is blood actually as good as people think it is?

21 minutes ago, Powerlord said:

It's funny to hear people complain about hitscanner hell and poorly designed bosses when we're also talking about doom and final doom, I think several decades of swimming through swarms of ultra refined limit removing doom mods might give some people a little bias.

what's even funnier is to hear you say that when i'm very much a fan of 90s wads. maybe, just maybe, you don't know what you're talking about with that :)

21 minutes ago, Powerlord said:

I think blood stands on its own even compared to incredible modern doom heavy hitters like eviternity or valiant or ancient aliens

...lol. you goofy motherfucker.

I do love Blood, but I will admit the enemy roster is pretty much carried by the cultists, which are not only some of the best aspects of the combat, but also some of the worst. Best because they're the only enemies in the game that actually pose a threat to the player, chucking dynamite into your spot and in general keeping you on your toes. However once you start cranking the difficulty up from lightly broiled, the fun factor with them begins to slightly diminish.

Now, I don't have an issue with hitscanners in games, methods to make them feel fair to the player do exist such as giving them a wind up, or in the case of the ones with machine guns, fire in short bursts to allow more leeway for you to get behind cover. The HECU soldiers from Half-Life are a good example for these practices. The issue with the cultists on higher difficulties is that they have zero wind up, and start firing at you the moment they're alerted to your presence. Fanatics are the most egregious, since their tommy gun can effortlessly riddle away your health before you even have a moment to retreat. They can be stunned when they get hit, yes, but not much can save you from their instantaneous attacks aside from memorizing their locations and attacking pre-emptively.

As for the rest of the monsters, most of them boil down to either being trivial, or just flat out obnoxious. Gargoyles and Phantasm for example aren't difficult to deal with at all, but they have a habit of staying up in the air for a varied amount of time while constantly screaming at you. Butchers, as well as most enemies with projectiles, can barely, if not at all, hit you when you're crouching. They are still fun to fight with, just not that difficult compared to the cultists.

Despite all this, I still love the game. And while Duke 3D is probably my favorite build engine game overall, Blood does eclipse it with its atmosphere and weapon roster. But I think Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior's enemy roster is better than Blood's, but really they all have their own flaws.

Yes it is as good as people say. Not liking games everyone else likes is forbidden under Internet Bylaws book 3 section 12. Failure to abide will result in a sentence of 3 to 6 months of getting lightly insulting memes sent to you. Sentence length subject to change if everyone gets bored and forgets.

More seriously, it's ok not to like Blood. Maybe it's just not for you. I like the game a lot but it definitely has issues and it wouldn't be in my top 10 if i could be bothered to make one.

Play on lower difficulties and enemies die in seconds because of less than half the health (or sometimes a third compared to Extra Crispy), a lot of them are also insanely weak to a specific weapon so knowing those makes it even easier, they also sometimes resist the hell out of a weapon so knowing those also helps. for rats and other pests you'll almost always have spray can which makes it real easy to kill armies of them so they shouldn't be doing anything. or you can kill them by running and jumping over them (slightly harder in ports).

Blood has an unfair rep because people are used to games having much easier UV difficulties  while Blood unlashes those god forsaken cultists on you (and fighting them around corners will just get you killed especially in Extra Crispy, have to use dynamite or keep running as they'll usually shoot where you were and miss).

7 hours ago, roadworx said:

...i know that it's known as a hard game, but the difficulty feels much more along the lines of "irritating bullshit" than it does "challenge that you can overcome"....

7 hours ago, yakfak said:

the dynamite stick is an interesting weapon and it has cool music and a peculiar atmosphere but it is literally too annoying to play imo

6 hours ago, roadworx said:

...also, if higher difficulties in your game make it frustrating to play no matter your skill level, then you suck at balancing difficulty :p

3 hours ago, Astar said:

I love the way Blood looks aesthetically. I love the crispy textures, muted rust palette and dithering.

 

But compared to Doom, it's gameplay certainly doesn’t have the same impact

Like Astar says, aesthetically LOVE Blood. But I never played the shit out of it back in the day because I got bored of the

"irritating bullshit". I'm not that good of a 3dFPS video game player so a game has to offer something else for me to get

stuck on it like I am with Doom. Loved Heretic, notso much Hexen, though I feel Hex was still decent and spent more time

with it than Blood. My friends were always into "the next big thing" when it came to the FPS stuff. Therefore, I was always

sampling it in real time even if it took me a bit to getting around to seriously trying to play them. I never really cared for

Quake, for instance. But when Quake II hit, I got hooked good on that. Duke Nukem was awesome but the one that had

me always coming back to play more was Redneck Rampage. I guess I'm a sucker for humor in video games.

