Doom3 thoughts

[andrewducker]

It's pretty, very pretty. The lighting, movement and textures are all incredibly well used. It looks better than any other game I've played.

It's dark, very dark. I don't know if this is going to continue to be the case, but so far I've been constantly swapping from the torch to my current weapon and back. I frequently have to shot blindly because the enemy is over 5 feet away and the room is too dark to see that far.

It's flexible, very flexible. Monsters can now come out of walls, through stairs, from ceilings, etc. There's just so much more flexibility as to where you can be surprised from.

It's scary, very scary. We may have 4000 years of civilisation behind us, but turn the lights off and have a demon leap out at you and it's _still_ brown-trousers time. People have complained that the techniques of scaring people haven't changed since the original Doom, but I'm willing to be that that's because my hindbrain hasn't changed in a few hundred-thousand years either.

I'm running it at 1024x768 in Medium quality on an Athlon 2400 with 512MB of RAM and an ATI 9600. The game looks gorgeous at 640x480, so those of you with a lower spec machine should still give it a go...

Comments

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

Would it work with a Duron 900 at 256MB do you think?

[andrewducker]

I think that might be pushing it too much. Especially as your graphics card is likely to be on the low side too. The main sticking point, as I understand it, is the graphics card.

Official minimum specs are:

* A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500;
* 384 megabytes of memory;
* Two gigabytes of hard drive space;
* An nVidia GeForce 3 or better; or an ATI 8500 or better.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Too slow, and too low. You need 600-1100 more cycles and 128mb more RAM, unfortunately. Also helps to have an nVidia card, GeForce 3ti or better.

Depending on your motherboard, it might not be too expensive to upgrade. You probably can install an Athlon XP 1800+, another 256mb RAM, and score an nVidia FX card for not too much money. It's also supposed to come out to the XBox.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

I like it very much. However, I've decided to run the "flashlight duct-taped to your gun" mod to overcome some of that darkness. Yeesh. Am running it on 640x480 on an Athlon 2500+ with most of the effects shut off, and it's still pretty. Besides, I'm too busy running and shooting to really nitpick on the graphics.