“Doom” came to mean equal parts adrenaline machine and navigation puzzle.ĭoom 3 threw all of that out. Doom and Doom II are deserved legends of the first person shooter genre, combining labyrinthine map layouts with high speed non-stop action.
Unfortunately for many fans, the game wasn’t at all like its predecessors.
It was a new paradigm for real-time lighting and shadows, and everything was slathered in normal maps.Įven on lower specced PCs at low settings, or in its later Original Xbox port, the reliance on normal mapping for most of the character and environment lighting detail allowed the game to look good and run smoothly. It started a brand new era of graphics rendering techniques, and many of the visual techniques in games today can in some way trace their lineage back to what idTech 4 was doing. The original PC release of Doom 3 was a big hit commercially in 2004, but critics and fans were divided about its new core design direction. It was supposed to usher in cooperation between Bethesda and Oculus on a number of VR products…but instead a messy legal battle ensued.
