The DWmegawad Club plays: Bloodstain

[dobu gabu maru]

Alien Vendetta and Estranged are currently tied at 6 each, FYI

[Spectre01]

I'll change my vote to +++Estranged instead of AV then since I've never played it and the latter has quite a few similarities to Bloodstain.

[Aquanet]

MAP28: The Deepest Abyss

A pretty fun icon of sin level where you need to find three keys and kill a cyber to reach a teleporter to the platform for rocketing the Romero (see below). The IoS half has some interesting floors that step up and down, forcing you to watch your feet as you keep an eye on the spawning monsters. It's sort of tough, which avoids the problem of IoS being too quick and easy. I ended up death exiting, but unlike other hell levels, there's plenty of spheres and cells.

Big thanks to Pipicz for a cool megawad.

Spoiler

[Magnusblitz]

MAP29: Ov Fire and the Void
98% kills, 4/7 secrets

Large spawling "collect all three keys" map here, good fit for MAP29. Back to the black rock and lava theme, and it works well. Lots of cool little design bits like the cage elevator or the bridges to the blue key. It's got a lot of that "fight for territory" aspect but has a lot of spots where the player is just sniping from (relative) safety which can drag things down a bit. Ammo balance was interesting, I was never out of ammo but frequently found myself low on the ammo I actually wanted, which was a bit annoying (such as being out of rockets for the red key leg, wanting them for all those knots of revenants, but the rocket ammo I needed was guarded by said revenants...)

This map also made me realize how much I dislike the Afrits... just too many hit points. I think they're at 1500 hit points (Baron is 1000, Mastermind is 3000) but I've never been able to kill one with a BFG like the spider (I think because they're too small to be hit by enough rays). Anyways, I can't help but feel this level would've been a lot more fun without them. The red key cage is a cool design piece but frustrated me immensely, I don't think it's possible to survive the whole warp-in on UV without getting really lucky thanks to all the revenants and hitscanners. After about five tries I finally noticed the way out and just did that as quick as possible to escape and fight the enemies on my own terms. So it's better than the horrible cage in MAP13 of Hell Revealed.

[Magnusblitz]

MAP30: The Deepest Abyss

One half Vile-and-mouse game, one part Icon of Sin. The first part is interesting but something that I think would've been better saved for one of the secret maps, perhaps. It's quite easy to accidently aggro too many Viles at once, or miss a shot or two and not have enough ammo to handle the ones you're fighting. The second part isn't a bad IoS setup, as far as they go, except for those goddamn Afrits. I basically wasn't able to legitimately finish the map, as every time I teleported up top I immediately took a billion Afrit fireballs to the face (and if I took the time to take them out, the rest of the map had filled up with Cacos or Pain Elementals or AVs or other monsters that made it impossible). So, whatever.

[Rayziik]

I'm gonna go ahead and say

+++Estranged

Because I don't ever want to play Alien Vendetta again in my life.

Also due to connection problems, marathon stream on Bloodstain will try again tomorrow if anyone is still interested.

[Spectre01]

Rayzik said:

I don't ever want to play Alien Vendetta again in my life.

What, how is that possible?! AV is a legendary wad man. Never gets boring!

Magnusblitz said:

I basically wasn't able to legitimately finish the map, as every time I teleported up top I immediately took a billion Afrit fireballs to the face (and if I took the time to take them out, the rest of the map had filled up with Cacos or Pain Elementals or AVs or other monsters that made it impossible). So, whatever.

Shameless plug, but check out the demo in my post to see how I did that part. ;)

[rehelekretep]

+++ Estranged

im changing my vote to Estranged then :)

[baja blast rd.]

:) :)

[Magnusblitz]

rileymartin said:

Shameless plug, but check out the demo in my post to see how I did that part. ;)

Didn't seem like anything too out of the ordinary strategy-wise, just that you made sure to clear out the afrits first. I'm not saying it's unbeatable by any means, just that I got a bad hand with the monsters that had spawned around the rocket tower and didn't feel like starting from the start of the level again.

[dobu gabu maru]

Aw you boneheads, I had the thread all typed up for AV too. Guess I'll save it for later—Estranged it is.

[T-Rex]

dobu gabu maru said:

Aw you boneheads, I had the thread all typed up for AV too. Guess I'll save it for later—Estranged it is.

Same here, I was looking forward to replaying AV. Oh well, maybe after you guys are done with Estranged.

[rehelekretep]

dobu gabu maru said:

Aw you boneheads, I had the thread all typed up for AV too. Guess I'll save it for later—Estranged it is.

sorry :x
im gonna vote for AV in Sep so hopefully we play that then

[joe-ilya]

MAP28
More peek shooting, but in an extreme prolonged manner that I hate even more, just like in MAP27, except it has no bullshit traps.
There are too many of those dropoffs where you're immidietly shot through all direction and there's barely anywhere to move, but at least it's a small deviation from the dull formula.

0/5

MAP29

Finally a map that isn't bad, there's more dodging than there is peeking, the gameplay's actually balanced and it's not too cramped although it's still awkward to move around to dodge balls, that's the only reason I had to save, all the areas are steep and are filled with infinite breakdowns on the walls.
There's also a bullshit moment where a teleporter teleports you in a middle of a baron group and you instantly die unless you have a full megasphere or immidiatly step back into the teleporter.

