I think Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal are far more successful as Doom games than Doom 3. Like the original 90s games, they're fast-paced, with wide-open combat areas and hordes of enemies on screen at the same time. The technical choices they made with id Tech 4 meant that a game like that wasn't really possible with the hardware available in 2004.
Maybe they just shouldn't have called it Doom? But its design as a slow-paced horror game, what with all the tedious monster closets, doesn't compare well to Resident Evil 4, which came out only a few months later.
Doom 3 on the other hand is different; you very rarely have more than one enemy to beat at a time. That single enemy can absolutely shred you if you are not very careful, you have to consider each engagement carefully. The darkness and blood are tuned to intensify that "fear" feeling. Rooms are very small, limiting your ability to dodge, almost to the point of inducing claustrophobia.
Painkiller was released almost as the same time as Doom and was way more action oriented, even tho it contains its fair share of gore.
It might be just me being overly frightening but I clearly remember 14y old me playing Doom at night with my headphones on and begin scared as fuckin hell when something appeared out of nowhere making guttural noises.
If you know how to strafe, and get to the point that you are habitually doing it almost every second of play, Doom is an action game where you are grossly overpowered compared to your opponents, more or less. To even slow Doom guy down you need tight corridors to cut his maneuverability down and enough enemies to clog him up even so. In open space the only real threat is being plinked away by the undodgeable hit scan weapons; high level play with speedruns involves a lot of managing that and hoping for decent luck. The non-hitscan weapons for them are, to quote a popular Youtuber, super easy, barely an inconvenience, which ironically makes the "weakest" enemies actually the most dangerous in the game in most places.
If you don't know how to strafe, which was very common at the time since we were all new to 3D spaces and even the ones we had used before may not have had a "strafe" option, Doom becomes much more a horror game. As others are saying about how Doom 3 gives you the choice of "seeing" or "shooting", but not both, Doom without strafing gives you the choice of either dodging or shooting, but not both. Shooting becomes a contest of nerves because you're committed for a second or two... to dodge an incoming missile involves turning, then moving. And that move is either "forward", vectoring into the oncoming missile, or backwards, vectoring away but heading away from your field of vision.
I remember both modes now, both playing it back when Doom I was the only release and I played the shareware, and I saw the "strafe" option and had no idea what it was or why I would use it, and playing in later years when strafing was simply part of my 3D "vocabulary" and I did it instinctively. It's almost two different games.
I suspect even at the time, the developers of Doom weren't used to strafing either, and in a weird way it has contributed to its classic status. If they were it would have been balanced much differently.
The same things that make it a gaming classic that people are still playing to this day are also gross violations of the current state of the art of game design and balance... the reader is invited to conclude from that statement whatever they like.
It wasn't really a good setup even in Wolf3D, but it took some time for the gamers to figure that out, and for those findings to percolate as the defaults in newer games. Even Quake (1) didn't have mouse look + WASD enabled by default. I think part of the inertia was that arrow keys were so ingrained as navigation by design (they're arrows!) that abandoning them just didn't make sense.
I don’t know if that’s fair. Doom had a timer in it and was built to have speed running in mind (even if that term hasn’t yet been coined).
There are other moves that developed much later.
I'd also observe that biologically, "strafing" is fairly hard, and the idea that you can strafe at the exact same speed you can run forward, safely, for long periods of time, is absurd. What we have instead is faster turning than keyboard controls offer, and more flexibility in general, but not literally the ability to "strafe" at 90 degree angles. It's an adaptation to limited 3D environments. (Strafe + forward gives a more realistic 45 degree angle of shoot to movement. I think in reality that would still be a fairly extreme thing to maintain all the time, but it's closer to realistic. 90 degrees is just absurd.) As it is implausible, it is perhaps not surprising it took a while to become popular.
Doom 3 plays very different to Doom 1&2.
Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal gameplay is much closer to Doom 1 and 2. Both are very "push-forward" shooters.
In any case, while I like Doom 3 I am glad the series didn't go in that direction afterwards. When lukewarm Quake 4 came out I was beginning to worry that id had lost its touch... luckily Doom 2016 saw a return to form.
I think it was E1M3 or something that had a large room whose lighting slowly pulsed at about half a hertz. With about 15 demons, that room was fucking unpleasant. In Doom 3, you’d just whip out your flashlight — no biggie.