How would a modern Blood game look?

[Woolie Wool]

At that point, why not just make a new game with a new name and a new setting?

[seed]

Well, yeah, that would be the idea, a new game that doesn't try to be a carbon copy of the old or mostly the same but HD 2.0, but with its own setting and identity.

 

As about appealing to the old fans first and foremost... never thought I'd see myself saying this unironically, but absolutely not. If we've seen anything with newDoom and other series, this is a huge mistake, nostalgia pandering never ends well, and those people absolutely cannot be pleased no matter how it would turn out, for better or worse. Yeah, I'm serious, "old hardcore fans" should take a hike and stick to the original game, to avoid "feeling betrayed" when it turns out not the way they expected.

 

Reboots should aim to attract new audiences instead and move on.

[hybridial]

1 hour ago, seed said:

Well, yeah, that would be the idea, a new game that doesn't try to be a carbon copy of the old or mostly the same but HD 2.0, but with its own setting and identity.

 

As about appealing to the old fans first and foremost... never thought I'd see myself saying this unironically, but absolutely not. If we've seen anything with newDoom and other series, this is a huge mistake, nostalgia pandering never ends well, and those people absolutely cannot be pleased no matter how it would turn out, for better or worse. Yeah, I'm serious, "old hardcore fans" should take a hike and stick to the original game, to avoid "feeling betrayed" when it turns out not the way they expected.

 

It doesn't matter what audience they aim at I think, really, they either make something good or they don't. Doom Eternal is a nice game but then you get things like the horrible attempts to revive Contra or Battletoads for a "new audience". And then you get something like Bloodstained which is classic Castlevania in all but name that has been well recieved by most. 

 

Whom they target doesn't matter as much as one would think, its all about the vision they do in fact follow, and sometimes you get Doom Eternal, and other times you get Star Trek Picard utter shit. 

[wheresthebeef]

I would love more Blood, but I honestly can't decide if I'd want a full blown Doom '16/Eternal AAA big budget game or a smaller retro FPS similar to Blood 1; hell, even use the build engine.

[Man of Doom]

Something I've kind of realized when it came to the old guard coming to the new generation: That each title has something to offer in regards to gameplay that's more than just "shoot all the things".

 

Doom 2016/Eternal opted for a more God of War-like approach (the original trilogy, I mean), Wolfenstein TNO/TOB/TNC opted for a slightly more grounded approach without devolving into a CoD clone, ROTT 2013 pretty much went full arcade mode, DNF went for a more Halo-ish approach (to its detriment, of course), Shadow Warrior has some DMC aspects in it (and of course there was that whole looter-shooter thing for the second game).

Perhaps as @Archanhell said, maybe a potential Blood game could take on the DNA of a Soulsborne title? It doesn't necessarily have to rely on pop-culture as much and could still have a shade of comedy that's so black that it might as well be vantablack. If anything, the black comedy of Blood in my opinion is much more striking and much more characteristic of its particular style than all of the pop-culture references it used even if it used the latter as heavy influences (though using various horror stories as inspiration, especially the Lovecraftian ones, couldn't hurt).

 

As for all the things about "why should a new Blood game exist when we already have the original version?", well, it's pretty much the same thing as "why should a new Doom game exist when we already have the original version?"

The thing is, as we've seen with the likes of Doom 2016 and Eternal, old dogs are very much capable of new tricks while still reminding people of what made the franchise special in the first place. It's really all about making sure that a new title has something to offer.

All of that said, I feel like an absolute killing would be made if Blood was finally ported to consoles considering just how surprisingly popular and fondly-remembered it really is.

[seed]

7 hours ago, hybridial said:

It doesn't matter what audience they aim at I think, really, they either make something good or they don't. Doom Eternal is a nice game but then you get things like the horrible attempts to revive Contra or Battletoads for a "new audience". And then you get something like Bloodstained which is classic Castlevania in all but name that has been well recieved by most. 

