Doom 3 BFG Edition Preview

Its been eight long years since Doom 3 was originally released on PC and a lot has happened in the first person shooter world in that time. Military shooters now dominate the scene and fast paced classics like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament were just a thing of the past until the recent release of the excellent Tribes Ascend reminded us all of how great those games can still be. Doom 3 got pretty mixed reviews back in 2004 when it was originally released, many people loved the dark, scary, sci-fi world that id Software created and the fact that they had produced a focused single player game and not compromised the game for multi player. Others felt that it did not push the first person shooter genre forward into new territory like Half Life 2 did which came out the same year and that the pace of the game was to slow compared with Doom games of old.

My overriding memory of playing Doom 3 was playing a game of just sheer technical brilliance not only visually, but in the sound design to. This was a game worth upgrading your graphics card and sound card for to see it and hear it at its best. Well now its back and this time not just for PC, but consoles to.

Old School Games Are Back

I was quite surprised when id software announced that Doom 3 was coming back, but I probably shouldn’t have been. There have been umpteen HD re-releases on consoles over the last few years and Doom 3 never came out on the current generation of consoles although it did make an appearance on the original Xbox console. Also Doom 4 is currently in production by id Software so it makes sense to get people interested in the Doom franchise again and bring new players in who have never played the Doom games before.

This is not just the vanilla version of Doom 3 here though this will be a whole lot of hell to shoot your way through. Along with the original version of Doom 3 you also get the Resurrection of Evil expansion, a new collection of levels called ‘The Lost Mission’, Doom and Doom 2 for some retro fun and whole lot of multi player maps to play online. So this really is like the whole story of Doom so far all in one big package and its a pretty reasonably priced package as well as all this will only cost $40 on consoles and $30 on PC which seems like a pretty good deal to me especially if you have never played any of these great games before.

Not satisfied with just adding all this extra content  to the standard version of Doom 3 which was a pretty decent size game on its own id Software have gone back to the game and added some new graphical touches and improved the lighting and rendering of the game. Another added bonus is the implementation of 3D into the game which should make for a very interesting experience. Problems and criticisms with the original game have also been addressed such as very limited amounts of ammo at certain times during the game and also the old classic flashlight problem.

It will be very interesting to see how this very old school first person shooter goes down with the console generation who have been hooked on military shooters for the last decade and haven’t really had the chance to play anything like this. Its also a pretty important time for id software at the moment who once ruled the world with there fast paced shooters, but times have changed and it just feels like id have gotten left behind somewhat in recent years. There last release Rage was a big let down for many in the PC community as they felt that the PC version of the game was badly compromised so that it could run on consoles. Many where let down by the game itself who thought that it would be a big open world game in the style of Fallout 3 with the addition of vehicles and have hundreds of hours of gameplay, but sadly that was not the case. So there’s a lot of weight on Doom’s shoulders at the moment and a lot riding on Doom 4 for which there is currently no release date, but I would think they would release it on the current generation of consoles as that what their id tech 5 game engine is based on. Doom 3 BFG Edition is will be release on 16th October for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.