On 7/9/2022 at 4:12 AM, Lippeth said:
BFG has a few things going against it for me but ultimately they're both equally playable. Below are only a few of the most obvious differences, comparisons and opinions I can think of. Take them with a grain of salt because it's just my point of view.
- BFG Edition changes a few sounds, and generally has a more balanced sound mix than the original, but if any sound had more than five variations (most do), all but the first five are removed from the game.
- There are a few memorable set pieces and monster encounters from the original that are completely removed. Not replaced, not improved, but removed.
- BFG Edition doesn't allow you to skip cutscenes, and pauses the entire game to save, which is absolutely obnoxious.
- 120 fps is nice, but depending on your monitor you'll have constant screen tearing unless you use another program to force it into borderless window mode. It could just be my hardware, so your mileage may vary.
- Some take issue with the darkness of the original and claim BFG is brighter and therefore better, though all it seems to do is raise the light scale which completely blows out the lightest parts, and leaves the darkness as dark as ever. If you do play the BFG Edition, setting r_lightscale to 2 restores the original lighting. If you want BFG's lightscale while playing the original, set it to 3.
- The FOV is zoomed in 10 degrees by default, but the same value has about a 20 degree difference. I did a side by side comparison, and in order to match the BFG Edition's fov at 90, I had to set the original's to 71, and to match the original's 90, I set the BFG Edition's to 110.
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- The flashlight differences are trivial because I use it so little in both versions that it really doesn't matter, though it may be the most contentious difference. While it's nice to have one less weapon to cycle through in the BFG Edition, the armor mounted flashlight does this jitter motion when going up stairs, or a weird bob when crouching, which looks pretty terrible.
- The BFG Edition omits the gunflash effect on weapons for some reason, so combined with the armor mounted flashlight, it functions identically to the duct tape mod for the original game.
- There are way more mods and great maps for the original, and the original is easier to mod and tweak in general.
- The amount of surplus ammo in the original is absurdly high, borderline comical. And for some reason The BFG Edition doubles this amount.
- Rather than finding source images or alternatives for the really low res textures, they focused on making the character models look...different. To get the most out of the textures in the original game, add the following to your autoexec or change them in the config file:
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seta image_usePrecompressedTextures "0"
seta image_useNormalCompression "0"
seta image_useCompression "0"
seta image_forceDownSize "0"
seta image_downSize "0"
seta image_downSizeBump "0"
seta image_downSizeSpecular "0"
seta image_roundDown "0"There are two mods for the BFG Edition that absolutely make it worth playing: Cst-Doom3BFG, which mainly just fixes bugs and restores things from the original while adding an astronomical amount of qol features, and RBDoom3 which opens up modding capabilities to the less technically savvy and adds ambient lighting which is pretty nice, though the lighting does blow out certain computer screens so you can't read them. Still a very ambitious mod that's worth experiencing.
I see a lot of comments about the original being more horror focused and the BFG Edition being more action focused, but really it's the exact same game at its core so I can't fully relate to that sentiment; BFG Edition feels more like a halfway interesting mod that ended up breaking more things than it tried to improve, but for all the gripes I have with it, when I'm in the middle of playing either version I don't feel any difference in genre or tone. Sure the BFG Edition cuts content and has worse looking character models, but that doesn't change how the game feels overall. They may be referring to the flashlight differences or increased light scale, or even movement speed and the ammo increase, but I mean even reserved mods are usually more drastic than that, and it's still Doom 3.
In the end, it comes down to personal preference or at least a curious interest, and while there's something special about the original to me that the BFG Edition undermines, I will say that The BFG Edition does some of the more obvious stuff out of the box which makes it seem like an easier option at first glance, and is fine if messing with a config file bothers you (though BFG Edition may still require a bit of faffing). The original does almost require a little bit of setup with an autoexec.cfg or the regular config file depending on your preferences, but even out of the box it's still by far the definitive version.
TL;DR
Just play both because you have them both lololol thanks for letting me rant.
Too informative and logical to be a rant. I prefer the term "essay."
Good stuff. I learned a lot. Thank you.
On Topic, I have never played the BFG edition, nor will I, because I am a classic oldschool snob.
