After playing about half of the game I'm really not liking the changes here. The amount of ammo is absolutely ridiculous. To the point where there seems to be more than enough ammo to kill every single enemy with just a single weapon for the entire game. It really is too much. There was plenty of ammo in vanilla and you'd never come close to running out as long as you cycled your guns every once in a while. In BFG the storage closets are almost a waste of time because I was fully stocked almost every single time I found them. I just opened them anyway out of habit.
Also the levels are simply too bright. This isn't just slightly tweaking things to make the game more visible... they're exposing parts of the map that are basically flat, low detail filler that were meant to be hidden in darkness while the nice complex geometry was always well lit. Power's out in alpha labs 4? Could'a fooled me! No point is using the EFR, I can see just fine as it is.
It's really upsetting that people seem to have succeeded in convincing Carmack that D3's design was a mistake. Even if the flashlight 'issue' was born from a technical limitation, that's a limitation the game was entirely built upon and they created an interesting design ethos around it. So many parts of the game are completely stripped of tension and purpose. Why did they even keep the lamp escort npc now that you can see perfectly fine without him? It makes the clashing ideology so grossly conspicuous. It just feels empty.
I personally hope Doom 4 goes back to the speed and scale of the map and encounter design of D2, but this game was fine the way it was and Tim Willits' comments on contemporary design and demographics really don't make me expect anything nearly as good as vanilla D3.
I just felt like ranting for a bit because playing this for the last 2 hours kind of put me in a sour mood.
Enjoy your playthrough!
ROE is great as far as i can remember
ROE is indeed awesome, and in the last half it feels extremely intense with huge waves of enemies spawning in one after another. The game really started giving me that Doom adrenaline rush. It's just a shame the artifact makes everything ridiculously easy.
I will always hold ROE in high regard as one of the last 'proper' retail expansion packs before the dlc insanity began.