3/5

MAP30

This one's a fine ender, I liked the Plutonia Hunted with ammo conservation at the start with the AVs, the wacky architecture allowed for some wacky death penalties which I appreciated.
The IOS battle itself is way better than I anticipated, you're given a big field to walk around to collect keys and pull flying enemies towards when you need to shoot that brain, it has enough health to make you cross the field again, it's heighty and allows for some good dodging.

5/5

Overall:

The thing placement is weak, the layout is cramped and bumpy and the gameplay is repetitive, the good maps are too few, when they're good I rate them 4/5 or 5/5 and I barely did that, only 9 maps were good while the rest were either poorly executed or just plain bad. The only good thing I could say is that I like the architecture a lot, too bad it's not used to enhance the gameplay, but it rather goes backwards.

2/5

[Demon of the Well]

Map 29 -- Ov Fire and the Void - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Ah, a fairly shiny and polished culmination, with a nod towards one of the world's most shiny and polished death metal bands. Save perhaps for the matter of setpieces, which other than the RK cage (a gimmick encounter in the truest sense of the word!) are much more subdued than the similar encounters we've been seeing in the second half of E3, what's on offer here seems to be something of a summary of this concluding section of the game--the early choice of forks ala "Perdition", the occasional enemy stampede ala "Sulfur", the explorability and crisscrossing through a central area ala "Disciples of Babel", the choked-chokepoint aspect of "Slaughterworks", the cleverly looping layout of "Descent Into Madness", even a quirky ending 'cutscene' ala "Chambers of Suffering", etc.--as well as having a sort of "Living End" thematic angle, quite the piece of work. Some of the setlong placement issues continue to show up--to make a callback to something I was complaining about all the way back in map 01, the potential deadliness of forced weapon-switch time in the very first ambush is obnoxiously pronounced here!--but it's evident that this is a very ambitious piece of work that the author lavished a lot of love and care upon, taking the time to lend it as much depth and nuance as anything seen in the set. This is most evident in the way the level progression is framed, featuring a classic 3-key/3-door exit setup, with each key found in its own distinct enclave area and theoretically accessible in any order, with each major area neatly linked to both of the others via the outer loop or the precarious paths over the burning central void (or both), with visual interconnectivity at mapset highs if you take the time to take a careful gander.

This depth and nuance to the layout and progression possibilities can be quite hard to notice while you're actually playing the thing, though, since the combat aspect of progression is doggedly labor-intensive. In no other level in the set is the comment from KMX's synopsis about having to fight for every yard of ground gained more true than it is here, with pretty much every significant bit of playable space occupied by the howling damned, making overall runtime fairly long considering that the level is not actually that large. With most of the opposition deeply entrenched, the early play is, realistically speaking, largely a matter of exploratory trial and error, where you try out different paths and different sequences of accomplishments (weapon acquisitions, key nest clearings, etc.) until you can finally start making some headway. Pipicz has been tricksy with his calculations of the eventualities and allowances--a nasty blockade paired with an easier out at a given fork (i.e. the very first choice between right and left) may intuitively lead you to pick the road of least opposition in expectation of becoming more powerful and returning to the briarpatch later, only to find that just a little ways down the 'easier' road there's an even more problematic brick wall (or meat wall, rather) to run up against.

Redundant weapon placements and the physical interconnection between areas mean that different routes are possible, but some are going to be infinitely more manageable than others after one takes all of the potent meatgates on the outer rim and the hotbed of withering artillery attrition (the defanging of which is realistically a map-long process) into account. Progress, then, comes most smoothly after you've paid some exploratory/experimental dues, and I reckon this is the sort of level where players using frequent saves may well end up taking longer and having a worse time than someone not saving so often--pretty easy to get 'married' to a bad sequence here if taking that tack to playing the game, I reckon. Many players consider this type of balance (that is, where you need to know something about the overall situation before you realistically stand a chance of clearing it) to be invalid; I am not one of them, and I appreciate that map 29 is a reasonable place to put up the heaviest opposition (though I reckon maps 27 and 28 are both harder than this is), but I do think this slow-going style where the hardship is more a matter of logic than of aerobics loses a little something at the end of a long set where there has been very little opportunity for running around free.

