I have heard a lot of complaints about doom 3 bfg edition, so lets pretend you work at id software and you got the lead design position on doom 3 bfg, and you have 12 months to remaster the game. That includes your qa time and your preproduction time.

Now tech wise lets stipulate that they took unfinished stuff in doom 3, aka the experimental renderer and the idtech 5 code was a off and on effort through out the whole process and is already something you were told to do.

Keep in mind you have the tech stuff, what more would you do? Higher resolution normal maps, they already do that but would you do that? Would you spend time fixing the dark areas in the game with bake lightmaps? Would you not do anymore tech than what you are required to do and add game mechanics? Would you do multiple skus? If so add another month to your qa.

Now for all the features that you list, two of them have nasty bugs in small areas of the game and you must choose to take out those features or take out the content.

Add subtitles.

This.

Freddo, why are you copying me so much?

It's more a case of what I would not have done.

There were gameplay changes made which - for me - completely spoil the original atmosphere of the game. They make it a little more than just a fresh lick of paint on a comfy old house; now it's as if someone has come in and moved furniture around too.

They shouldn't have happened.

OK, we can argue the toss over the flashlight until the entire world and their dog are blue in the face (for what it's worth I liked the old flashlight mechanic but I also remember the sauaging that id got on account of it when the original was released), so it's best to just side-step that one and look at the main issue which would not have happened in "my" Doom 3: the increased ammo counts.

The original game was not short of ammo - in fact quite the opposite; it had an over-abundance in some areas. The thing was though that you had to actually go looking for it. You had to look under walkways, get locker codes, go crawling into tunnels, go off the main route a little here and there, but it was always there to be found if you bothered to take the time.

I'm not sure what gave Willits the idea that ammo was a problem, but I have a theory that he has something of a tendency to look at modern shooters, see how they work, and then go and completely overdo things as a reaction to them. If that theory holds then it's an adequate explanation of what happened here.

So the main thing would be - keep the old ammo counts, maybe even decrease them in some areas.

Left everything the way in both games.

I would've bug tested the game. Something they clearly didn't do, and I agree with the above saying there's too much ammo, there's literally no point of using the shotgun anymore when I always have 500 plasma gun round.

That's a solid argument but remember if you want more QA you will have to cut features what features would you cut?

I would add:
-HD textures
-Bloom and HDR (and let the users move higher and lower to their liking, because overdone bloom looks like a$$)
-Subtitles
-Include Final Doom in the pack
-Mod Tools, for Doom3 & ROE, and classic Dooms, too
-a dark ambient light (so that it's never pitch-black, but still the dark areas would stay very dark)

I would remove:
-excessive ammo (there's way too much ammo, even the original had lots of ammo)
-the censorship (i would give germany their own downloadable version of Doom1 and 2)
-the bright lighting (i have played doom3 in brighter modes, but BFG edition is too damn bright)

I would also test the game, so non of the horrible bugs would've happened.

Last but not least, an actual new boss. Recycling bosses is lazy and stupid.

The new boss argument I'll give you I agree with that as well. Now if you don't sensor the game you can't sell it in Germany which means less revenue. So you will have to pick one other feature to cut because I'm playing the evil upper management and tell you to find one other thing to cut censorship stays, you could do skus if you want but you will have to cut your new boss, make a choice .

This is a real life type situation.

there is a lighting setting in options.

im not sure what i would have done, I'll have to think about it

I'd simply listen to my fans, then make dicisions.
But after finishing LOST MISSION all complainings gone! id know what they should do! .....almost

I would want the games to have stayed the way they were. Plain and simple.

My only real complaint is the button mapping on the console versions.

Sprint mapped on L3 makes the game unplayable on higher difficulty levels, it just doesn't work.

I find it crazy that at some point in the QA phase somone didn't say "Hey, this doesn't work. Why don't we have the option to map sprint to L1?"

If anything needs a patch, its the console control mapping.

I would resign and find another company to work with that does not sleep with big corporations. (In the sense of most AAA games and stupid BS deadlines/cuts/etc)

the controls are perfect for consoles

BUT if you swapped running with the flashlight controls, that might work better for a lot of folks

personally i dont really run alot in doom 3, so it doesnt matter to me

the only thing i would change is make doom 1 and 2 fullscreen widescreen, thats how it is on computer, thats how it is on the ios versions, and it doesnt look bad at all, do it at least as an option

Hmm...
I'm beginning to have doubts over the BFG release. At least when it comes to the included ROE version.
Doom 3 is pretty much intact aside from plasma gun light flashing and the flashlight shadows.
The Lost mission is new and therefore nothing much to criticize here aside from recycling some enemies.

