Modders vs Puritans

[Lizzieborden]

Back in 2020, I first started playing Blood on an inherited win 98 rig. It blew me away and brought back PTSD memories seeing my uncle playing it in 1999 when I was 4.
So ..after a coupla yrs of playing DOS Blood in win 98, I shifted to using Nblood on win 10. (Nightdive's port IMHO is a mess)
I now find myself caught between 1) puritanically sticking to the original DOS experience, and 2) quality of life improvements (widescreen, more voxels, sound enhancements, HD packs etc.. )
Soo...was curious: what Mods do you Bloodite veterans out there accept, repudiate, venerate, or vilify?
Where do you draw the line?

I'm kinda new at retrogaming, so I have I would love to hear what all you guys have to say about this

[Dzierzan]

You want to be pure? Use Dosbox / MS DOS machine.

Otherwise none of the ports are super uber perfect. NBlood is considered to be the most accurate to DOS, but I do not see any difference between NBlood, BloodGDX and Raze.

It's hard to vilify anything, mods are supposed to be used by users. You don't like them? You don't use them. They are supposed to enrich your experience. It's really up to you.

I personally play Blood with my SmoothBlood, voxels, skyboxes.

[patho]

Personally, I don't like gameplay modifications.

I don't like new textures either, as they mostly differ from the usual style. These usually just look out of place.
So I mainly play maps and expansions that only use original resources.

[Dead Reckoner]

Back in 2020, I first started playing Blood on an inherited win 98 rig. It blew me away and brought back PTSD memories seeing my uncle playing it in 1999 when I was 4.
So ..after a coupla yrs of playing DOS Blood in win 98, I shifted to using Nblood on win 10. (Nightdive's port IMHO is a mess)
I now find myself caught between 1) puritanically sticking to the original DOS experience, and 2) quality of life improvements (widescreen, more voxels, sound enhancements, HD packs etc.. )
Soo...was curious: what Mods do you Bloodite veterans out there accept, repudiate, venerate, or vilify?
Where do you draw the line?

I'm kinda new at retrogaming, so I have I would love to hear what all you guys have to say about this

Interesting, I was also introduced by my uncle to Blood in 1999 at the age of 4 or 5. It may be the best age to start playing Blood I had so many unique impressions when I entered its world. Despite the horror theme and gruesomeness of the game, there was always something very warm and inviting about it that kept drawing me in even then. It took a little while for me to muster the courage to finish a map by myself, so at first I would spend a lot of time hanging out in safe areas like the streets of E3M1.

Regarding the topic - since BloodGDX and NBlood were released, I haven't had any desire to go back to dosbox. If you have a windows 98 machine with a CRT monitor, I can see why the more authentic experience would be appealing, but with my options being clunky emulation or ports with quality of life improvements, I choose the latter.

Widescreen feels much better than 4:3 with borders or stretching. Loading savegames in vanilla Blood is glitched because of loss of fog and difficulty settings, a bug eliminated in the ports.

The new custom voxels are almost essentials to me now, they feel like they should have been in the game at launch. I suspect Monolith intended to voxelize most of the sprite objects in the game but didn't finish because of time/budget constraints.

I believe the look and feel of Blood would benefit from further enhancements like dynamic lighting. I would also like to try out more lite gameplay mods for Blood that rebalance the game. Extra Crispy for Fresh Supply has some cool ideas, but it's overall too crazy for me.

[Lizzieborden]

Agreed about voxels, widescreen ...and one day... If Deus vults it....dynamic lighting !

The win 98 rig with CRT (Viewsonic v775, 17 inch) is admittedly sucky for spoilt lil me , as I was too young to use PCs at the time. So nostalgia is less a factor. But from this rig I got into blood, even learned basic DOS commands
For me, now, it's Nblood, voxels, widescreen. I like Phredreeke's upscale pack too.. but at times if is out of place (either upscale everything or nothing, lest inconsistency ensue).

So you too had an uncle who groomed ya into becoming a cultist hater?
Small world. Perhaps your uncle is my uncle.

[Vantala]

Back in 2020, I first started playing Blood on an inherited win 98 rig. It blew me away and brought back PTSD memories seeing my uncle playing it in 1999 when I was 4.

Interesting, I was also introduced by my uncle to Blood in 1999 at the age of 4 or 5. It may be the best age to start playing Blood I had so many unique impressions when I entered its world. Despite the horror theme and gruesomeness of the game, there was always something very warm and inviting about it that kept drawing me in even then. It took a little while for me to muster the courage to finish a map by myself, so at first I would spend a lot of time hanging out in safe areas like the streets of E3M1.

Semi-offtopic - I was introduced to Blood in my early teens and I remember myself... well, I guess the blood and violence and gore seemed so cartoonish to me that it didn't shock me at all. Maybe that's how it was intended.

