Welcome to my no frills Doom 3 page. Contained here are outright spoilers to id's latest Doom 3. Basically it's a walkthrough and an items list for the game. The page was opened 8th August 2004 within a week of my purchase of this stunning game. This page is definitely a work in progress and will change shape several times before taking its final form. It grew out of the discoveries that I and several friends and Doom 3 fans have made since the games release.
Doom and Doom2 are my alltime favourite FPS games for the PC. I have logged more hours playing Doom2 than I have on any other game including Core's Tomb Raider series, Ensemble's "Age Of *" series, and Blizzard's Diablo 2 packs. Needless to say I followed the four year development of Doom 3 quite closely and with great enthusiasm - downloading every teaser, screenshot and movie in the leadup to the official release of the game on August 5, 2004.
After the four year wait, now that I have the game in my hot little hands I can say that I am in no way disappointed by this game. In fact it has exceeded my expectations in several aspects. The highlights for me are:
- The graphics are incredible (and require an incredible graphics card). They did not lie when they said 'Shrek-like quality'.
- I have yet to play a game as immersive as Doom 3. You feel like you are part of the story. I found myself shaking at times, literally too afraid to enter the next room. It is intense! The scripted parts of the game add majorly to the experience of feeling 'part of it all'.
- The sound is brilliant. You can actually locate sound sources and they get louder when you get closer. I believe that this is an integral part of why the game is so immersive.
- The game has a great, well thought out and written storyline. Another factor contributing to the immersivity of the game.
Here are my main criticisms of the game, the first is the worst and the reason I decided to write a walkthrough:
- The dreaded one way trip! Nothing is more frustrating than finding out that you aren't going back to a section that you 'hoped you would get to later'. It is unclear whether you should be able to go through a given locked section - does a key code or a security clearance exist for the area? There is no feedback in the way of an end level summary letting you know what items/secrets you have missed out on.
- There is a bug in the game where collecting an item will trigger a game event. If you are maxed out on that item the game event will not be triggered. Sometimes this means some enemies don't appear but sometimes it can mean you are stuck. You will deliberately have to waste equipment or take damage so you can then collect the item.
- Doom 3 is an indoor engine. There are very few areas where there is enough room to show off your strafing skills. I would have liked to see some wide, expansive outdoor scenes.
- There is no Cooperation Mode for multiplayer - although with such narrow passageways in places there would be no room for it anyway.
- You can't Alt-Tab to other windows app's while Doom 3 is running. This is very irritating and makes it difficult to write walkthroughs!
- You have to restart the game after any video resolution changes.
- There is lack of female characters in the game. A large effort was given to the storyline but I would have preferred a balance of the sexes.
After the first few days of playing Doom 3 and discussions with my friends revealed that it was particularly hard to describe where you are in the game and why you are stuck. Everyone playing the game had a different set of problems and noone seemed to have an adequate explanation of "where did you find that" or "how did you get there". In fact "I can't remember ever being where you are" was a common answer when asked how to get past a given point in the game where someone was stuck.
Furthermore, the one way trips were really getting me down. That door you couldn't get through did not open up later, instead you left the level behind without ever knowing if you could get in there.
Thus this walkthrough was born. I compiled it for myself, my friends and anyone else who is interested in finding all they can and enjoy the full experience possible that this seminal game has to offer.
This isn't a strategy guide. I can't tell you the best way to fight the enemies in the game with the exception of a few hints on the bosses. You need to work our your own strategy for the run of the mill enemies in the game. You will need to decide the best combination of flashlight use for searching versus weapon use for fighting.
I'm not going to provide transcripts of everything that is said or written but I have made an effort to document the most important information. I won't describe all aspects of every room, just the salient details, this walkthrough voluminous as it is. Mostly I will tersely describe an area in bullet form.
I won't tell you when to save your game unless you are at a point where there is a decision to make and a branch occurs. My only advice is to save and save often. You won't be reminded where items are. Go back and get them when you need them - e.g. armour and health.
This walkthrough applies for the "marine" difficulty level of the game and may not be applicable to the other difficulties - recruit, veteran and nightmare. I use all standard game defaults with the exception of remapping keys to fit my fingers. I have resisted using any cheats because I don't want to spoil my game experience.
Do you know something that could be put into this walkthrough? Have you found some information that is not accurate? Can you fill in gaps or sections marked with a question mark? If so, please let me know. I will certainly credit you by adding your name to the credits section. It is important to me that all contributions be duly recognised.
