Why Doom 3 is still an important and misunderstood game

GamesFPSDoom 3Why Doom 3 is still an important and misunderstood gameWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: id)

A cacodemon attacks

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Still, few remember Riddick and its place in gaming history. Even with the discourse surrounding it (largely on now-defunct gaming forums), Doom 3 sold great, and its slick, heavily bump-mapped aesthetics were a popular style in games for years to come. So why isn’t Doom 3 remembered quite as fondly as its peers? Doom 1 and 2 are getting new, fantastic expansions and ever-improving ports. Even Doom 64 got a second wind in the past couple years, whereas Doom 3’s biggest official resurgence has been as a PSVR exclusive.

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(Image credit: id)

A hell knight in silhouette

Virtually Doomed(Image credit: id)Doom 3’s claustrophobic environments and slower, up-close combat make it a shockingly good fit for VR, flashlight in one hand, shotgun in the other. Weirdly, the only official way to experience this is via the PlayStation VR port, but the community have stepped up to offer several options, including Doom3Quest for standalone Oculus/Meta headsets, and Doom 3: Fully Possessed for the SteamVR crowd.

Virtually Doomed

(Image credit: id)Doom 3’s claustrophobic environments and slower, up-close combat make it a shockingly good fit for VR, flashlight in one hand, shotgun in the other. Weirdly, the only official way to experience this is via the PlayStation VR port, but the community have stepped up to offer several options, including Doom3Quest for standalone Oculus/Meta headsets, and Doom 3: Fully Possessed for the SteamVR crowd.

(Image credit: id)

An armored soldier holds out a tablet

Doom 3’s claustrophobic environments and slower, up-close combat make it a shockingly good fit for VR, flashlight in one hand, shotgun in the other. Weirdly, the only official way to experience this is via the PlayStation VR port, but the community have stepped up to offer several options, including Doom3Quest for standalone Oculus/Meta headsets, and Doom 3: Fully Possessed for the SteamVR crowd.

Less popular is the repetitive encounter design, often spawning two enemies in front of the player and one directly behind for a cheap gotcha shot in the back of the head. Frustrating, but understandable given the limitations of narrow corridors. Less excusable are the few sections where you need to navigate on Mars’ surface, and Doomguy appears to have forgotten a helmet. Plus, he’s been smoking a pack a day since he was seven years old, because his total lung capacity is barely 30 seconds. As a thoroughly non-athletic person, I can still do several times better.

So, a mixed bag, but an enjoyable one. But in my opinion, the one thing that held back Doom 3 the most from enduring success is that its mod scene never took off the way it could have. A source code release in 2011 and a remaster in 2012 gave the game a brief second wind, but to this day, only a dedicated handful of fans continue to work on the game. Let’s take a brief look at what the fans have been doing to keep the game alive and kicking into the 2020s, and the best way to enjoy the game if you’ve missed out on it up until now.

(Image credit: id)

Arriving in Hell

The Ultimate Doom 3

If you’re under the age of 30, there’s a solid chance you’ve not played Doom 3 for yourself, just read about it and watched videos on YouTube. The good news is that if you want to, it’s simply a matter of grabbing the game on Steam (where it is frequently available at a steep discount), scoring you both the original 2004 version of the game and its expansion, plus the remastered ‘BFG Edition’ from 2012.

Unfortunately, neither of these is the best way to experience it.

If you just want a quick peek at the game, then the BFG Edition is apassableway to experience it, but the remaster makes a number of odd changes that fans of the original have found divisive, and I’m broadly in agreement. Among them, the overall brightness of the game has been boosted, the flashlight is replaced with a shoulder-mounted torch that you can use at the same time as guns (blunting the intensity of some pitch-black sections) and ammo and health pickups are more generous. That last one is especially odd as Doom 3 was never especially tough to begin with.

(Image credit: id)

A flying cherub attacks

The Dark Mod

(Image credit: The Dark Mod)

The easiest way to dodge these alterations is to go back to the source. If you’re willing to spend five minutes of tinkering to get the best possible experience, you’ll wantdhewm3, a source port that makes the original, unaltered game play nicer with modern hardware and aspect ratios. Compared to its cousins GZDoom and VKQuake it’s a bit bare-bones, but irons out most of the issues inherent in the original release.

The only real down-side of dhwem3 is that its mod support is limited. The port’s official page lists a handful of supported projects (including the popular graphical overhaul Sikkmod, which doubles down on the hazy, color-graded aesthetics of the PS360 era), but many of the bigger projects out there require a fresh vanilla install and the occasional console command or bit of config-file tweaking. ModDB has a growing number of projects porting themselves to dhewm3, but it seems unlikely to move the needle much.

(Image credit: Team Future)

Doom 3 mod Phobos

Phobos also leans more heavily into storytelling than the original, putting players in the chunky space-boots of an amnesiac protagonist with a voice and a backstory explored through (professionally voiced) dialogue and some lengthy flashback sequences set back on Earth. It’s a genuinely impressive production, a solid shooter in its own right, and still feels like Doom 3, even if Phobos’ shotgun is several times more effective. It’s also still growing, with its third (and largest) episode released just this May.

Sadly, there’s not much else to be said for Doom 3’s modding scene. While a little more active than Rage’s dusty ghost-town of a community, Doom 3 has never experienced the popularity of its direct predecessors. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time until a Quake-style community renaissance comes to the dark, high-tech corridors of Mars, but I’d not hold your breath. Not given Doom3guy’s embarrassing lung capacity.

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Legacy of Rust#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

The Ultimate Doom 3#

Legacy of Rust

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals

The Ultimate Doom 3