WHERE MY REAL NAMMERS AT???!!🗣🇻🇳🔫

Just now, Kwisior said:

WHERE MY REAL NAMMERS AT???!!🗣🇻🇳🔫

Heh, I actually kinda like that game, despite it being complete shite.

I enjoy Blood as much as Duke3d tbh. For different reasons, but when Blood is good and your SSG'ing everything to death while the world explodes around you.. and the screams.. :-) Yeah it's cool and a great game, it does suffer from some bullshit however, although I don't actually mind the hitscan.

Ive tried and failed to get into Blood countless times. Even now with a Night Dive remaster and Raze as sourceport thats for SOME reason very familiar to the Doom port ive used for over a decade, I still just cant get into it. I think its the difficulty, I die far too often and its just frustrating. The atmosphere is great, sure, but I rarely get to enjoy it.

2 minutes ago, Devalaous said:

Ive tried and failed to get into Blood countless times. Even now with a Night Dive remaster and Raze as sourceport thats for SOME reason very familiar to the Doom port ive used for over a decade, I still just cant get into it. I think its the difficulty, I die far too often and its just frustrating. The atmosphere is great, sure, but I rarely get to enjoy it.

In the night dive version you can set increase monster density but keep their stats the same as lower difficulties, might make it a lot less frustrating to play when cultists don't remove your health bar in one second.

Games were built different back than. I remember getting my ass kicked in Eye of the Beholder 2 and Descent, yet they are my most vivid gaming memories from my childhood. Blood is the exact same. I still remember that train level...

Looking back, they are frustrating and unfair and well... not up to today's standards. But I firmly believe Blood was one of the most influential fps of its time.

Yeah, I'm not too fond of Blood either. There's some very good stuff in it but when I have to approach every corner with just as much (if not more) care as I would in tactical shooters, then there's something very wrong. Like, I don't like hitscan enemies to begin with and I wish designers would minimize their use as much as possible, but at least something like DOOM's Chaingunner has an attack with a good amount of windup. Blood's cultists on the other hand lack the weaknesses necessary to make them somewhat tolerable.

And sure, I could just lower the difficulty, but it results in the game becoming piss easy, especially since the hitscanners are only ones that posed a real threat to begin with. Not matter what the balancing is borked in one way or another.

people enjoy different things to you, youre overthinking it if youre implying people pretend they like the game for idunno.. clout?

"Blood" definitely lives up to the hype. But if you want to play it Doom-style, don't go above 3rd difficulty. Those last two skill levels is what makes the game unfun if you're used to the more casual gameplay style of Doom. The reaction time of those cultists is a real showstopper on higher skilll settings.

Oh man, I'm a huge fan.  I played it a bunch when I was younger, and coming back I turned up the difficulty and it was just the masochistic exercise I enjoy.

All the weapons are really satisfying to use, and the enemies are (almost*) all really fun to kill, and to me that's about 90% of making that style of FPS exciting.  The level design is great and varied and there are secrets all over that I can actually find, although those are things that I find get in the way when done badly rather than make the experience.

I love a slog though.  I'm one of those "you can never play Dark Souls for the first time again" kinds of guys.  I like a rough challenge that will kill me multiple times so I feel like I've beaten a worthy opponent when I clear it, and feel like a student turned master when I return to it.

*-the hellhounds being vulnerable to water/tesla makes fighting them either too easy or a waste of time imo

IMO, Blood is the best Build Engine game from the 90s.

Okay, so, I haven't played Witchaven II or TekWar or Extreme PaintBrawl...so maybe one of those is actually the best, who can say?

2 hours ago, fruity lerlups said:

people enjoy different things to you, youre overthinking it if youre implying people pretend they like the game for idunno.. clout?

well no shit.

the reason i made this topic is less because "everyone who likes something i don't only likes it for clout" and more "i think it'd be interesting to have a discussion not blindly praising the game but instead focusing on some major flaws that it has", because that's something that you don't see anywhere near as often imo. sometimes it's interesting to bring out the criticism for something beloved; don't get me wrong, i like the game (which, if you read the op, you'd see that i literally said that), but i do think it's rather overrated. duke3d just feels better to play, even if its atmosphere is nowhere near as good.

It's a good game that does not play nice, so you shouldn't play nice either. Use TNT to hit enemies around corners as your default strategy.

Also, the Death Wish mapset remains the best BUILD game of all time, and it looks like it will become even bestester in the future, hopefully sometime this year.

