"Bloodline": new-ish Doom 2 megawad

[Linguica]

https://www.moddb.com/mods/bloodline-wad

 

I saw this over on ModDB, and while it appears more-or-less designed for use with a gameplay mod, it is still a full vanilla-ish Doom 2 megawad with emphasis on atmosphere over action.

 

Quote

30 level PWAD for Doom II. Single player or 2-4 co-op. Custom music. Continuous open world/realism theme.

 

• Ultimately designed to play with Brutal Doom in OpenGL rendering mode with these settings: Options> Display Options> OpenGL Options> Preferences> change "Sector Light Mode" and "Fog Mode" to "Standard". Make sure to use a source port that supports OpenGL rendering like Zandronum or GZDoom.
• Playing in vanilla or other software rendering modes will result in too dark and too bright areas.
• Tested with source ports Chocolate Doom, Crispy Doom, Zandronum, GZDoom, ZDoom, QZDoom, PrBoom+, Doomsday and Legacy on both PC Windows 8.1 and Mac OS X 10.11/10.12. Game crashes may occur when playing in Chocolate Doom on Mac OS X 10.12.
• Freelook needed. Jumping/crouching not needed. Falling damage should be turned off.
• Requires IWAD doom2.wad to play.
• Start MAP01 end MAP30.
• Custom music.
• Difficulty "walk-in-the-park".

 

[Memfis]

Weird stuff. Rudimentary gameplay, several monsterless maps, very minimalistic detail, quiet ambient music, level progression with a hint of plot. Probably not worth a lot of attention unless you're yakfak.
 

Some pics:

Spoiler

 

 

 

[grrfield]

Currrently at map 10 and played it with 2. It is not that bad at all. The guy is experimenting with some stuff that turns out to be funnish. I like the style of hugheiness (if that is a word) of the maps.

 

It could have used a few more monsters though. There is some nice detailing, but not very consistent. The teleporting spaceships are nice eg..

 

I will proceed with that mapset anyway.

[DoodGuy]

Its weird to say at least, the maps are huge, but very few enemies... Not to mention the enemy placements.

[eharper256]

Sounds interesting. I like spooky low enemy intensity maps.

 

EDIT: Yep, its pretty much a basic romp. Lots of novice mapper standards, like misalignments, long straight corridors, and its needlessly massive. It's also clearly made for brutal doom and assumes you have a Rifle start, and doesn't even give you a shottie until map 4 or so. So that was an interesting challenge for me.

 

However, he really has tried some interesting things here and there, like these planes near the start:

 

This fairly interesting green sky castle:

 

And this Teleporting Cyberdemon battle arena was creative and probably the best map.

 

Though its headscratching at several points, and has some odd enemy placement (the river with lots of deaf mancubi facing away from the player was the pretty silly highlight of that). Quite often, you need to quicksave and make a leap of faith off a massive cliff to progress in a level. But don't jump off random places either since some places are acid pits without return teleports. -_-' I eventually died to a castle full of chaingunners and called it a day there.

Edited July 9, 2018 by eharper256 : review

[Gothic]

I'm guessing this is 100+MB because of MP3/ogg music, right?

[Pegleg]

17 hours ago, Memfis said:

Weird stuff. Rudimentary gameplay, several monsterless maps, very minimalistic detail, quiet ambient music, level progression with a hint of plot. Probably not worth a lot of attention unless you're yakfak.

You should probably explicitly mention @yakfak to ensure he knows you were thinking of him and can take a look.

 

As for the megawad, I haven't seen much of it, but from what I've seen it has some interesting things to try, but could stand some refinement in places.

[KVELLER]

This one of those cases where, even it isn't the best, it has enough originality to ensure that you won't forget about it any time soon. At least I won't. Played through the hole thing BTW, Brutal Doom included.

[Gideon020]

It's an...interesting mapset, but I dislike that the final levels rapidly turn into a confusing, disjointed set of mashups of previous levels that seem on the surface to be pretty lazy, and it isn't helped by the lack of custom intermission text to provide any form of context.

 

Still, the early maps are good, and while monster placement and ammo provision is sparse, they played well and smoothly.

[elborbahquarama]

hello, i am very sorry to update this very old thread if i'm not supposed to but i wanted to let anyone who is interested know that this pretty strange wad is still being updated up to this day (last time was in january 2023 to be more precise)

it seems the creator of this wad has never really interacted with the doom community and i guess everybody forgot about it and from what's i've seen from the older versions people played back in 2018 it definitely looks like a whole bunch of stuff was added and modified since then without loosing the weird atmosphere it has going on

i can't say that it's one of my favorite wads or anything but it is definitely a pretty curious one and i guess it could be worth checking out for anybody who is interested in this sort of stuff, the link to download it is still the same one that was shared in the original post