Delving on the comments of what I wrote below.

Jason McCullough:
So my official Doom 3 comments:

1. *Uncertainty* is scary. Knowing something is there, but not quite where, or what it is, is scary. Note these are not equivalent to “really dark and enemies jumping at you every single time you’d expect them to if you were designing a b-grade predictable horror movie.” The game is so goddamn predictable I got bored after an hour.
2. What the fuck is up with the armor and ammo scattered all over the place? It makes no sense in the context of the game world at all, and it isn’t fun.
3. What’s the point in having secrets and lots of items when it’s just ammo and armor? This might be fun if there was Duke Nukem 3d-style items like the holoduke that you actually could use and plan around, but nope. It’s just drudgery.
4. The scripting is static. That guy who tells you to stop moving in the initial airlock where they bio-scan you, fresh off the arrival ship? He always says that, whether you’re moving or not. Lazy.
5. Single well-lit monster syndrome!

God, what a turd.

myself:
All your comments are in-line with the other thread I wrote:

Doom 3 starts to become extremely annoying NOT because the unexpected is expected. This is a side-effect. It becomes annoying because we know what the possibilities of the game are. We define better the shape of the box and we start to be able to look at it from the outside. A scene isn’t scary anymore because it happens in-text, but it’s scary because it *always* happens out-of-text.

Jason McCullough:
But mine has bullet points!

myself:
Yes, but what I did was about collecting all those points and summarize them under the same flaw:
– The design breaks the “suspension of disbelief” because it exploits artificial “out of game” design strategies.

What you wrote in those points is true and originated by the same flaw in the design stage: “out of game” design.

DrCrypt:
Jason, even though (as H. Rose rightly j’accuses or il t’accuses or something) you ripped off H Rose’s penetrarating denunciation of Doom 3’s design flaws wholesale, I’d like to thank you anyway. So here goes: Thanks for neatly summarizing Koontz 2’s plodding forty paragraph post on things we all said about Doom 3 a month ago while expunging from your summary the bizarre comparisons he made to an MMORPG completely dissimilar to it in every way.

myself:
Fun that PcWorld has just posted a “mixed” review between DooM 3 and City of Heroes:

“Both are hugely entertaining, and both cater to a very specific desire of gamers: to remove one’s self completely from reality for a few hours per day (or week).”

Just a re-iteration of the flaws I focused. The purpose is the immpersion of the “spectator” inside an experience. And there are basic flaws in this process.

It isn’t important if the experience are completely different (single player FPS and a mmorpg), because there are many, shared purposes and mechanics under the skin.