 

Whom they target doesn't matter as much as one would think, its all about the vision they do in fact follow, and sometimes you get Doom Eternal, and other times you get Star Trek Picard utter shit. 

 

I would normally agree, you know, but then you get people who cannot be satisfied with anything but classic in HD and true 3D 2.0 and never stop screeching about how the new game isn't retro enough... that was what I was saying there.

 

If it's good, it's good, if it's bad, then it's bad, but some can never be pleased no matter what.

[jazzmaster9]

10 minutes ago, seed said:

 

I would normally agree, you know, but then you get people who cannot be satisfied with anything but classic in HD and true 3D 2.0 and never stop screeching about how the new game isn't retro enough

If its too samey = "Lazy Nostalgia Pandering, Stuck in the Past"

If its too Different = "Ruined the Series, Disrespected the Original"

[seed]

Just now, jazzmaster9 said:

If its too samey = "Lazy Nostalgia Pandering"

If its too Different = "Ruined the Series"

 

Ditto.

[hybridial]

I do think any sequel that is made under the circumstances that basically no one involved in the original is working on it, and it basically shares nothing in common with the original games beyond being in the same genre and is pretty clearly being made to cash in on the name of the original is by definition disrespectful.

 

And I say that with a particular game in mind right now, that being Baldur's Gate 3. I have seen quite a lot of hand wringing over that one. My attitude is it absolutely is a sequel in name alone and is simply using the name to cash in. I am willing to give it a chance on its own merits but, well I'm also prepared for the worst because I really hated Divinity Original Sin 2 and in particular I think the writing in it sucked. I don't know if anybody else would make a better Baldur's Gate 3 really but I do know there wasn't much need to drag its name up from the ether after the whole story was basically finished. 

[DNSKILL5]

18 hours ago, seed said:

As about appealing to the old fans first and foremost... never thought I'd see myself saying this unironically, but absolutely not.

 

I agree in the way you're saying this, but this is not what I was trying to say in my post. I said that if a new game was made, it should appeal to fans of the series and be accessible to newcomers. Hopefully I can explain better here,

 

Doom is iconic on a global level. Even if Doom 2016 had never come out, Doom/Doom II have made the series a household name for decades. Doom has a community that has been in existence for at least as long as the games released, and it has grown larger and more advanced over the years, spawning a lot of user content. Doom 2016 didn't need to appeal to old fans, and it didn't even need to garner a new audience to be honest. It's DOOM. People shit on Doom III all the time, but it was a big deal for a lot of us that were alive when it came out. It was the first Doom in a long time, and whether you enjoyed Doom III or not, it was successful for Id. I'm fortunate enough to have lived to see the new games come out as well, and the hype existed for me with every Doom release. What I'm getting at here is, Doom doesn't really have to prove itself. It's Doom, people will buy it from the name alone, and word spreads fast. Doom isn't a hidden gem, Doom is known all over the world, and even if a shitty Doom game did come out, it wouldn't ruin the legacy of Doom. 

 

Blood, on the other hand, does not have this luxury of being remembered as much as Doom/Doom II. There is much less of a community presence to Blood, and yes, there technically is a community but look at how inactive it often is. If a new game comes out, there won't be much for newcomers to get in to currently. While I absolutely do not share this belief myself, there are people who find DOSBox to be too complicated, and they may have written Blood off long ago already before any of these ports came to be like Raze, NBlood, and BloodGDX (there's probably one or two I'm not remembering) and could be completely unaware of these ports. Blood II is critically panned by everyone, especially by those who have never played it, so the chances of a newcomer having any interest in Blood II are pretty slim. That leaves them with little to nothing to feel nostalgia over, and most people who are not fans of similar games won't bother playing the first game, unless it was ported to consoles where the average person could get into the game. There, they might find out there's a console specific community related to the game, and find out about the PC ports through there, possibly leading to a bloom in user content for the game. This sort of happened with Duke 3D when the XBLA port came out, but we all know how DNF turned out soon after that lol. So to me, you can't just ignore the old fans of a series that is already clinging to life. You have to keep new players in mind above all for it to sell, but I don't see this happening in the first place. Blood is a cult classic for a reason, and I think that's where it honestly belongs. A "hidden gem" of the 90s FPS scene that had a rushed sequel that ultimately killed off any interest in the series from the developers, publishers, and gamers in general. 