But ROE, in my opinion the best part of Doom3, is butchered quite heavily.
Some areas have been simplified (3rd artefact Boss -> lower section is missing), gameplay modified (toxic area section-> no air canisters needed, helmet animation sequence cut), effects removed (Delta Labs unknown -> no permanent switching/flashing between hell and real world and areas completely cut (Hell -> heavy action sequence after entering the teleporter, stage with blue fog/background).

Especially the removal of the permanent swapping between hell and real world in Delta Labs unkown totally damages the gameplay experience.
This scene was one of the highlights in ROE and was technically and atmospherically one of the most intense moments in gaming history.

I assume it was cut due to incompatibilities with VR and/or 3D stereo rendering as the engine permanently modifies the projection matrix in that scene.

If i would have been in charge of the BFG release, i would have skipped the original Dooms.
PC guys already own them anyway and separate releases are available in the respective console stores of PS3/360.
Would have avoided censorship discussion.

I also would have left the original gameplay of Doom3 intact.
I remember that at the time of the original release most people complained about the flashlight OR gun feature and that visuals were way to dark.
But this was 8 years ago.
Modern TV sets / monitors are way brighter today than they were then and most gamers have adjusted to the original gameplay over the years.
Modifiyng the gameplay/visuals 8 years later reminds me of what George Lucas did to the original Star Wars movies.
Although the modifications to Doom3/ROE are not as obsessive as the alterations to the Star Wars classics,
it feels a little like the pc original is the complete release and the BFG version is just a cut down mass market version of what once was a very unique game.
I've got the impression that id wanted to bring Doom3 with the modifications made closer to the originals and they succeeded in this.
More ammo, more action, everything is brighter.

But in fact they just watered down the intense gameplay of the original release...

They failed, though, because Doom1 and 2 are much more challenging, and that's part of the fun. You can't expect a few more demons to balance out the huge crapload of ammo added...
But yeah, I'm not as ticked off anymore, at least I mean, I want the mod tools to release, so that I can mod the game and make it difficult and fun and balanced, and other things too.
_____________________


Now, if you think I hate Doom3 being action style you'd be wrong. In fact, I play with Sikkmod's adding of loads of monsters that are randomly generated (much better than a few added pre-placed monsters), with zombies sometimes even coming back to life if they aren't gibbed! The reason I don't like the BFG Edition changed is because it keeps people from knowing the original experience, the way it was supposed to be, and even the whole look of Doom3 looks like it was meant for horror, with its enclosed hallways and broken lights everywhere, and lack of any music at all, even when fighting a boss.

Had game testers to prevent problems like these:

• You can’t map weapons on the d-pad anymore. When you are in a fast paced firefight online, you need to be able to quickly switch weapons, like in the original xbox version. I liked to press up on the d-pad and pull out my rockets, now I have to toggle through 5 weapons with the shoulder button to get to it. By the time I get to it, I’m dead…
  
• You can't customize the controls. The main concern for this is that you can't crouch with the left toggle instead of the right. Think about it, you aim with the right toggle, and crouch currently. This throws off your aim when crouching, For example: Many of us like to crouch and aim and shoot quickly, now it is very difficult.
  
• The matchmaking system svcks. Who knows if you can fix this, but here is my criticism. In the old original xbox version we had ‘optimatch’, you were able to choose specific rooms that listed: what map, what game type, who the host was, and how many people were in it. Now we just get RANDOMLY thrown in a game. You also were able to host your own game if you wanted, as well as kick unwanted annoying people. We need this back please!
  
• Strafe jumping has slowed down. Like many competitive players across your ID software titles, strafe jumping is essential. This version seems to have eliminated almost any momentum attained from strafe jumping. We need this back.
  
• We are not able to choose our character color as we could in the earlier version.
  
• You are not able to choose what team you want to be on in team death-match. Who wants to play with someone you do not want to?
  
• You are not able to adjust any other settings in ranked, such as total time of match, number of frags, etc.
  
• The host advantage is ridiculous. You would think that the lag would be less than the original xbox version since this is an old game. You should have been able to compress the data in such a way so that lag would be less, instead it’s almost worse than before.
  
• Every weapon that the host uses is significantly stronger than the other not-hosting players…
  
• The double barrel shotgun is about ¼ the strength of what it was before. What the heck!
  
• The rocket launcher has little to no splash damage anymore, as well as being over ½ weaker. I can send three rockets into a character who has only 100 health and it only brings them down to 30 health. What the heck!?
  