As is often the case with levels of this type--I guess this is again a really heavily articulated form of the 'zone of influence' style, when you get down to it--things slack out more and more rapidly as you make progress and gain momentum. After getting the first BFG from out of the RK area, I pretty much steamrolled the rest of the level, with both the YK and BK areas seeming much milder in comparison. My impression was that the author is aiming more for spectacle later on than anything, which I think is just fine, with both of those latter two keys lightly guarded initially and then turning into 'siege' encounters when you try to leave. Given its ornate construction, the BK bit in particular was markedly affected by a necessary (but no less unsightly) lack of monster-pathing, but to be honest some of the visuals here are so cool that I can't help but be onboard with 'em, whatever the cost. While it has a very limited color palette for sure, and some of the lack of concourse polish we've seen throughout is evident (some misalignments, the occasional floating pickup or prop, etc.), on the whole I'm quite comfortable calling "Ov Fire and the Void" a visual masterwork, all the moreso because it's done in a very sober 'realist' style unconcerned with having a lot of visually similar connective tissue, in contrast to the dizzying floods of vibrant color contrast and manic shape that characterize more stylistically modern AAA WADs. Pieces like the hanging abyssal observatory where the BK is found or the inverted cathedral spire housing the exit are of course immediately and potently striking, but even the unassuming cave areas where about half of the action takes place is nicely worked with props, peeks at the void and other areas through oddly shaped crevices and apertures, and creative segment to segment transitions (riding on top of a large gibbet as though it's a lift at one point, for example) to lend the diegesis a great deal of life.

Map 30 -- The Deepest Abyss - 559% Kills / 100% Secrets
Now this is really fucking cool! This begins with a sort of simplified "Hunted" scenario where the ease of a much simpler/less confounding playspace is compensated by a razor-thin ammo balance from pistol start and a demoralizing first jab where three of the spindly bastards mercilessly jump you all at once, setting the tone (incidentally, while I have been playing from pistol-starts anyway, I didn't experience a death exit at the end of map 29, which some others referred to....?). This transitions into a two-stage IoS-style fight against an entity that seems to be a charred ashen Titan of some sort. The slant on the fight most closely resembles something like "It" from Memento Mori II, requiring that the player locate three keys before the boss can be made vulnerable to its long-overdue nightcap of high explosives. Lining up and landing the rockets in the boss's gullet is simple in this case--no timing a moving firing point or the like--but it will take a fair few more than the traditional two clean hits to get the job done, and of course you'll be under heavy fire while doing so. Despite the 'soft' time pressure that the rapid rate of endless monster-spawnage represents (they appear something like 5 or 6 at a time, it would appear), I found the action here incredibly liberating, as the final arena is a large, spacious (if topographically unfriendly) area where one can run around free and so can the monsters (watch out for flyers attacking from bizarre angles!), which has been so rare in this set that it feels quite distinct from most of the rest of the game in spite of its great simplicity.

(The joy of unrestrained BFG-fueled overkill helps as well).

This is a fine example of what I like to see in an ideal map 30--something that is both aesthetically striking and distinctly different in mood from what has preceded it, something to bring the game to a memorable and cathartic finish. I've often said that actual gameplay robustness is pretty secondary to what I most want an IoS-style map 30 to accomplish, but this level delivers in that respect, pairing a genuinely fun IoS fight (moderately amenable to one of my 'survival' challenges) with an offbeat atmospheric preamble for contrast. Very well done, this is the best map 30 I've seen in a while.

***************

Bloodstain has many fine qualities, particularly in its 'art direction', if you will, but as it stands I feel that it is also heavily flawed. I won't wax too lyrical on the matter here, because I think that Gaspe already hit the nail on the head a few pages back--in many ways the slogginess and lack of any gameplay dynamism that dogs the set's weaker maps appears to be the result of a rushed or otherwise compromised 'finishing' stage to the production, and much of the game suffers for it. My impression was that Pipicz was afraid to allow some maps to be too easy on UV in comparison to some other contemporary releases, and so floodfilled layouts not at all suited to being floodfilled with beasts, and then leashed them with blocking lines to budget-engineer some kind of curve in the action over the game's first 20 maps or so. Much of the negative side of the set's reception, I think, both in this thread and in prior treatments from the community at large, elides from a gamelong experience; the trench warfare combat style seen here is as conceptually valid as any other in Doom, I reckon, and some of these levels made a very good play on the style, but it's pretty hard to sit through 30 maps of it with only rare variations on the theme, especially when monster density is cranked up to 10 at pretty much all times. Most of Bloodstain's flow problems are not due to fundamental level construction, I think; many of these maps (and the set's digestibility as a whole, by proxy) could be improved immeasurably simply by retooling/rebalancing the thing placement and overall 'difficulty' curve (thus reducing or eliminating the practical need for so many blocklines); some of the maps would seem far more 'ordinary' than others in this case, it's true, but the irony here is that I doubt few players would see this as being unnatural or unacceptable, especially in the context of 32-map narrative and in comparison to the herky-jerky pacing we see here instead.

Looking past this issue, there is a lot to like here; the consistently strong visual presentation is an obvious talking point, but I also found the WAD's delicate handling of its constant nods and allusions to classic WADs while still being very much its own thing with its own ideas endearing, and in those levels where Pipicz was not constrained by the need to coddle a conventional curve in difficulty/map complexity he was able to wring a goodly dose of quality play out of his trench warfare/ZoI placement style, adding his own inflection where boards are more intricate and comprised of a web of many small zones rather than a few large ones. This is something I would like to see more of from him, perhaps in a smaller/more focused set.

My top 5 maps from Bloodstain, in no particular order, were and are:
Map 16 -- Malleus Maleficarum
Map 28 -- Descent Into Madness
Map 25 -- Disciples of Babel
Map 09 -- Mountain Outpost
Map 30 -- The Deepest Abyss