[Daedalus]

I am somewhat, let us say, notorious for my purist stance, but I am certainly warming up to the ports, though I am well aware of their imperfections. I hope to one day be able to document all the differences, but it is hard to source time to do everything I hope to these days.

In recent years the quality of Blood modifications has really improved with regards to keeping things authentic, which is tremendously beneficial. The voxel pack, with a few small exceptions, is from my investigations extremely faithful in replicating the appearance of the vast majority of Blood assets, and as mentioned, it seems likely that more assets would've been done had the team worked on it for longer. SmoothBlood also is a faithful replication that makes the art flow a little more nicely.

Of course, the benefits of widescreen and the beautiful smoothness of the ports are hard to discredit - retail Blood as it was meant to be played is naturally choppy in comparison and it's great to see silky smooth performance in it.

Art itself is naturally a case-by-case basis, but these are naturally attached to custom maps. Usually these are outright awful, but in rare cases they can be interesting or good. The bit of "HD" texturing I've seen failed to capture the character of Blood's sensitive art style.

It sounds like your journey has been just right for getting the best possible Blood experience, so continue to trust your intuition.

P.S. -- Lizzie, the scope of this question seems a bit broader than just art modifications for Blood and it seems an open question worthy of the Blood section itself. I'll move it accordingly.

[Lizzieborden]

Ooops. I blinked.
Then 5 days just whizzed by.
To answer Daedalus:
yeah, it can be a delicate balancing act. I was lucky to start out with my uncle's old win 98 pentium 200MMX a coupla years back, SO i got a good feel for the original game play (for Blood and Shadow warrior ). played on it for about 2 years.
It was so cool (I say WAS, cuz i now use my regular PC, the quantum 3.2 GB started clicking ) to have a PC dedicated ONLY to older DOS games on a rig that dates to those games.
SO when I checked out the Nighjtdive port I knew right away something was amiss.

Thx for the insider info on voxels. Did not know that many more were initially intended. But it would make sense, as (IMHO) not only gameplay but also immersion is vital...and shifting 2 d sprites always facing you in one way does break the immersion. But not too much.
But of course the question is...where do you stop? How far is too far?

One thing that I will always be a purist about is the music. If only music were better in todays games. Doom 64 (nightdive port), NIN in quake, Blood , SW. RR rides again was nice, too. I play my blood/Quake CD music on their own, with a nice glass of red wine, on my balcony, getting slowly stoned and thinking dark thoughts clad in black clothes. Wish my hair was black, dangnabbit.

[Daedalus]

Have too many scares from Blood turned your hair white?

[Lizzieborden]

Crisse !! Nice retort.
You must be a brit !!
White would be cool (colour of death in some countries). Mine is dirty blonde . At least i have more fun eh?
Yours, through a glass , darkly

[Dead Reckoner]

Both the CD and midi tracks are very dear to me, but they show flaws when one spills Blood for so many years.

CD soundtrack has too few tracks for Blood's large and diverse set of maps, and the steep tempo changes don't correspond with the pace of the gameplay. One potential solution may be an adaptive music system like in Blood 2 that shuffles between the fast and slow portions of the track depending on whether the player is roaming or in combat. But on their own, each track is a masterpiece and I also enjoy listening to them standalone.

When playing, I usually stick with the midis, but some of them can get repetitive and annoying in longer maps, and especially in bloodbath, where I just turned the music off. That's where I would have liked a fresh injection of music the most.

[Lizzieborden]

. That's where I would have liked a fresh injection of music the most.

What kind of music would you suggest for this? The guy who did doom 64 music ? (I think his name is Hodges)
Heavy metal stuff quake 2 style or ambient foreboding stuff quake style?
(I myself prefer ambient stuff like quake or doom 64)

[Dead Reckoner]

. That's where I would have liked a fresh injection of music the most.

What kind of music would you suggest for this? The guy who did doom 64 music ? (I think his name is Hodges)
Heavy metal stuff quake 2 style or ambient foreboding stuff quake style?
(I myself prefer ambient stuff like quake or doom 64)

Doom 64 music, and especially PS1 Doom music captures the feeling of supernatural horror on an abandoned space station perfectly. To me it sounds too sci-fi horror and suspenseful for Blood, but that could be because of what I grew to associate it with. Quake music might be a better fit.

I was thinking something like this in terms of mood and tempo:

[Lizzieborden]

Wow that IS creepy and more blood-like for sure.
The organs at the beginning freak me out (Catholic convictions will do that to ya)
And the lamenting bell with drums, ..this reminds me of spaghetti westerns (good bad and ugly/ once upon a time in the west, etc) which would be Caleb territory : Pure evil, revenge, with inconsolable sadness as undertone

Thx for sharing this !!

[Lizzieborden]

Forgot to add: music with harmonica would be cool too. Like in the showdown in Once upon a Time in the West