This was the first (only?) game that legit had me jumpy. I remember one part of the game where I was in this room and a monster walked across the window, saw me, then came around and started pounding on the door. Each time the door dented a bit more until it gave out.

I don't think I saw a game before Doom3 that was quite like that.

I think it might even be argued its rendering techniques either weren't that revolutionary, or turned out to be dead ends.

Don't get me wrong, it's a technical masterpiece, but one of execution rather than innovation.

It's main feature was dynamic lighting and shadows, which it accomplished with dynamic lights, normal maps and stencil shadows.

Dynamic lights and normal maps were nothing new even back then, I remember multiple titles using them, but not this well and not to this extent.

Stencil shadows were kind of unique, they worked by extruding the geometry from the light's perspective, and figuring out what was inside the light's shadow by counting front and back faces.

Unfortunately, since they used geometry, they looked really blocky and sharp, with no smooth edges unlike shadow mapping.

Imo they looked kind of bad, a step down from the beautiful pre-rendered lightmap shadows we enjoyed years before.

It's also a game that arguably was directly limited by its advanced rendering techniques; the number of enemies on screen at any one time rarely exceeds four IIRC, corpses vanish almost immediately to reclaim resources, most environments are quite small with few open or large spaces to explore. Id had to ship something that could actually run on customer computers of the era.

This is in sharp contrast to Half Life 2 released at a similar time, which had far more enemies and NPCs on screen at one time as well as much much larger maps to explore. I think in some ways Half Life 2s visuals have honestly dated better despite the less ambitious technology - the larger and more varied maps its lesser performance requirements permitted help a lot.

Doom 3 wasn’t the same kind of game as Doom and Quake were. Serious Sam was more on that line - Doom 3 was an entirely different game type even though it had the same lineage.

Same for me, it looked nice, but never got into Doom 3. On the other hand the new Doom games, especially Doom Eternal, go back to the roots and are one of the best FPS games out there, at least for single player that is...

to this day it is for me the only fps that i felt was art. almost like a very good movie. better lit than most of what hollywood produce now. sound design was awesome, it had so much style and atmosphere, and it was really minimalist to an extent that each interaction was important each enemy was a strugle. defintly different from all the other doom games hence why it was never as popular as the others but there was so much depth in its shadows than it reminded me of how great composers use silence in music

https://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/renderer.php at the technicql level there were some cool advances and the game in its production definitly felt like a leap forward that only a few game matched after (i could say mgs 4-5 and death stranding are close ones, final fantasy 15 while very weak story wise had others, but definitly no fps did what doom3 did)

I got super annoyed at enemies popping in behind me out of thin air, too. Felt like a cheap way to surprise the player, and it got old really fast.

Doom 3 as a game sure looked cool, though. The flashlight blew my mind back in the day.