The following people and organisations have contributed to this walkthrough:
- Tim Morrow (me :-)
- Wayne Kerr
- alt.games.doom
The current walkthrough is broken up into the 27 main levels of the game. Each level is a separate web page. Each web page is broken up into paragraphs, each paragraph representing a new doom 3 area - this usually corresponds to a room.
Red text indicates an item you pick up or a mission you obtain. The first time you find a generic item like a weapon, ammunition or enemy is indicated in red font as well. The numbers in parentheses after an item or enemy indicates how many of that type of item has been found up to that point in the current level. Emails are counted but the email title is not specified unless it contains important information like a cabinet code.
There are rooms with duplicate names, some don't even appear to be connected. To distinguish between the different rooms I've suffixed the area name with [n] where n is the nth duplicate.
After a weapon is found, later you may find the same weapon again. When this occurs you are given the ammo of the weapon instead - i.e. you can't have more than one Pistol. I refer to the later weapon items by their ammo name instead - e.g. I will refer to a Pistol item as a Small Bullets after the Pistol has been found.
The general philosophy of the walkthrough is to discover as much as possible as early as possible. An attempt is also made to trigger all possible enemies, even if they are easily avoided. The idea is to get as big a bang for your buck as you can :-)
You have to make decisions when writing a walkthrough in regard to what information to include and how to include it. In hindsight, some decisions were not well chosen. I've made several mistakes as I was acquiring my Doom3 legs. I have identified the following problems with the walkthrough, they will all be fixed in the next pass in a couple of months time.
- The decision not to distinguish between a weapon and ammo after the weapon has been collected was a bad idea. The first 9 levels are affected. I have been correcting the situation from Communications Transfer going forward.
- In early levels I may have confused Large vs Small Clips - I couldn't tell the difference between them.
Almost all software has errors. Here are some of the most annoying bugs in Doom 3. The quintessential level Monorail Skybridge exhibits all these limitations. In fact after completing that level I was motivated to add this section.
- One way trips.
- There is usually no good reason why you shouldn't be able to revisit places where you've left things behind. An elevator breaks or a building blows up behind you - fine! You can't go back. Locking a door behind you just for the hell of it - that is weak.
- Triggers/events attached to items that don't won't trigger because you are maxed out on the item.
- This is seriously bad. It really sucks if a door won't open or enemies aren't triggered when you attempt to pick up a health say when you are already at 100 health. There's no excuse for this - programming logic error plain and simple. Serious Sam had the same problem and it got fixed. Let's see if id do anything about it.
- Variable number of enemies triggered - even from the same load game.
- I really don't understand this. You load a game, collect an item, and x enemies appear. Reload the same game, collect the same item and y enemies appear. Do it again and z enemies appear. WTF? Kind of makes a mockery of the game stats. How many imps are in this level?
- Invisible walls.
- Sigh! We don't want you to climb this thing because then we would have to fill in extra surrounding details - let's just block it off instead to save us the trouble. Lazy level design.
- Enemies that appear from nowhere.
- There's no need for this, the game supports a teleporting function. This occurs more and more as you get into the game. The earlier levels have very little of this.
- The Pinky Demon roar.
- Here's the deal. You get surprised by Pinky so you reload. Forwarned, you lob a couple of grenades where you know Pinky to be - Pinky goes down. Move forward and hear him roar!? WTF?
There are several ways that information is provided to the player in Doom 3. Some are collectable objects like PDA's, Emails, Audio Logs and Video Disks. This information is permanent and the player can repeatedly peruse the information at their leisure.
Doom 3 uses other ways to set the mood, build atmosphere and reveal the story to the gamer in the way of interactive game characters, cutscenes and incoming audio communications from Sergeant Kelly. Information provided in this way is transient and less tangible and you have to be on your toes to absorb it all.
Below is the list of information sources for Doom 3 that I've tracked through the game. It is useful to have a repository such as this for quick reference when trying to find where you discover or find a piece of information. All of these are linked from and to the main walkthrough.
Doom 3 contains a plethora of items, objects and enemies that you can collect and fight throughout the game. I've compiled a list of tables for what I regard as the most important classes of items in the game. In my walkthrough these items are listed where and when they are found. It is useful however, to have a repository such as this for quick reference when trying to recall where a given item is first located or what you need to do to get it.
By no means complete, it is however fairly detailed and should be sufficient for most gamers needs. The intention is that this information should be tractable and easily obtained within a couple clicks. I'm not certain my HTML is up to the task though :-)
