Forgive Me, I Have to Talk About DOOM³ Again

In Which We Talk About a Different Game for a Bit

It's funny how life throws surprises at you sometimes, you know what I mean? Here I was, booting up DOOM The Dark Ages again because I wanted to give it another run through finally and think about ranking it properly (although the more I hear about the coming DLC the more I want to wait and sink my teeth into that before I do it). And you know what, I'm not afraid to say it, DOOM The Dark Ages is moving up in my estimation this time around! It really, really nails the feeling of DOOM II in its combat, except you can jump and there's a sick fucking parry system. I'm really into it! The dragon levels? Perfectly paced, they don't overstay their welcome, you get in and out and it changes things up just enough that you don't get annoyed by the pauses in the ripping and the tearing. I'm less big on the mech sections, but they're even shorter than the dragon sections so even those don't get annoying to me.

I mean look at this, this is both 1. gorgeous 2. metal as all hell

A Brief Aside About the Steam Deck

Okay, so like everyone else on earth, I was aware that running DOOM The Dark Ages on PC would require a bit of beef if you wanted all the bells and whistles on, and also that it was a requirement, at least at first, to have an NVME drive. That meant, at least to me, that playing The Dark Ages portably was something you could only really hope to do if you happened to have a GeForce NOW subscription (or I guess Game Pass so you could stream it that way). Which hey, I do have a GeForce NOW subscription. Then towards the end of last year (more accurately, the end of October) id pushed an update that hey, actually, they'd made the game playable on Steam Deck. Natively, no less!

I hadn't tried this at all, mostly because I very rarely haul the Steam Deck around these days - the Switch 2 is smaller, slimmer, and doesn't make my wrists hurt after like five minutes. The Deck is just hooked to my TV now for the most part, serving the same purpose a Steam Machine will, one day, serve. Still, curiosity finally got the better of me, so with some bullshit YouTube on my tv I grabbed my Deck and fired it up.

Those dudes at id Software are fucking wizards. Not only does it run smooth as butter, but the loading times are still basically nonexistent (and this is installed on an SD card!) and (at least on the Steam Deck's screen) it's still a hell of a looker, even without path tracing or any ray tracing (beyond, I suppose, the global illumination they used). If nothing else it convinced me they can 100% do a Switch 2 port that I will stupidly buy because I am a complete fucking mark.

Alright Getting to the Point

I also managed to properly articulate what I think about the game's soundtrack (quickly said, it's extremely nice wallpaper but it doesn't ever feel like it is propelling the action forward the way the soundtracks in 2016 and Eternal do. I'll get into it more when I finally write something up about DOOM The Dark Ages). However, as I played throuhg the game, having a great time and occasionally firing up DOOM II to be like "damn this really does nail the feel of that" I increasingly found myself seized by a strange and blasphemous desire. The desire to play more DOOM³.

Oh no this guy again

No Wait Come Back

Stop me if you've heard this one before: DOOM³ is actually pretty good. Like, yes, I fully agree, it's not DOOM as She is Played, generally speaking. It takes the creepy vibes DOOM 64 (and arguably the PSX version of DOOM, a topic I will get to One of These Days if I can ever be arsed to get a wad of it or maybe play it on a controller for a True Experience. I mean I've got RetroArch set up nice, why not (am I also going to check out the 3DO version one day? Oh, absolutely) and runs with it. I've gone over this before - how DOOM³ was in some ways presented as "this is what DOOM would have been like if the technology had been there" in the run up to its release, and how I played it and found it Pretty Scary as a teen, and how the shotgun fucking sucks.

Here's the thing: I have, of late, sought as many ways as possible to never have to boot into Windows unless there's no other choice. For some things I do, it's still necessary, but in my dreams I find ways to just stay in Linux forever. So obviously when the urge to play DOOM³ hit, I did the smart thing which was find a way to play a nice source port of it in Linux.

The Linux Gaming Discussion Corner

When I did this in Windows, I went with Dhewm 3, which is the gold standard source port as far as I'm concerned. Naturally, my first thought was to see if there was a Linux build available. The answer is, sort of?

Which is to say yes, of course there is, but you have to do a little work to get it. This is kind of a recurring theme for Linux, at least when it comes to playing older stuff (if anyone has advice on how to get Diablo running nicely under Linux let me know. I have the nice version GoG did but the screen is all flickery and you can't actually see like 90% of it, just a little section around your cursor. This happens regardless of which version I run - the nice newer version, the original version, the expansion pack, it's all fucked). Dhewm has packages ready-to-run in some package managers, but not all. It did in fact show up in the Linux Mint manager, but they're empty packages with no documentation that would explain, you know, how to set them up and get them running.

So instead of doing that, I did the next best thing. I went to the very well-documented github page for Dhewm 3, installed the required libraries and compiler using the Terminal so I felt like a Real Hacker Guy, pulled the latest build, and compiled the damn thing myself. Then I went to the equally well-documented Dhewm 3 website to find out where I should stick my DOOM³ files, punched in another command in the Terminal, and then I had DOOM³ looking about as nice as it is possible for DOOM³ to look, which is to say, shockingly good but everyone's head still ends in a fucking point and that is just never gonna not be the case. Not even the uh... "attractive" scientist lady in Resurrection of Evil is free of this curse! I mention doing this whole rigamarole because if nothing else, it lets you know just how much I wanted to play DOOM³. I was willing to mess around with Linux to get the precise results I wanted. It was important! Putting in that effort was good for me, because it made sure I really did want to play this game again.

