The undeservedly forgotten best shooter of 2002 – Doom 3 Alpha + Maps

Before moving on to the best shooter of 2002, and the abundance of maps written specifically for the alpha version (according to some reports, here Fargus and the Navigator tried). A short introductory note for those who don’t understand what we’re talking about.

Doom 3 is a game developed by Id Software and released in the summer of 2004. It was supposed to be a technical breakthrough and the best game of the year, but it lost this race to three games at once:

It received fairly mixed reviews, particularly for the lack of a flashlight, unrealistic system requirements, harsh dynamic shadows, and nearly pitch-dark levels. Subsequently, the game gained cult status as a good, albeit very controversial, offshoot from the main Doom direction. To be fair, this is the last Doom made by John Carmack (albeit without John Romero).

But if you go back in time, you can easily understand the fans who were expecting a technical breakthrough, but in the end they got “This.” Although they were not promised anything “different”, what is the reason for the less rosy reception of Doom 3?

Everything is extremely simple – long-term development. Doom 3 was first shown back in 2001, and its release was promised back in mid-2003, and if you remember how quickly graphics developed in the late 90s and early 00s, it’s easy to understand that what was at the forefront of progress in 2001, and would have been a revolution in 2003, in 2004, at best, was “good”.

To be fair, Doom3 looked good in 2004, 2010, and even now in 2023.

Why Half-life 2 is worse and better than Doom3 at the same time

I’ll step aside a little, just because I want to speculate..

First, let’s get this straight, if you download HL2 now from Steam, or even from OrangeBox, you will definitely notice that HL is superior to Doom in all respects. But there is a nuance: at best, you will download the 2008 version, on a highly modified Source engine.

Half-life 2 looked worse in 2004. No, not fundamentally worse, but not at all the same as with the release of subsequent episodes, but that’s not the point.

The point is that HL2 had very simplified lighting at release, but the models had more polygons. On average this was 5000 polygons per human model. In 2003! (Source dod stuff), Physics was also implemented. I’m not even talking about the plot, shooting, etc.

Doom 3 had dynamic shadows, pixel-by-pixel lighting of models, insanely many shadows, a lot of light… but at the same time, the models had only 1300 polygons (which is only 300 more polygons than Quake 3, which came out in 1999).

Yes, in Doom3 bump-mapping was applied to the creature models in order to create the illusion that they were more detailed. Texture baking was also used, but no amount of baking or bump-mapping can hide the diamond-shaped heads.

To be fair, bump-mapping was also used in HL2, but in relation to the terrain, and not to models.

What’s the outcome… and at the end of the day, Doom3 with terrible textures and low-poly models consumed many times more resources than Half-life 2. The situation was so critical that it affected the mechanics (remember about 3 attacking enemies at the same time, of which one is necessarily generated in back).

While Half-life 2 could generate more enemies and huge open spaces.

Of course, on more modern hardware, Doom3 with maximum graphics reveals itself much better (the main thing is not the BFG edition, where the sound and shadows were broken) than Half-life 2 from 2004.

But HL2 looked great even on medium and low graphics, produced a smoother picture, ran on weaker hardware, and did not limit the player “by its technical imperfections.”

Actually, back then the polygons outperformed the lighting, but what am I getting at with all this? Besides, if the developers had not been chasing Ray-tracing for the last few years, then it would be possible:

1. Physics would return to games.

2. The models would become more detailed.

3. Starfield would run on any hardware without FSR.

4. We would forget about the input lag associated with DLSS 3.

In general, light is cool, but in 2004 it lost out to polygons. Why then is everyone putting so much emphasis on it now?

…Let’s go back to 2002

So, for the first time Doom3 was shown at the presentation of, oh horror, Geforce 3! February 21, 2001. And even then, he shone with an unrendered picture, which for 2001 was… Well, something that really caused a “WOW” effect. But in truth, if you look at the footage from the presentation, this “WOW” worked at about 10-15 FPS, but it worked!

Yes, and at release it could be run on a Pentium 3 1.4 ghz and Geforce3 TI, and it produced the same 7-10 FPS (slightly less than in the demo, but the textures were also improved).

Nowadays, I haven’t checked this myself (even despite the presence of an old hardware emulator, oh which I wrote earlier.), used footage from Indian YouTube channel.

The second build was shown at E3 2002, and despite the fact that most people believed that the image in the game’s trailers was pre-rendered, the leaked playable build refuted this.

So, November 2002. Doom 3 has been leaked online. And it turned out to be the best game for November 2002. It really showed off the full power of the Id Tech engine, sporting all those shadows and incredible detail on the models for 2002.

