Curse of Blood - a 32 map megawad - RC1 released!

[waverider]

Curse of Blood is a brand new 32-level megawad for Doom 2. It's made by Mattias Johansson (waverider) and Michael Jan Krizik (valkiriforce).

 

You will need an advanced port to run this, new MBF21 ones are highly recommended, which also means "-complevel 21" is intended for demo recording and playback.

We've aimed to make a good-looking, atmospheric and challenging megawad that's fun to play. Hopefully we've succeeded in doing this. There's lots of new flats, textures and several new sprites also. In addition, there's two new enemies, we leave it to the player to find out what they are. There's also two modified monsters, one of them is the Spider Mastermind, which will now die faster from rockets but will take longer to beat with other weapons.

 

We hope most players should feel right at home with the skill levels. Skill 1-2 is easy, Skill 3 is moderately challenging and Skill 4 is at times very challenging - expect Alien Vendetta or similar difficulty at it's worst. We hope there's enough margin of error even in the toughest maps.

 

The theme in Episode 1 is tech-base with some other themes as well. Episode 2 comes mainly with a gothic / medieval theme. Much inspiration in E2 comes from the (imo) awesome games Heretic and Hexen. And then finally, the theme in Episode 3 is the not uncommon Hell theme :P (with some other themes as the void theme) 
Hopefully we have managed to make it feel fresh. Each episode starts out with smaller, easier maps and ends with bigger, more challenging maps.

 

We recommended reading the text files for addition project info.

 

Well we hope you will enjoy Curse of Blood! :) Please - fire up the comments! Here's the link to the wad: https://web1.storegate.com/share/YVwLsFZ

 

And here's some screenshots:

[DreadWanderer]

A very pleasant surprise, love the variety in the screenies. Will boot it up!

[RaRu Des2122]

It sounds interesting, looks nice and the names of the authors are a certain sign of quality for me! I'm starting to get acquainted...

[Devalaous]

Nice, more Valkiriforce content!

[OverflowingMocha]

New Valkiriforce maps????? this is real and not fake????!!!!

 

I NEED to play this as soon as possible, holy shit.

[DSC]

MORE valk stuff!?!? Sign me up please!!!!!

[NightFright]

Curse of Ultrawide!

 

Git it on Github (tm)

[Firedust]

We now live in a funny time when every time you beat a megawad, two more drop.

 

I will most definitely be playing this!

 

 

[Egg Boy]

Looking forward to checking this out!

[TheShep]

More for my backlog let's go! Hopefully sooner than later :)

[Andromeda]

Now that's a duo I never knew I needed in my life, thank you both for this!

[DRON12261]

Nice work. So far I can only see the prerequisites for this becoming another one of my favorite megawads. Great gameplay with cool memorable and very unique visuals. I'm in anticipation for more. Recorded the first try of 5 maps.
 

 

[Kor]

I remember your Curse of Blood project from back when we talked on ICQ. I've played up to level 5. Good stuff. I've played the earlier version of COB, that was good too. And I remember the texture wad I sent you which contained some Vengeance 2 textures. Good to see them being used, especially the ones I made :).

[plums]

Looks great! Does it have anything to do with your earlier Curse of Blood episode?

 

edit: Oh cool it's still using those graphics I made ages ago :)

Edited August 6 by plums

[JustAthel]

Interesting screenshots! Gonna definitely put this on my list of WADs to play!

[Teo Slayer]

Another MegaWAD which will go in my "WADs I NEED to play" list. Those screenshots look lovely

[grothendieck1453]

I played the first five maps, and am having fun so far! I particularly like the visuals.

[Joshy]

Congratulations! Great to see this finally get released; definitely can't go wrong with more waverider and valkiriforce maps. ;)

[waverider]

Thanks everyone for your kind comments! :) 

 

Naturally both me and @valkiriforce will be extra happy if this project will be well received, but do let us know if we can improve anything for an eventual later RC version. For instance, the end of EP2 and several maps of EP3 are really challenging on UV - so if any maps are completely unfair - do let us know so we can rectify that! (Or other issues too, of course!)

[DSC]

One small bug that needs to be fixed: the imp that is supposed to appear on this section of MAP05 doesn't show up on GZDoom. Maybe it's a pop-up trap and they're stuck in the ground?

[DoomGuy2077]

This was unexpected. I've finished several maps so far and the first couple seemed like they were over before they began but as I'm progressing further, I appreciate the non-linearity of the map design. I look forward to finishing this set. It's always good when new releases drop on Friday.

