This game was advertised as being remastered with new and improved rendering and lighting. Instead, the game literally looks worse than the 8 year old original. How can that possibly be?

This is not fair to your fans who were duped into buying an inferior product


I love the Doom series and have bought each of the games as theyve come out, but this is just wrong. Not only that, you took out the dynamic shadows too.

You should be doing the right thing and do a proper patch that puts true high res textures in the game, or allow people to get refunds.

Small teams of enthusiasts already made a vastly superior product with the original Doom 3 through free mods years ago, yet you have a whole studio at your disposal and we get a game that you managed to make worse..

You're mostly right, but...

Dynamic shadows are still present. You can easily see this on the shadows underneath e.g Sentry Bots or Trites. What was removed was certain lights casting shadows (see the "Flashlight shadows do look like ass" thread for an ongoing discussion of this), but it's incorrect and misleading to say that all dynamic shadows were removed.

I haven't done any measured comparison of texture resolution but to me they look the same. What is different is that BFG edition uses texture compression which was not used by Ultra mode in the old version. This has the unfortunate side-effect of adding compression artefacts to the images, which in some cases are extremely visible, and which was one of the more bizarre decisions made for this reissue. All the more so on account of the fact that the new asset packaging system has hugely bloated the install size.

Unfortunately a patch with uncompressed textures would be a > 7gb download; not impossible for some but highly unlikely to ever happen.

A patch with increased texture resolution is just an unreasonable demand - you're effectively asking id's artists to remake every single texture in the game.

Your best bet if you want increased texture fidelity from BFG edition is to wait until the GPL source code release happens and pester some folks to add support for the original games textures to it. Cold comfort I know, but that's just the way it is.

You know it's funny you should say that the textures being redone is impossible, considering 1 guy did, and he did it rather quickly too. Version 2 came not long after version1.

This was 1 guy, doing it for fun, a hobby. Why couldn't a whole studio do it in the time they had worked on the game?

Also, he made them like mega HD status, not twice the resolution some new detail, he's got them to the point where if you play with his textures and the Sikkmod, Doom3 looks photo-realistic pretty much.

Would you mind pointing me to this mod? I may end up playing the original with it if possible .

REDSPEED, you sound so familiar. hmmmm..... I wonder why that might be /sarcasm

There's a difference between 1 guy doing it for an optional add-on and a whole studio doing it for core game content.

In the 1 guy case, if they don't work, it's no big deal - you still have the option to not use them.

How can a texture not work? Simple - because not everything is software. You need to design content around the hardware limits you're aiming for. If your target hardware has a max texture size of 4096x4096, then no matter how much someone on a forum might want to thcweam and thcweam and thcweam and thcweam and thcweam until they're thcick over it, a larger texture will not work. If your target hardware isn't guaranteed to support non-power-of-two texture sizes - likewise.

id are already getting stick from certain quarters over having raised the hardware requirements from those the original game had. This is a fight that they just cannot win. Raise them; they get stick; don't raise them, they get stick.

So again - remaking every single texture in the game to higher resolution is an unreasonable demand.

What is a reasonable complaint is the texture compression; that was a really weird choice for them to make and it boggles the mind a little that they didn't actually notice that the quality of certain textures was so badly degraded.

Shipping with the equivalent of the old Ultra-quality textures in an uncompressed format would have been the most appropriate balance IMO.

It would be http://www.moddb.com/mods/wulfen-texture-pack
Only get Version2, as it is meant to replace version1, not add.

Jimmy, you do realize they could make the HD textures optional, don't you? For PC. The consoles wouldn't need them, they can get the same textures but downscaled a bit. They would still be remastered as compared to the old ones

The least they could've done is allowed mods, so people can enjoy the Wulfen Textures in the BFG Edition.

Of course that's true; I'm just addressing the demand for a patch containing higher-res textures. That's the part that's unreasonable and unrealistic.

It's fine to speculate on what they could have or should have done, but the reality is that it's out in it's current flawed state. In any event I expect that as soon as the GPL release happens early source ports will include high-res texture support so the problem is one that's going to go away.

The only difference between that guy and ID guys, because this guy wants to this job for fun and care, and ID dont care about anything and dont want to do any extra bit of work until they paid enought. Simple. Greed and lack of motivation at ID side, and opposite at side of that guy is the difference.
ID could be busy with DOOM 4, but they already got whole little team separated fro DOOM 3 BFG, and this team did almost nothing except for screwing graphics and gameplay to let inferior old consoles with rusty hardware run it. For PC version they did nothing except for quite a simple 3D support and removal of everything we loved doom 3 for.

Redspeed is Decayedmatter... can tell from the sentencing. And the age of the accounts.

It's really weird that you see this as a bad thing. id are a company; they have employees to pay, rent, light, heat, power overheads, so on.

Of course they're doing it for the money. Why on earth would they not?

This isn't a "different id", by the way; look back over all past publicly available info and you'll see the very same pattern.

None of that excuses the texture quality downgrade, however.

Youre right about the dynamic shadows, I meant the flashlight shadows. Still, its extremely disappointing to see them removed.

And your comment about it being impossible to add the uncompressed textures back being impossible or a 7gb download? Im not sure how you came up with that figure. The original Doom 3 shipped on 3 650mb discs for the entire game... It would not take anywhere near 7gb to add the proper textures back. A texture pack bringing higher res textures to the game I would estimate to be at 500mb to 1gb. Totally manageable.

Look at Crysis 2- they even added an official higher res texture pack for fans to download, and the stock game looks vastly better than Doom 3 BFG to begin with.

Id software needs to come clean and fix this or allow refunds. The game was marketed as an improvement to the original. It obviously is not.

Im not this Decayedmatter person, I promise you. Im guessing he's as upset about BFG as I am though

The problem isn't the size of individual textures or even the total size of all unique textures, it's the new packaging. BFG edition as is weighs in at 6.93gb so 7gb is a reasonable extrapolation, although true uncompressed high res would likely be a good deal larger again.

You may be interested in this - this guy over at Doom3world unpacked the .resources files and identified that the cause of this size was a huge amount of data duplication for each map. See: http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=25538&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=270

Of course it's nothing that couldn't be hacked around in code, but it seems unlikely to happen.

Note that I'm not even attempting to defend any of this, by the way.


It wasn't.

That doesn't excuse the degraded quality, but despite that I'd urge you to go back to the original promo trailer and work forwards from there, and see exactly what it was marketed as.

Maybe you're his brother then.


To make it easy: The BFG edition was marketed as "optimized for consoles".
Optimized for this generation of consoles.
Meaning optimizations made for hardware conecpts which are 8 years (360) and 7 years (PS3) old...

Most people seem to forget that the BFG edition was released to give console gamers of today a decent port and pc gamers support for VR.
No more no less.

This doesn't excuse any flaws in this release but which game today get's released without flaws and doesn't need any bugfixing?