[seed]

5 hours ago, Gerolf said:

Blood, on the other hand, does not have this luxury of being remembered as much as Doom/Doom II. There is much less of a community presence to Blood, and yes, there technically is a community but look at how inactive it often is. If a new game comes out, there won't be much for newcomers to get in to currently. While I absolutely do not share this belief myself, there are people who find DOSBox to be too complicated, and they may have written Blood off long ago already before any of these ports came to be like Raze, NBlood, and BloodGDX (there's probably one or two I'm not remembering) and could be completely unaware of these ports. Blood II is critically panned by everyone, especially by those who have never played it, so the chances of a newcomer having any interest in Blood II are pretty slim. That leaves them with little to nothing to feel nostalgia over, and most people who are not fans of similar games won't bother playing the first game, unless it was ported to consoles where the average person could get into the game. There, they might find out there's a console specific community related to the game, and find out about the PC ports through there, possibly leading to a bloom in user content for the game. This sort of happened with Duke 3D when the XBLA port came out, but we all know how DNF turned out soon after that lol. So to me, you can't just ignore the old fans of a series that is already clinging to life. You have to keep new players in mind above all for it to sell, but I don't see this happening in the first place. Blood is a cult classic for a reason, and I think that's where it honestly belongs. A "hidden gem" of the 90s FPS scene that had a rushed sequel that ultimately killed off any interest in the series from the developers, publishers, and gamers in general. 

 

I definitely do agree that DOSBox is obnoxious though, there, I said it. It's a godsend for games that never received any kind of ports, but that's about it, I'd never use it if I had alternatives - and I very much do, mostly, especially for Blood.

 

You're also missing something important here: modding tools. Duke is popular for, sadly, nothing, as the base game is still well above most community content made for that game, and trust me I've played dozens of them, a large portion of it is simply mediocre, and its modding tools are also very primitive in comparison to Doom's - mapster32 holds no candle to something like UDB or even DB2, and that's not even bias, it's objectively true. With Blood it's even worse insofar as its editor never left DOS, if you want to make maps for it, you still have to use that. But here's the irony: Although Blood has its share of stinkers and fewer mods overall, just like all games, I would say its average mod quality is most definitely higher than Duke's, and its scene is also much more determined to deliver episodic adventures, whereas for Duke, a lot of stuff is just single maps.

 

Even if a Blood sequel is to be made, it needs to attract a new audience first, actually. Attract the old hardcore who? The Blood fanbase is very small, a fraction of that of Doom, it absolutely cannot rely on them to have much of a future because they're too few. Like you said, Blood is pretty much doomed to forever enjoy mainstream obscurity and be popular only among retro circles, whether that's a bad thing or not is debatable. And frankly, based on what I've seen new generations really don't appreciate these games at all, for them they're little more than silly, dated, relics of a time long gone with shitty, edgy protagonists and imagery trying too hard to be cool, full of bad taste and lame jokes, and for people who cannot run modern games on their potatoes. They're definitely not for them, they don't have the capacity to appreciate these games for what they are and what made them great. These games warrant a more sophisticated audience.

Edited August 10, 2020 by seed

[Man of Doom]

Even though this is technically fan-art more than anything, it does provide a pretty cohesive and relevant image into how a new Blood game could look:

 

The first two pics are supposed to be Caleb, the third pic is officially marked as Tchernobog even though it looks much closer to Cheogh, and the fourth pic is obviously that of a Cultist. (And there’s an image of a Gargoyle over on the artist’s VK page.)

 

IMO, it looks much closer to a dark fantasy style rather than outright horror, but it’s still an excellent ideation regardless.