into space. Doom 3 was a cop out.