The biggest issue Blood has to being more accessible to enjoy is probably the cultist type enemies. Their near-instant reaction time to mow you down that requires the same to stop them. This was the biggest issue for me, but once I figured out different strategies and got used to taking them on, the game became much less unfair and much, much more enjoyable. I stick with Well Done difficulty, and it has definitely become my favorite of the original 3 main Build games. Caleb's lines, the sound design, the visuals and atmosphere and the combat.

On the last one, I really like how involved and dynamic the game's arsenal is with respect to the different enemy types. And I have the best, least frustrating time when I put that to good use. Pretty much every weapon has a really good ability to fold one or more enemy types, while being standard or even highly wasteful on others. It's pretty uncommon, you'd think the damage system works on some simple, linear design but it doesn't. There is a really neat, effective and satisfying strategy to taking down every enemy type in the game.

As was already mentioned, the play style is quite different to the Doom-engine based games and even Duke 3D. If it's not something you can get used to, then yeah you're not going to have a good time with the game. It is what it is.

The way I deal with cultists is taking them down out of sight as much as possible. A single flair round kills most cultist types except the dynamite ones, so I tag one or more cultists in the area and just stay out of their sight until they're gone, no stress. It's especially good for the ones situated very far or higher ground. The game gives you tons of flair rounds, too. I also lob dynamite around corners; the alt fire really, really comes in handy. That usually deals with them nearby (it's also good against groups of them, or ones situation higher or lower from your ground level). If it doesn't, I have either the shotgun with finger on alt fire or machine gun out waiting for them to meet me around the corner; I also use either of these in the same way if I alerted any of them, just hide and wait for them to come to me so I can surprise attack them. The cultists tend to stop attacking and retreat for a bit when you hit them with shotgun or machine gun fire. In fact, they tend to remain stunned by the machine gun.

1 hour ago, Kinsie said:

It's a good game that does not play nice, so you shouldn't play nice either. Use TNT to hit enemies around corners as your default strategy.

 

Also, the Death Wish mapset remains the best BUILD game of all time, and it looks like it will become even bestester in the future, hopefully sometime this year.

Fleshed Out is also excellent, except for the first few maps. It plays things a little more loose and exploratory, though. 30 massive maps. French Meat is pretty good as well. I like all of those mapsets more than the base game by a huge margin.

13 hours ago, Kinsie said:

It's a good game that does not play nice, so you shouldn't play nice either. Use TNT to hit enemies around corners as your default strategy.

 

Also, the Death Wish mapset remains the best BUILD game of all time, and it looks like it will become even bestester in the future, hopefully sometime this year.

i do still have to play death wish because i hear nothing but praise for it, including about how the level design trumps the original quite a bit, so i'm thinking that my opinion would likely change after playing through that.

i'll give my thoughts on the dynamite later cuz rn i'm tired af lol

11 hours ago, roadworx said:

i do still have to play death wish because i hear nothing but praise for it, including about how the level design trumps the original quite a bit, so i'm thinking that my opinion would likely change after playing through that.

Honestly any of the good Blood mapsets surpass the original maps the vast majority of the time. Stuff like Death Wish and Fleshed Out are on another planet compared to the base maps. I love Blood, but it does have some problems. Like we were saying, the bosses suck - they aren't even ballbusters, they're just lame and tanky. The phantom enemy has the most annoying scream, and has a tendancy to be irritating to fight. The maps in the second half of the game aren't as good as the first half. I don't like the voodoo doll/staff/deodorant can that much. The Nightdive port had problems. But when you get a good mapset that uses the game's resources with today's knowledge of what makes the game work (and what doesn't) it really just works.

Blood is my favorite fps, but I do think it's a touch overrated. I think it's more consistent than Duke or Shadow Warrior, and the highs are very high - plus I'm a horror fan so Blood's reference pool and atmosphere definitely resonate with me. That said, ever since Civvie made his video, I've noticed a tendency for people to say its perfect or objectively the best which is utter bullshit. It has its fair share of problems just like any other video game.

2 minutes ago, roadworx said:

i'm someone who values gameplay significantly more than atmosphere, 

the point is a lot of us like it for the gameplay, not just the atmosphere. It had a unique gameplay loop, everything feels like a wild west shootout, your ducking behind cover, throwing dynamite, and then theres explosive run and gun sectiond with napalm, and interesting enemy designs like the ghosts mix up the gameplay loop.

12 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

Blood has some great map designs and interesting set pieces (like crashing a train, infiltrating a haunted ship, spooky hotels, demonic funhouses...) and I didn't struggle with the game too much...

