Shame they got there after 17,000 other games got there first (play-wise, that is).
Never seen anybody else do the "see or shoot but not both at the same time" thing, or the thing where using a computer is done by aiming at it, whereupon your crosshair becomes the cursor. Neither of those were things I'd ever seen before.
Other than that, "run through corridor, shoot stuff, find button, open door, shoot more stuff, run through door, shoot yet more stuff" has been a staple of the genre since it's conception -and guess who conceived of it? that's right, it was iD Software. I'd say they're entitled to stick to a few of the conventions of a genre that they created, surely? Off the top of my head, I can think of only two FPS games that didn't follow the template laid down with DOOM and Castle Wolfenstein - namely Half-Life (being somewhat more strongly story-driven than normal) and Deus Ex (being nonlinear).
It's a matter of some confusion to me that people are deriding Doom 3 for having mediocre and cliched gameplay. iD did what they wanted the first time, everyone copied them for ten years, and then when they do it again but with better graphics, hardware and a stronger engine, people rip the piss out of them for being uncreative and following suit when almost every FPS game for the last ten years has been copying THEM? It hardly seems fair. They laid the foundation, I say people should let them build the house as well, even if everybody else and their dogs have been using their blueprints.
Thank God that's not how Doom 1 came out.
Say what? you have to think in terms of context, here. DOOM 1, for its time, was a collosal game simply because nobody had done anything at all like it - even Wolfenstein was just a primitive shadow of DOOM. All it had single-layer levels with uniform lighting. DOOM introduced multi-storey, interactive levels, massive choice of weaponry and enemies, all kinds of stuff. By modern standards, it looks and IS primitive (the game engine made it impossible to place an accessible surface above another accessible surface, for example). If they'd managed to release even a low-res version of DOOM 3 back in 1991, with even only a tenth of the technical accomplishment, power and complexity of the modern engine, then it would still have been ten years ahead of all the other games out there. DOOM 1 is only given its high status because of its innovative and influential position in game history, whereas DOOM 3 is sneered at simply because it brings very little innovation and influence to one of the most popular breeds of computer game ever, where there is, by now, increasingly limited scope for improvement and inovation.
All this "Doom 3 did nothing new therfore it suck" crap is elitist bullshit, frankly, perpetuated and warped by cynical internet kids who were expecting iD to pull the second coming out of their arses because their older brothers told them just how much DOOM did to change the face of computer gaming. If somebody without iD's status or history had released DOOM 3, it would have been ticked as a "must own, very good" game by nearly everybody, who would then play it while waiting for iD to craft the holy grail - which, when released, would fall short of people's inflated expectiations.... you get the point. People have been fed on thirteen years of "iD software is teh rock! they produce the bestest and most original games EVAR!!!1!" so when the reality emerges that they are, in fact, merely very competent, rather than being the quasi-deities people were led to imagine, everybody felt let down.
having said that:
iD is pretty much an engine development company, not a game development company. They shouldn't have bothered with Doom 3, and just churned out iD engine v4.0. Kinda like the whole Unreal Engine. 
Gonna have to agree there - iD make good engines, but I think they should have completely passed the game-making torch over to Raven a few years back (just after producing Quake 3)
Not because I think that they shouldn't have made DOOM 3, or because I think they make bad games, you understand, but because I think they would have saved themselves a lot of slander and flak if they'd retired from the actual game-making scene and focussed purely on engine writing, which is where their greatest strength lies. DOOM 1 really was little more than a vehicle for the technology, even if people laud it as being a fantastic game in its own right.
Hell, I could come up with ways to improve the usual "press this button, then walk 1000 miles and press this other button" theme, given an afternoon.
Go on, then...
