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Doom 3 vs Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Deleted member 7219

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Wild Slop said:
It was, still 'good' enough to kill some time with.
Just so happens I've got some time to kill and am looking for a shooter, hopefully much better then doom 3 caliber.

How is Deadspace? or FEAR?

I really dont have any expectations.
Starting off from the agreement that Doom 3 is shit how to those games compare?

Haven't played Dead Space.

FEAR is a very good game but has a bit of repetition, not as much as Doom 3 but you might get a little bit bored of the indoor office environments after a while.
 
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Doom 3 was pretty bad. It tried to be System Shock 2 and failed. Also, the final boss battle was ass-tacular. Cyberdemon deserved better.

RTCW was alright. Nothing amazing, but far from terrible.
 

Cuther

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return to wolfenstein has non-german speaking nazis, no giant hitler bosses, and retarded vikings like enemies. It's fun at first but later levels are shit (like the forest stuff).

Doom 3 is a little bit boring and an insult to the first two, but as a stand alone title it's not too bad...

I think they are both mediocre games
 

Luzur

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return to wolfenstein has non-german speaking nazis, no giant hitler bosses, and retarded vikings like enemies. It's fun at first but later levels are shit (like the forest stuff).

well other then those 2 HUGE bugs it was an ok game, and you do get to see Himmler in the end, before he goes home.
 

NiM82

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They both had pretty mediocre gunplay, RTCW didn't even have hand animated guns, just tag animations, Doom3's were just annoying (yey, thick black smoke that obscures your already poor FOV!). RTCW had better gameplay overall, due to actually having variety in terms of level design and enemies. Doom3 was just complete shite, once you got over the graphics (about 20 mins).

:raeg: WTF is with the FEAR love around here? It was fucking awful. AVP2 owned it, completely. The supposedly great AI made no difference to the difficulty. When the gameworld mostly consisted of copy/paste, dull, narrow,coridoors with a totally linear layout, it's so hard to guess which direction your gun needs to be pointing! Not much room for them to display 1337 AI either, they barely had room to dodge most of the time. The bigger encounters, like setup ambushes were scripted, with no noticable difference on reload.

The weapons also sucked, probably less gratifying than Daikatanas (the only other game I can recall where everything was locked to burst). They even managed to fuck up the normal maps on them, which for a game hyped as the most "next gen" of the time was pretty funny. I'm sure those generic "CIA Shooter" games you see in the budget bin for £2.99 offer more variety and better gameplay...
 

taxalot

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Codex 2013 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
I have been playing RTCW for the first time. So far it is a major disappointment.

The game fails to provide the fun factors of earlier shooters, and it's lacking in enemy variety. The level design can be open sometimes, but it is still mostly linear in its approach.

And, oh my god, that sneaking Mission at the beginning. Do not get me started on that. Soldiers spot you from the otherside of the map if there is no obstacle between you and them, which made it impossible to solve in at least one instance for me and basically forced my hand to cheat to continue the game. On the other hand, you can kill two or three guys next to another soldier and he won't notice if you're jumping around him as long as it's behind.


Doom 3 is a much better game.
 

DalekFlay

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I have been playing RTCW for the first time. So far it is a major disappointment.

I posted much the same thing in another Wolfenstein thread lately. The nostalgia brigade quickly stormed the castle, but I think we're right. It has some cool moments, but by and large very much feels like the dawn of Xbox fucking with shooter design. It's just as linear as the newer ones with a lot of poor level design, and the weapons are mostly kind of bland.
 

Darth Roxor

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you people wouldnt know a good shooper if it came over and kicked you in the ass

'the weapons are mostly kind of bland' when talking about rtcw jesus christ
 

Wunderbar

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Played it a lot in early 00s, replayed it this year and it definitely holds up. The only thing i disliked was a mandatory stealth section in the forest (second stealth section in the village was alright).

btw, RTCW is closer to Half-Life than to MOHAA.
 
