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.
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.