Also, this was:

— 12 weapon models. There are only 4 real ones (7 more had models from Quake 3, and the saw did not have the damage amount set in the config, which is why the game crashed).

— A working shotgun (the spread indicators were significantly less than in the release version, which is why the shotgun simply worked as an ultimate weapon).

— 3 levels and a whole cutscene.

— Not the most disgusting artificial intelligence system (very conditionally. The enemies saw, knew how to find a path, and aim at the protagonist).

— 8 working models of enemies. Including one Hell Knight.

Speaking of models, they were practically no different from the models included in the release version. Which once again proves… 1300 polygons for 2002 is very cool (but not for 2004).

— Disgusting set of sounds. How inexpressive the weapon was in the release version. In alpha it hurts the ears.

The levels were of course scripted almost entirely for public display. Most of the things didn’t work, or required manual editing with the console, and that would have been the end of it. People would look at the alpha, rejoice, maybe play with the textures, But!..

…A level editor was supplied with the alpha version of the game, and not only was it “there,” It was Radiant.

What is Radiant?

Radiant is a level editor from Id Tech. And it is known for the fact that its previous version was released to the public along with Quake 3.

And there would be nothing wrong with that, but only enthusiastic modders did not sleep, and they had 3 years of practice with the level editor between the release of Quake 3 and the release of Doom 3.

This means that the pirates had all the tools to release “Doom 3 full release version” in 2002.

Some of these disks were simply Alpha versions prepared to varying degrees:

• Somewhere a bug with a saw was fixed.

• Somewhere there was a Ragdoll Hell Knight working.

• Some craftsmen have connected the launch of the game through the menu, and not through the console

• Some graphical bugs have been fixed

• Somewhere there was just a set of files from the “build your own doom” series.

But there was another part – full-fledged maps, with their own textures, with a plot, scripts.

There were a lot of them in my memory. Now, when I started searching for survivors (using YouTube, file dumps, and the web archive), I could barely find cards for one and a half to two hours of gameplay.

On the other hand, a full-fledged Doom 3 is about 10 hours of gameplay.

Doom3 from 2002. + cards

Actually, here it is! A masterpiece of the gaming industry from 2002, with standing corpses, and even with different textures.

There were really a lot of cards. There were maps from the site Doom3.de. in quantity 10 pieces. You can go to the site itself and look at the list of cards too. But, unfortunately, it is not possible to download.

If you search on the Internet, you can find 20 cards of varying degrees of readiness by eye. A little further on there is a link to those that are easily accessible from the Doom3.ru website.

Some of them can be found here:(I don’t know if it’s possible to put links to torrent trackers, so the screenshot contains enough information to search).

If you want a card, you can find here. The difference between the version on torrent and on the website is that the assembly on torrent is optimized so that maps do not need to be called from the console (at least the first 3).

Space Evil is one of the most famous maps of that era, which consists of several levels, united by one theme. In total, the gameplay on it is about 15-20 minutes, which is more than enough considering the timing of its release.

I don’t remember Onan’s map either in childhood or in adolescence, but this is one of the very first maps made by the German modding team, which has survived to this day and is in almost all modern builds of alpha and beta versions of Doom 3.

And all this a year and a half before the official release.

If you don’t want to mess with an artifact of the past. Footage from 8 cards, you can look at this YouTube channel.

What is all this for?

So, I talked about the advantage of polygons over lighting, I talked about craftsmen… I didn’t talk about the fact that the first computer capable of running Doom 3 “at ultra” came out only 2 years later (in 2006), due to the game’s requirements for the amount of video memory, what was I leading to?

Oh yes! Exactly! For all its shortcomings, the release version of Doom3 could have become a cult game if it had been released literally a year earlier. It would have been forgiven for poor optimization and slowdowns, and the game already had everything it needed to be enjoyed back in 2002.

And the only miscalculation that was made “Carmack and Co.”, this is by no means an emphasis on “lighting” instead of “detailing”, or even a change of pace. And the fact that they saved on the number of artists and other people responsible for the content, maps and models.

What instead of results? You can touch Doom 3 Alpha with your hands only if you are a big enthusiast and want to dig into antiquity, or go through custom maps (which, in principle, you can run on the release version if you really want to).

But it’s better if you want to touch Doom 3, take the good old vanilla version as a basis:

— install several mods on it with this site (mods and conversions for the original Doom 3 are collected here).

The main thing is not to overdo it, because the fashion for bloom and oil in the 00s can ruin the game.

– It is possible to take several custom cards.

And go through Doom3 as you remember it, and not as it was, or as it became after Bethesda re-released it!