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Swigen

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No, for real though? I just bought Doom 3 off of the PlayStation Store for $9.99. Waiting for it to download now, hope it’s good.
 

schru

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I played Return to Castle Wolfenstein years after its release and never really understood its popularity. The Nazi occult theme is nice and certain sections do have somewhat interesting, tense combat (the undead in the crypts, the special units), but overall the game felt bland. The kind of semi-realism that games like these seemed to introduce in the early 2000s, with many hitscan enemies, less abstract level design, and fewer ‘gamey’ design elements, didn't amount to much of interest in most cases. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was mentioned, but that one also felt interesting mostly for the atmosphere and a few elaborately-scripted missions rather than the base gameplay. Perhaps the later levels in Return with more powerful enemies were better. I wasn't good at shooters when I played through it so perhaps I shouldn't speak about the later parts of the game, but I recently replayed it up to the mission with the friendly tank and it just wasn't fun. This isn't that surprising either considering Gray Matter Interactive's earlier games: Redneck Rampage or Kingpin—they had interesting concepts but the execution was weak (the first hub in the latter was very good, though).

To my surprise, I enjoyed Wolfenstein from 2009 in spite of its bearing some typical signs of a standard triple-A, designed-by-committee, multiplatform shooter. The combat and weapon upgrades were unexpectedly quite good, even if the setting and atmosphere lacked what Return had.

As for Doom 3, it's reasonably fun for what it is, but it's still a disappointment. It failed to live up to the greatness of the originals, but the switch to small-scale, close-quarters encounters in dark areas with emphasis on horror was interesting. The early parts, while you felt more isolated, defenceless, and didn't know what to expect had something of a survival horror feel to them. However, as I got used to the jump-scares and darkness and the action picked up the pace, the game didn't develop into anything interesting. There was some tension to the encounters, but larger battles didn't flow that well given the player movement and weapon mechanics.

Regarding both these games, it's interesting to note how the ‘realistic’ style of shooters (not simulations, just games going for that kind of feeling and setting) had come into the vogue well before Half-Life 2, which usually gets blamed for steering things in that direction. To me, while Half-Life 2 lacked in difficulty, it was one of the few shooters in that category (realistic style, heavy scripting, linearity) which were actually good (others such would be Far Cry or Fear). It wasn't until the next generation of consoles that things got really bad, with heavy-handed cinematic style, gameplay adjusted for console controllers, regenerating health, often meaningless weapon upgrades, very restricted interactivity and movement, quick-time events, and what-not.

No, for real though? I just bought Doom 3 off of the PlayStation Store for $9.99. Waiting for it to download now, hope it’s good.
Is it the BFG Edition? The gameplay in that version was changed pretty heavily by allowing the player to use the torch while holding other weapons and increasing the brightness in many areas. This hasn't changed the game for the better and instead ripped out what was pretty much its main feature.
 

Swigen

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No, for real though? I just bought Doom 3 off of the PlayStation Store for $9.99. Waiting for it to download now, hope it’s good.
Is it the BFG Edition? The gameplay in that version was changed pretty heavily by allowing the player to use the torch while holding other weapons and increasing the brightness in many areas. This hasn't changed the game for the better and instead ripped out what was pretty much its main feature.

Awww fuck, it’s a little brighter? Well that’s $9.99 down the tubes.
 

schru

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Awww fuck, it’s a little brighter? Well that’s $9.99 down the tubes.
That version is still enjoyable enough to play, the flow is all right. It's just that it removes something that pretty much was the game's defining feature. I don't think it'd be unfair if you just pirated the PC version, seeing as the BFG Edition was probably Bethesda's idea and they didn't care about being faithful to the original intent, so its being advertised as an improved version is misleading. However, with that version you get an additional set of levels (they're a separate game-mode or something like that) that were cut from the game and a new episode for Doom II which is pretty good.
 

DalekFlay

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you people wouldnt know a good shooper if it came over and kicked you in the ass

'the weapons are mostly kind of bland' when talking about rtcw jesus christ

It has some neat stuff toward the end, but the vast majority of the game you've got the standard WW2 loadout, and they don't feel particularly weighty or powerful.

