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Every now and then I like to take a trip to Hell to see what’s new. That’s what’s great about the Doom community; there’s always something new to see and do. The amount of mods for classic Doom can keep you occupied for years. Overhauls, weapon mods, maps and megawads, gameplay mods, audio mods, and plenty more. There’s quite a few mods out there for Doom 3 as well but it’s just not on the same scale. You may have heard of some of the bigger and more popular ones like Doom 3 Redux, Doom 3 Essential HD Pack, Absolute HD Mod, and Sikkmod. They’re all excellent and the people behind them certainly deserve praise for their work. These mods make the game shinier by improving the audiovisual presentation and whenever I run a search for the best Doom 3 mods, these are the ones that are typically listed. As cool as all of these mods are, I’m always on the lookout for gameplay mods. Mods that significantly change how things function and behave. Unfortunately, my research has led me to the discovery that there’s just not as many gameplay mods as there are presentation mods. The three popular ones I know of are Perfected Doom 3, Overthinked Doom 3, and Doom 3 Golden Edition. This review will cover the Golden Edition mod.
I’m going to quote the description on the Golden Edition’s Moddb page; “A remastering of the 2004 classic. Although a lot of it is rebalancing, even though there are a few changes that one could say as being drastic, there however are some presentational differences like the lighting, music (yes, music) and sound effects. But in the end, this is still Doom 3. BFG Edition not included.” As indicated in that description, Doom 3 Golden Edition is a mod for the original game only, not the BFG Edition. It modifies the base game and expansion, Resurrection of Evil.
Golden Edition doesn’t make any changes to the narratives. It’s all about the gameplay. It doesn’t make a lot of drastic changes to the audiovisual presentation, either. For the most part, it looks and feels like Doom 3. A lot of the changes are under the hood, so to speak. As it relates to games in general, I will always recommend playing the original game before a modded version, excluding maybe unofficial bug fix mods. The reason I say that is because if you play the original first, you can appreciate the mods that much more and get more out of them. You can truly understand what they change and determine for yourself if they make something better or worse. And this definitely applies in this case because the Golden Edition changes a lot of little things for big results. And if you’re not familiar with the original game, it’s very possible you won’t notice any of them.
As you may or may not know, Doom 3 is not my favorite Doom game. I enjoy playing it from time to time but I don’t think it’s the horror masterpiece some people make it out to be. I’m not going to dig too deep into it here but I just feel the horror doesn’t work and the emphasis on darkness doesn’t mask the game’s flaws. The Golden Edition mod feels like it was designed to be faithful to the original experience so I can’t say it fixes a lot of my issues with the vanilla game but it can make the gameplay feel more tense which is a good thing.
I’ll talk about some of the surface level changes first. One of my absolute favorite changes in this mod is that when you’re attacked by an enemy, the camera is no longer knocked in a different direction and the double vision effect is removed. This means you can remain focused on the action even while you’re being attacked. The mod comes with a new crosshair, muzzle flashes are more intense, flashes from enemy attacks will now light up rooms, and rocket and grenade explosions have more realistically sized flashes. In addition to these are new sound effects which are all modifications of the vanilla sounds. For example, explosions are louder and according to the mod’s change log, the shotgun’s firing sound has been equalized and is a combining of the vanilla shotgun, enemy shotgun, and BFG Edition shotgun. Ultimately, I feel the new and changed lighting effects and altered audio do help enhance the action and gunplay.
Doom 3 Golden Edition doesn’t do anything too fancy. You still have to switch between your weapon and flashlight, rely on muzzle flashes to see in some combat situations, and there’s no new weapons or enemies. What the mod does do is change is how things function and behave. Your movement speed and jump height have been increased and the flashlight is brighter. One of the biggest changes is the reduction of max armor and ammo pools and adjusted clip sizes. Weapons now hold less ammo than before. It may not seem like much but it actually made me think more often. I found myself switching weapons frequently, relying on certain weapons for certain threats, and trying to be more careful with my shots. That’s not to say ammo becomes a problem because it was rare that I ever actually ran out of ammo for most of the commonly used weapons and there’s still plenty of ammo in the environments. But the ammo reduction results in a bigger emphasis on exploration because you want to make sure you’re stocked up and ready for any threat the game throws at you.
Reduced ammo counts isn’t the only change related to weapons. Grenades bounce less erratically, the shotgun’s spread is reduced, and projectiles from certain weapons move faster and their push is reduced. Basically almost all the weapons have been subtly changed and if you’re familiar with how they function in the vanilla game, the changes here will be noticeable. As a result, I think some weapons do feel better than their vanilla counterparts.
Enemies have also been modified. The health of some foes has been increased and enemies like the Hellknight and Lost Soul are more aggressive. Imp fireballs now bounce off the terrain, the Cacodemon’s plasma ball has larger splash damage, and the Wraith teleports faster and no longer stands still to wait for the teleport animation to end. A lot of the changes make enemies more dangerous and that certainly applies to Pinky which might just be one of the most dangerous enemies in the game now, excluding bosses. It not only has more health but it no longer stops to roar while chasing the player so it just comes at you relentlessly. A good example of a small change that makes a big difference. Then there’s the bosses. They have more health, the speed of Vagary’s projectiles is reduced making it easier to dodge them, the Guardian releases more projectiles, and Cyberdemon attacks all the time and instead of firing a rocket, it unleashes a ball. I would say the boss battles do feel more intense which is good. I didn’t play through the game on the Nightmare difficulty but according to the change log, Nightmare no longer reduces your health to 25% and Saboath (Corrupted Sarge) is impossible to beat on Nightmare with only 25% health unless you have a fully charged Soul Cube.
There’s not much to say about the audiovisual presentation that hasn’t been said already. The mod does alter some lighting effects and features some new and improved sound effects as mentioned earlier. Other than that, it still looks like Doom 3 and you can probably combine this with certain visual mods for a better looking presentation if that’s what you really want. On the technical side, the game and expansion ran smooth and the only issue I encountered was a couple of crashes during my time with Resurrection of Evil.
Doom 3 Golden Edition is pretty faithful to the vanilla experience. If you like Doom 3’s mechanics and the type of horror it attempts to convey, the Golden Edition mod doesn’t really mess with any of that. It doesn’t try to make the gameplay more action-packed and it’s not trying to dazzle you with shiny new textures and models. It’s not trying to turn Doom 3 into something it’s not. It features a lot of small changes that, when added up, result in a more challenging Doom 3 experience. I can’t say it resolves many of the issues I, personally, have with the vanilla game but it does make for more tense gameplay which is a great thing and I really enjoyed my time with it. In fact, I was impressed with how some of the seemingly small changes improved things. Most of the enemies no longer feel like complete pushovers and I was actually mindful of my ammo, what weapons are best against what threats, and tried to make my shots count. This all results in more exciting gameplay and action.
I do recommend Doom 3 Golden Edition. It’s a Doom 3 mod for Doom 3 fans. It’s for those that love Doom 3 but maybe wish that a few things were tweaked and I think that’s what this mod attempts to do. Tweak things to better fit the idea or vision id Software was aiming for with Doom 3. One of the mod creator’s responses to a comment describes it perfectly; “Golden Edition is a hypothetical alternative version of Doom 3 that we could’ve gotten back in 2004.” If that sounds like something you would be interested in, definitely check it out.