Blood II The Chosen's Birthday/Halloween Party Thing

[dosgamer000]

Just made this topic about 45 minutes over 12:00 AM where I live to celebrate both Halloween and Blood II's birthday. Now I believe since it was released 1999 it's apparently 14 I believe? It's been a long time hasn't it? Anyway, Happy B-day Blood 2 and also Happy Halloween!

EDIT: Blood 2 is actually 15, my mistake. Thanks, Tchernobog!

[Tchernobog]

It was 15 last night as it was released in 1998. ILA's server was a nice celebration in of itself.

[N0t_mINe]

GT interactve gave Shogo an extra 6 weeks of development time over the scheduled July release date. Why the hell couldn't they do the same with blood2? Half of blood2's team was working on shogo, So blood2 was essentially sacrificed, with only a whopping 7 weeks with a full dev. team (b2 went gold Oct.11th)....


Rant, Rant, rant RANT rant....rant.
... ..
.. .... .

THE F!%^#*~ SOURCE CODE!



Happy b'day blood2.

[Tchernobog]

My personal opinion is that they should have released Shogo for Christmas '98 and then released Blood II in spring '99. That would have meant releasing around the same time as Columbine, but GT and Monolith would not have known that...

[N0t_mINe]

My personal opinion is that they should have released Shogo for Christmas '98 and then released Blood II in spring '99. That would have meant releasing around the same time as Columbine, but GT and Monolith would not have known that...

They did know about HL though, seen at the time as the one to beat. In fact blood2 was billed as a HL killer, while Shogo was supposed to see release a good 3 months before Half Life showed up on the seen. 99 would have put B2 in direct competition with Q3 and UT, not a place to be with an engine that was seen as inferior. It was the beginning of "Sell the engine, not the game," thinking and lithtech, with all its issues, was a part of that mind set.

Just some trivia below.

Does anyone know how many games were made with a highly pimped out version of the shogo engine? Not the re-written lithtech 2.0 engine, but 1.5 specfically?

3rdlaw started the ball rolling with kiss psycho circus (lithtech1.5), but valuesoft published a number of games with an engine simply called "lithtech". Some of these games definitely use 1.5, with a drectX8.1 renderer no less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur%27 ... he_Kingdom

[dosgamer000]

I quite liked Lithtech for what it was. Only visual gripe was fire effects could be better but they weren't horrible. IIRC, Blood 2 came out after HL and it bombed for many reasons and of course one of them was...it wasn't Half-Life. Alot of games suffered because they were not the next-gen engine god (Quake/Half-Life). The first Blood suffered similarly from Quake's existence but because of BUILD's still strong popularity and its refinement of the engine (and also not as many bugs as Blood 2 had), Blood had gotten better reception. If Blood 2 was released before HL, even with all it's faults, it would've had the godlike success Valve's game had gotten. Granted, I've said this before, I haven't touched HL1 ever but the hype never appealed to me and it didn't work for HL2 either.

[Tchernobog]

They did know about HL though, seen at the time as the one to beat. In fact blood2 was billed as a HL killer, while Shogo was supposed to see release a good 3 months before Half Life showed up on the seen.

So instead of letting some of the hype die down and let the product actually be able to better compete with it they forced it out right when Half-Life hit the scene. Gotta love publisher logic.

99 would have put B2 in direct competition with Q3 and UT, not a place to be with an engine that was seen as inferior. It was the beginning of "Sell the engine, not the game," thinking and lithtech, with all its issues, was a part of that mind set.

Both of which were released very late in the year, although industry speculation might have placed the releases earlier than for comfort. I also personally feel that Blood II looks better than UT, although it could not hold a candle to the final release of Quake3.

Does anyone know how many games were made with a highly pimped out version of the shogo engine? Not the re-written lithtech 2.0 engine, but 1.5 specfically?

No I did not know that; that might help explain why Lithtech's reputation got as bad as it did. The engine itself had flaws in Blood II and Shogo, sure, but it was not as bad as I had heard some people make out - with some of these games it probably was.

I quite liked Lithtech for what it was. Only visual gripe was fire effects could be better but they weren't horrible.

Blood II looked better than both Unreal and Half-Life, in my opinion.

The first Blood suffered similarly from Quake's existence but because of BUILD's still strong popularity and its refinement of the engine (and also not as many bugs as Blood 2 had), Blood had gotten better reception. If Blood 2 was released before HL, even with all it's faults, it would've had the godlike success Valve's game had gotten.

Blood had around four years to get ready to battle Quake though; Blood II would have had significantly less than one. It simply needed more time to truly come to fruition, Half-Life or no Half-Life.

Not that I am one the beat on the final product too much - I love Blood II, development warts and all. The fact that they could build something as good as we got in such a short time period is actually a credit to Monolith.

[dosgamer000]

The very first Unreal was one of the most important experiences in my gaming life. If I had to pick between what looked better in terms of environment, Unreal wins over Blood 2. But that has to do more with level design instead of engine stuff. You don't need OpenGL for Blood 2 whereas Unreal requires it to smooth out it's textures (none of my computers ever had really good hardware for a long time, this is why I call myself dosgamer000). But I saw one BB Blood 2 map in a pack online that reminded me of Sky Town, had Bloat Ambience music playing, and had this beautiful night sky. When I played that empty blood bath map, I knew Lithtech had the potential to make the same awe inspiring maps that Unreal 1 had. If there was a single player blood 2 mapping community, we could see a tiny vision of what Monolith wanted to do with Blood 2 if they had more time.

Excluding that, Blood 2 was an overall better game. Weapons were better and I prefer talkative characters like Caleb over silent protagonists.

[Tchernobog]

Well, I was talking about UT and not the original Unreal - I have spent very little time with the first.

[N0t_mINe]

If Blood 2 was released before HL, even with all it's faults, it would've had the godlike success Valve's game had gotten.

To be fair, this is probably not the reception blood2 would have gotten. Most bloodites knew the b2 team was struggling after the June 98 demo release. If you think b2's collision detection is problematic now, you might want to try the original (unpatched) shareware version. The Blood2 1.0 release in Oct. of 98 angered many of Blood's original fans, thanks to guns floating and shooting in mid air, levels that could not be completed, no multiplayer, and promises that were never kept.

:

I also personally feel that Blood II looks better than UT, although it could not hold a candle to the final release of Quake3.

So a directX 6 game beat out at least one directX 7 game with 32bit textures no less. Not too shabby.



trivial Lithtech trivia below:

Lithtech 1.5

Certain:

Kiss psycho circus
Legends of might and magic 9
WWII Iwo Jima

Possible/ still researching:

Elite forces: WWII Normandy (almost certain)
Arthur's Quest: battle for the kingdom
Vietnam: Black Ops

Many valusoft published ego shooters made before 2002 use lithtech 1.5

[dosgamer000]

@Tchernobog: Hehe...that's quite funny, I've actually never played Unreal Tournament but played the heck out of the first Unreal.

@N0t_mINe: If the early demos were that buggy then I should call myself glad to have never played them!