The BFG version has the base game, the add-on, plus another set of cut content repurposed as a mini-campaign. Sure, for the handful of deliberate pitch dark sequences it's a bit of a loss, but in general I don't see it as a good enough reason to pick the original over BFG + add-on.

The changed bright lighting looks terrible in the BFG edition, and the menus are super "consolized." It's a terrible version, and some meh extra levels aren't needed in a game that's already too fucking long.
 

schru

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GmanLives seems to cover quite a few problems with the BFG Edition in this video, things like the lack of muzzle flash lighting up the environment, increased amount of ammunition in the levels, or corpses clipping through one another. He starts talking about Doom 3 specifically six minutes in:

 

Darth Roxor

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It has some neat stuff toward the end, but the vast majority of the game you've got the standard WW2 loadout, and they don't feel particularly weighty or powerful.

Yes, I remember all those other standard WW2 games that had an overheating silenced Sten, an FG42, an eksperimentool sniper rifle with night vision and a chaingun.

Saying that the guns in RTCW don't pack a punch is just blatant fake news. Apart from the pistols and perhaps the tesla gun, all the guns in this game are prime examples of good FPS dakka when it comes to handling, sound, damage, purpose and character. Its FG42 might even be one of my all time favourite FPS guns.
 

Swigen

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Truth be told, I’ve only ever played the BFG version on Xbox 360, fucken loved it. I still need to play the expansion though. Nu Doom was ok but the loop of “find da heart, squeeze da heart, ‘SPLOSION BATTLE ARENA!!!” didn’t really seem like much of an improvement to “monster closets” or whatever.
 

schru

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Truth be told, I’ve only ever played the BFG version on Xbox 360, fucken loved it. I still need to play the expansion though. Nu Doom was ok but the loop of “find da heart, squeeze da heart, ‘SPLOSION BATTLE ARENA!!!” didn’t really seem like much of an improvement to “monster closets” or whatever.
Have you played the original Doom games? The newer ones have nothing on the first one. Doom II was very good too, but its flow was somewhat inferior. If you haven't, just a few suggestions for the best experience: GZdoom is a good choice for a source port (getting good-quality music in DOSBox is trickier, but it's an option with Sound Canvas VA), set the compatibility setting to ‘Doom (Strict)’ or otherwise monsters will move around the maps in unintended ways, use the software renderer as otherwise the lighting is just bad, set the skies to ‘normal’ in software renderer's settings, don't enable vertical mouse aiming or use jumping and crouching, finally, use the SC-55 recordings (it's the device the music was composed on): http://sc55.duke4.net/games.php#doom Animation interpolation should also be disabled for a more authentic feel, as well as the decals (I think it can be done by dragging the slider to 0).
 

Swigen

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Truth be told, I’ve only ever played the BFG version on Xbox 360, fucken loved it. I still need to play the expansion though. Nu Doom was ok but the loop of “find da heart, squeeze da heart, ‘SPLOSION BATTLE ARENA!!!” didn’t really seem like much of an improvement to “monster closets” or whatever.
Have you played the original Doom games? The newer ones have nothing on the first one. Doom II was very good too, but its flow was somewhat inferior. If you haven't, just a few suggestions for the best experience: GZdoom is a good choice for a source port (getting good-quality music in DOSBox is trickier, but it's an option with Sound Canvas VA), set the compatibility setting to ‘Doom (Strict)’ or otherwise monsters will move around the maps in unintended ways, use the software renderer as otherwise the lighting is just bad, set the skies to ‘normal’ in software renderer's settings, don't enable vertical mouse aiming or use jumping and crouching, finally, use the SC-55 recordings (it's the device the music was composed on): http://sc55.duke4.net/games.php#doom Animation interpolation should also be disabled for a more authentic feel, as well as the decals (I think it can be done by dragging the slider to 0).


Oh, yeah I’ve played 1 and 2, thanks though that’s nice as hell. I just mean I’ve only ever played the BFG version of Doom 3. I have GZdoom now but back in the day I completed Doom 1 and 2 on PlayStation 1. Got GZdoom just so I could play Brutal Doom. I still have to play Doom 64 and honestly I’m more excited to play that than Doom Eternal.
 

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