[apichatpong]

It's now a cliché (with all dimensions of truth there is in a cliché) : Doom community is full of varied talents, with as many fantastic wads but - and I guess I'm not alone on that point - due to the overflow of stuff to try, sometime you're looking for a wad to play, you try some, you say to yourself "great job" but you don't really know which one to choose. And this might be one reason (among others) why small wads have so much success nowadays. But some day you wake up with the desire for some megawad, and finding the right one is even more difficult than choosing "just" a wad (in the widest meaning possible).

 

Sometimes you're just lucky and you find THE wad you needed.

 

Curse of Blood did this for me.

 

It's been a long time since I haven't played with so much pleasure 10 maps in a row and, I don't know when the trip will end but I'm quite sure I'll stay on this one 'til map 30.

 

Episode 1 is full of non-linear, tastefully designed maps and I dig the way authors managed to stay at the gravity center between classicism and modernity regarding layouts as much as fights (as far as I know). I play on HMP and, until now, combats were fun, sometimes challenging for me, but always beatable without mid-saves. Great variety on themes or atmospheres. Cool midis choices.

So yeah, it seems I finally got my summer megawad !

 

Thanks to you, waverider and valkiriforce.

[Devalaous]

I'll be honest, I didn't know who Waverider was, so I looked up the back catalogue on the wiki. Didn't expect to see Daedalus! Downloaded Taste for Blood, Death Revealed and the earlier version of Curse of Blood and added them to my Backlog of Infinite Size, curious whether the early CoB is inside this new version in some form, and if so, how different the 11 maps will be

[waverider]

@DSC: Yeah that's most certainly a bug, good catch! It's added to the fixlist.

 

@DoomGuy2077: Glad to hear you liked most of what you've seen so far! The first couple of maps are indeed on the easy side.

 

@apichatpong: Great to hear you're enjoying CoB so much this far! Hopefully you'll like the rest of it too!

 

@Devalaous: (Don't read along unless you want spoilers of my older stuff!) Yeah I think I made two maps for Daedalus, but those could've been better, I remember some other TeamTNT member had to help me with those. Taste for Blood was actually meant to be an "official" prequel to Curse of Blood, but ended up being more loosely related to CoB. No need for anyone to play TfB before CoB for that reason. About Death Revealed, that's a pretty old wad now, probably not too good. And about the old Cob EP1 from 2013?, some maps will look quite similar, but some have been replaced altogether.  I suppose it's best if I ask an admin to remove the old CoB thread.

[waverider]

@DRON12261: Thanks for that video, was indeed good fun to watch! Hope you'll continue to play on and have fun!

 

@plums: Some maps are pretty or very similar to the maps in the old EP1 thread. But several maps have been replaced for the full release. I should probably ask an admin to remove the old thread. And about the graphics - yeah you made some great ones for CoB - it was an easy decision to keep those!

[Devalaous]

For what its worth, one of those Daedalus maps is one of the ones I remember the most from the set (Dimensional Shift). Thanks for the insight though, I'll keep the old CoB around, since its got exclusive content. I've also got Micro Plutonia, Akeldama and the PRCPs, so thats your entire public body of work on my drive it seems!

[S3M_XM]

As I love exploration wads, this one is one of my favorite megawads of this year and strangely isn't that hard (in skill level 3).

 

There's reports I've found on Doom Retro 5.5.0.1 on skill level 3.

Spoiler

Is there no Pain Elemental pain sound?

 

map13

Slime Trail in software rendering.

 

map28

Should the Blue armor secret be hidden from the automap? (Thing 1420)

 

map32

Found multiple HOMs.

 

[Bertt91]

This looks good. Congratulations on the work done, I'm going to try to do UVMAX runs to enjoy it! When I finish it, I´ll comment on sensations.

[Degree23]

I'm playing through a few maps a day. Just beat Map 10, which was one of the most fun maps I've played in years.

[apichatpong]

Ah Ah, I like how the difficulty curve reflects on my speed through this one :

 

First day - 10 maps (excellent)

Second day - 5 maps (awesome and awesomer)

Today - the two secret maps (

Spoiler

wonderful smorgasbord of hommages (I see eternal doom, some ribbiks, the "for frantic maps" canonical aerial style of Stuart Rynn, even some vague Sunder (for some architecture and sense of grandiose in map 31). I was a bit perplex at first for the first secret map (so many arachnos in big rooms) but turned out hard but joyful.

).

 

Spoiler

In spoiler because it's a bit silly since I still haven't played all the maps but :

I randomly took a peak at some following maps and, hum, it seems you guys did it till the end. We'll see but, I'm confident, I may not be a good doom player but my intuition rarely failed me in that kind of situation.