• Why not give us the option for more players in each match? I know of many clans who are interested in running tournaments on the xbox 360 version, but it is only capable of doubles currently. It shows that there is room for 4 more players in the player list in matchmaking and the scoreboard in game. So what’s the deal?
  
• Where is the co-op? It is pretty sad that the game is without this, this would bring many more people back to the game and buy it JUST for this reason alone. I understand that this is the “PC-port” but some idiot kid can make a mod for coop on the earlier pc version, why can’t you guys?
  
• Where is surface and commrec, and the other maps? It can’t be that hard making the old dlc or resurrection of evil maps on the original xbox backwards compatible for the xbox 360 to play on. We don’t need updated graphics even, just the chance to re-live some epic deathmatches on those maps would be great!
  
• The framerate stutters when firing the machine gun off-host...
  
• The "ping" noise hit detection occurs about 50% of the time off-host. Now noone knows if they are doing any damage to the other player besides the host knowing.
  
• The mega-sphere powerup noise is only heard by the host.
  
• We are forced to start a match after a 15 second warmup when entering a game. We all miss being able to hit "back button" when ready to start the match.
  
• The leaderboards need to be re-done. They show only points, which stand for nothing. We need to be able to see our kill/death, time played, win/loss, etc.

Welcome aboard

Nice critques , but the point of this is if you add more stuff or QA time you have to take out two features, what features would you take out? Remember a lot of what you mentioned is because they switched over to a flash UI system(not scaleform, they coded there own swf loader in idTech 5 which got backported), so everything UI related has to be added in all over again.

The point that really bothers me is that some map content got cut over the original release.
And i still can't see the reason for that.
If the DVD size limit was reached with the delivered content, it would have been smarter to skip the original Dooms as they were already available in console marketplaces instead of cutting levels on ROE and the respective Multiplayer maps.
IF DVD size limitiation was the reason.
But i can't imagine any other reason at this point in time.
Making the game easier and more accessible as Tim Willits said, can't be the cause for this.
There are areas in ROE still intact which are far more difficult.
And censorship can't also be a reason. All the slowmo gore and blood splatter is there as long as you don't trigger the decal bug with loading savegames.

If you release an "enhanced" version of an 8 year old game, i expect at least the original content and some additions but not less or compromises in exchange for new content.

As for the technical differences between original and BFG, i understand that there were some engine changes made to enable VR and 3D and that the BFG edition was primarily designed to run perfectly on consoles.
It runs pretty well on 360 so i don't want to focus my attention on minor things like flashlight type or position, etc.
This was never as important to me as it seems to be for others.

The bugs don't bother me either as long as they are not totally game breaking and get fixed.
I experienced the mentioned slowdowns just once and reloading my savegame fixed this for me.
Bugs at release date are hard to avoid with these tight time schedules today and come with almost every game released.

The censorship is for germany that wants to barry the 1940's, they don't care about the gore they just want to forget about the nazi party all together, I'm not saying there right, I'm just saying its not the gore they care about. The game was what 6.9gigs, and a dual layer can support up to I think 8.5gb, and if size was a issue removing doom 1 and 2 would only save you 40mb .

I don't remember Tim Willits saying that he took those parts because of the difficulty of those sections, do you have a link? In which case if he did say that, especially before the release, then you knew what you were getting when you bought the game plain and simple.

I was not talking about censoring Doom1/2.
There was a rumor before release that ROE in the BFG got censored or heavily "modified" because it had some ratings problems in Germany when it first got released in 2004. That's why i brought this up.
The sections in ROE missing have no content that could be linked to the Nazis or whatsoever.

Btw.: Germans don't censor Nazi symbolism in games to make germans forget the "1940s". In fact it's the other way around.
Adolf's face and all his "showbiz" is running on TV over here all day and all night to make sure germans never forget what they did back then...

As for Tim Willits' statement about lowering the difficulty for Doom3 because he himself was such a bad gamer, you might wanna check his interviews on youtube pre release of BFG.
I also recall reading an interview where he said this. Give me some time to find the link.

[EDIT]
The content limit on 360 DVDs is about 7 GB. The rest of the storage is reserved for copy protection mechanisms.
The 360 is the best selling console in the US so it's the main target platform for the BFG edition.
Skipping Doom1/2 would have spared between 40-50 MBs on disc. This would have been sufficient to include the missing ROE content.

The 6.8gb I thought was the limit for older xbox 360 discs and was changed later to 7.8gb. I only worked on 360 arcade stuff so we never had to worry about dvd distribution but it is mentioned here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware

That's assuming the stuff they took out didn't have art assets in other places in the map. I.e. if they had a texture used in that scene that was in a different place you wouldn't save any space.