 

Until the expansions, then that's the buttfucking you been waiting for. I swear to God I see Cheogh one more time I am going to lose it, I am sick and tired of fighting 400 tesla cultists just for my reward to be Cheogh again.

The greatest failure in this thread was that none of you corrected me, it isn't Cheogh, it's the Stone Gargoyle, which funny enough has more HP than Cheogh.

I am disappointed in the lack of all your's (all of you's? This is a grammar massacre God damn) usual vigilance, disgraceful.

18 minutes ago, fruity lerlups said:

the point is a lot of us like it for the gameplay, not just the atmosphere. It had a unique gameplay loop, everything feels like a wild west shootout, your ducking behind cover, throwing dynamite, and then theres explosive run and gun sectiond with napalm, and interesting enemy designs like the ghosts mix up the gameplay loop.

ehhh...idk about the ghosts.

the issue with the ghosts is that they pose no real threat and are kinda just annoying, and not in a good way that makes you wanna prioritize them like the pain elemental. they're annoying to fight, and while i do think you can do some interesting stuff with them, it feels like they're never used in a way that emphasizes those strengths. they become invincible for a period of time, which kinda just breaks the action (not good!), and it feels like they would've been far better if they hadn't done that. though at the same time that niche is filled by gargoyles, though those are a whole other issue, heh

part of the issue i think is that in an attempt to set themselves apart from other games they made all the enemies very unique, but in the process made them all far too restrictive in their usage for their own good

When it comes to Blood being overrated, I think it kind of is, or at least was a couple of years ago, and I think there's a specific reason for that. Blood, along with Doom 64, for a long time were quite obscure, and when the gaming community at large finally found out about them, which happened relatively recently when the remasters came out and the big youtubers made videos about them, this made the gaming community praise them as hidden gems, and overlook these games' flaws. But I think this overpraising is dying down a bit now.

Bloog is goog.

IMO its biggest flaw isn't the enemy design (it's not Doom2 or Quake tier but they do their part and the level design carries the game), it's that the difficulty is very front-loaded. The first episode in particular is a real ball-buster, with cultists being cultists, resurrecting zombies (if you don't figure out you need to blow 'em up), and fairly limited equipment for the first few levels (GLHF if you run out of dynamite). Been a while since I've played the game, so take this recollection with a gallon of salt, but maybe try out the other episodes if the first one is being a bit Much(tm).

I guess since I'm here nitpicking, I'm also a big stickler on thematic variance (i.e. does each episode and/or section of the game have interesting distinct themes?), and Blood suffers a tiny bit in this regard -- E1 and E2 feel very distinct, with the latter's snowy theme setting it apart, but by the time E3 rolls around the themes start to blur together a bit, and E4 is all over the place. But this same "problem" also affects Duke3D (E3's theme is E1's again), Doom 2, Quake and its sequel, and many many other games from all eras, really. It's just an oddball personal ralphis grievance that rears its ugly head from time to time. :P

BUT

This is indeed all nitpickery. Game's easily an 8.5-ish out of 10, if I were to assign a score from the gut.

Speaking as someone who tried Blood before (if on the second hardest difficulty) I somewhat agree. Dynamite is really fun to use, but not quite so much when a lot of the enemies are tanky enough to take more than one thrown maybe just to the side of them. And oddly enough, gameplay is not terribly important in Blood's case. But the first episode is detailed enough to where I'd rather just take the sights and sounds in whereas the other episodes' themes are different enough that it would make more sense for the difficulty to be less front-loaded. 

I actually don't mind peekaboo shooting, but it's true there's little to no time to react. I'm pretty easy but that's just a little bit too much for me.

Does the "throw dynamite around every corner" strat work without memorizing where every ambush in every level is first? Do they give you enough dynamite? I've fully beaten the game once, a while back, but I dont even remember on which difficulty, or what my playstyle was, other than the fact that I was definitely save-scumming a lot. But I've been starting different episodes now and again and playing a few levels to see if its still as bad as I thought initially. The impression I have is that dealing with cultist ambushes is very dependent on foreknowledge, or at least intuition developed through enough exposure to the level design style, which is really not my cup of tea. Though to be honest, it really does get easier past the first episode, trying the other ones tends to be less frustrating than going for another attempt at a playthrough from the very beginning. The train station in particular is the stuff of nightmares for some reason.

Also, what's the most authentic way to play through it (but with the savegame bug fixed) these days?

18 hours ago, roadworx said:

well, i mean, the game is good as fuck, but I agree, even on the easier difficulties it's still unnecessarily hard. i'd say the one who was the most balance on that sense is duke3d