My head: pointy. My science bodysuit: ripped from a Voodoo graphics card box

As a fun little bonus, when I copied over my DOOM³ files, I also apparently copied over my cloud saves, because I had the save from my Community Endurance Run stream last year waiting for me. Very convenient! So I picked up where I left off, which is to say at the very beginning of the game more or less, and yes, without a doubt, the beginning of DOOM³ is one of the strongest parts of DOOM³. I mean, to be totally honest I think the game never really sags in the way that DOOM II's levels get old. My biggest complaint is that there isn't a fucking map! I spend a lot of time getting lost in that game, because a lot of the areas look the same and yes, you can also feel free to insert every joke about how fucking dark the game is while we're at it. It's dark as fuck.

Mostly I Just Like the Lighting

This actually goes back to the whole digression about DOOM the Dark Ages from the beginning of this thing. See, DOOM the Dark Ages does a bunch of ray tracing and path tracing and whatnot, and also, importantly, global illumination. That's part of what made it running on the Steam Deck so well such a shock to me! I have generally been pretty down on ray tracing as a technology, because mostly it just seems like a way to make your game run worse (and also save a lot of development time because you don't have to bake in lighting), but look: the lighting in DOOM The Dark Ages is pretty fucking gorgeous.

Like seriously some great lighting and reflections, goddamn

The thing is, the lighting in DOOM³ is also pretty fucking gorgeous. Every time I boot it up I think to myself "surely it won't be so good as all that," and then as soon as it loads in I go "holy fucking shit" and spend at least five minutes just staring at the way light renders on some swinging lightsource that has no business looking as good as it does. Like the rest of the game, it's something you have to really see in motion to get the full effect, but it's so good! A frankly incredible technological feat.

No seriously look how wild this is! All these light sources rendering in real time!

I also have to reluctantly admit that whenever the game throws more than like one enemy spawning in behind you at a time, it feels really good! The combat feels good, even the shitass shotgun! This is probably because playing all the other DOOM games have me used to running right into a demon's face and pulling the trigger anyway, so the fact that the shotgun can't do shit unless the barrel is directly up a demon's nose is... I mean it's still a fucking crime, and even at point blank range even a regular-ass zombie will sometimes take like three shells to go down, but it's not like the game is making me play a way I'm not used to playing.

An Alternate Future

As one of those funny timing things, id celebrated 35 years of being id recently, and they did a livestream that had messages from the founders, showed off some interesting pieces of history and ephemera, that kind of thing. This reminded me that I never finished watching Hugo Martin's director's commentary of The Dark Ages, and in going to look for those, I saw that Hugo had also streamed DOOM³ a little. So obviously, I had to watch those, I mean, I like Hugo, I like his insights, and I like how much he clearly enjoys talking about DOOM all the time.

Anyway, during one of those, while talking about how DOOM³ clearly is like, a far more straightforward horror take on DOOM, he mentioned the idea of revisiting that particular concept in a future installment. After all, the Doomslayer is asleep (as of the end of TAG2), and liable to stay that way for a while. Why not visit a different marine, or someone who has to go wake the Slayer up again? It's an interesting idea, and it would be a wild direction to take the series after three games that were basically straight-up crazy metal ass-kicking. A thing I keep coming back to with The Dark Ages is that it feels like they've taken this as far as they can. Going in a different direction could be extremely interesting - even if it was just a version where you had to be more conscious of your ammo. DOOM³ was a shift from the running and gunning of the series into a tenser experience where you had to do things like reload (I would prefer for there to be no more reloading, even in a spookier, more survival horror-tinged version), and while it ranks last, it's still good as hell.

If we can't get a new Quake, which I feel like we won't - DOOM is doing really well for them, even if DOOM The Dark Ages seems like it came and went. By contrast, the last Quake was Arena Champions that tried and failed to capitalize on the hero shooter trend like every other hero shooter not named Overwatch or Marvel Rivals. Add that to the whole "Microsoft just brought a new CEO in who is either going to fire everyone and wind the brand down or demand the safest, most surefire shit and maybe put id in the CoD mines as like the worst possible scenario," and you know, it doesn't look good for Quake. I mean, never say never, but DOOM just feels like the only thing id is going to be allowed to make for the foreseeable. Maybe that's being too pessimistic, but I dunno. I would love for id to do some new shit, and working within the constraints of DOOM trying some more survival horror-tinged stuff (even though DOOM³ has that covered, sort of), I think that's probably the best option. Best of best case scenarios, id escapes Microsoft so I can buy their damn games without breaking BDS (actually best of best case scenario is a free Palestine, but you know what I mean).

Until then, I guess I could finally go through Resurrection of Evil. I still haven't finished that damn thing!

It would also be nice to find out what the hell all this business going on with Thira at the end of The Dark Ages leads to in the DLC.