The Lava Lamp

[tim]

The best one-word summary I can find to describe Doom 3 is "infantile". What troubles me the most about it is that this irredeemable piece of nonsense WILL be regarded as the greatest thing since Half-Life by enormous swathes of the gaming population and that says nothing good whatsoever for the continuing development of the computer game.

Games have stories. I can't for the life of me work out why something like Kuru Kuru Kururin or, frankly, Doom 3 has a story, but they do. It appears to be widely recognised by designers that games need stories, but they seem to be fumbling about in the dark groping for exactly why.

Once, out in the studenty bit of Edinburgh looking for takeaway curry we decided to try one of the restaurant places rather than Chilli Connection as usual. The experience was bizarre. Being sat at a table and served poppadoms while they cooked our order was actually pleasant, if confusing, but being brought the bill folded over on a little plate with half a dozen mints was mad. The reason you get mints with the bill in a restaurant is so you can go home not smelling or tasting of whatever you ate. Mints are pretty effective at scouring the pallette. Unfortunately they also leave an aftertaste of their own which, while fresh, pretty much destroys any food that comes soon afterwards. Needless to say, the nonsensicality of being served mints not only before your meal but between the starter and the main course is pretty clear. It's hardly offensive behaviour, just a useful illustration of what is wrong with, on the whole, modern FPSs.

The plot of Doom 3 is just like those mints. Just as this restauranteur had been to other restaurants, seen the mints and thought you needed them to run a proper restaurant without putting much thought into WHY you needed them and when would be appropriate to serve them, so id have played other FPSs made since Doom, seen that they have developing plots and decided to have one of their own.

You will often hear it said that the purpose of a plot in a computer game is a justification for the action. This is untrue. Although it's usually pretty rude to describe other people's opinions as "untrue", in this case the difference is that the kind of person who considers a plot to be an excuse is the kind of person who can happily do without it - the kind of person who would be as happy to play the mindless Timesplitters 2 as they would Half-Life.

Unless there isn't much more to the game than the plot (as with Torment), the purpose of a plot in a computer game is very simple: to motivate the player. Not every player - some people are quite happy with the justification "there's these aliens see, and they needs a-killing" - but those players for whom the existence of a bad guy isn't quite justification to go around stamping on him.

This is the same role that plot plays in action cinema. Bad action films are easy to spot - they're the ones where you have no idea what the hero is doing, why they're fighting the bad guys, why we should give a monkeys whether the hero lives or dies, and so on. The plot doesn't need to be complex, doesn't need to feature mind-blowing plot twists, but it does need to tell us something about the characters involved and why we should care. Caring is where it's at. There can be good action sequences in a bad action film, but they're just that - sequences. As one good song doesn't make a good album, one good scene doesn't make a good film - and one good gun doesn't make a good game.

This is where Doom 3 starts to tragically mess up. It has characters, but they're absurd. Bertruger, Swann and that other guy are well voice-acted but utterly hollow. Bertruger, we can infer from the EVIL THAT DRIPS FROM HIS EYES is some kind of bad guy, and Swann is presumably some kind of good guy. That's it. That's the whole of Doom 3's characterisation in two simple sentences. There are System Shock 2-style logs scattered about the base, but I shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong with them - listening to a thousand bored renditions of how evil Delta Labs is and how Bob died yesterday due to a chronic idiot attack and how the locker code is 6... 7... 4... is not plot, nor is it characterisation.

I could dwell further on how it has no idea what pacing is, or how to foreshadow something properly (Sarge... is coming... but first... you must fight through a whole load of tedium...) but instead I'll just say that I did enjoy it up until the first time a dog monster jumped out of a cupboard and soon afterwards I realised that the evil laughter and creepy voices meant absolutely nothing.

People say it's unfair to compare it to System Shock 2. The only people who say this are people who have never played that game. With the exception of the lighting engine and the first minute or so after the zombies first attack (which is incredibly exciting), System Shock 2 does everything that Doom 3 does, but better.

I suppose since this is supposed to be the SBS site I ought to mention the flashlight. The flashlight is Doom 3's only imaginative or original concept (no, lighting doesn't count) and does add a great deal of tension. Sadly it's fatally flawed, as the immense quantities of people complaining about it and the rapidly appearing duct tape mods demonstrate.

The problem is that as tense as it is, it contravenes common sense. Example: a monster that can only be killed by a rocket launcher. You have to fight your way through the section to get the rocket launcher. This is fine and logical, and it's even better if it's somehow sensible that the rocket launcher is where it is (such as in a far off but visible anti air turret). Alternatively, there could be a rocket launcher right in front of you but you're just not allowed to pick it up. Why? Because if you could pick it up you wouldn't have to fight your way across whatever to get to the other rocket launcher. Challenge without meaning is daft. Yes, it's also impossible to tap dance in Doom 3 but since tap dancing won't help you at all, and the ability to duct tape your flashlight to your shotgun would help immensely, they're just rubbing it in people's faces. The perfect mechanic is one which seamlessly combines challenge, fun and common sense, and Doom 3's flashlight does not do this.

In other news, I like The Suffering a lot. It's the game that Doom 3 wants very much to be. The very early sequence where you fight Slayers in the room with the metal detectors is both scarier and more exciting than any part of Doom 3.
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"Now I'm really confused. You're looking for someone who has a flaming head but also doesn't have a flaming head?"