Author:
madcows
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Date:
6/10/2021 11:53:18 AM
Subject:
RE: Been watching through a lot of "What Happened?
I think the video just covers the short development cycle and end result rather than the actual issues. If Monolith actually had the resources to implement Wilson's original vision, would that have made B2 a good sequel? Doubt it. The features originally promised according to the video (none of which I recall) really don't sound particularly compelling. I think there were several factors at play here and at least two of them are part of the era in which the game was made. FPSs were evolving fast, mainly in the form of the tech that underpinned them, and also in the idea that they should be more story driven. Starting with the tech, can anyone think of a 2.5D game that transitioned all that well to 3D? One that wouldn't have worked just fine as a whole new IP? B2 was worse than many in this regard, retaining nothing from the original other than the name, main character, and a rough copy of some of the weapons. None of the enemies even followed until the Nightmare pack (apt name). Then there was the in-game story telling elements that could now be done cheaply using the engine, so late 90s shooters were filled with cutscenes galore, and unsurprisingly, by and large they were universally terrible because they tended to consist of half-baked stories hacked in because almost nobody had competent story writers on the payroll.
Then there's the possibility that Monolith management didn't fully understand the original game in the first place. How much of the game design avoided meddling by Monolith after their purchase of Q Studios and the rights from 3D Realms purely due to inertia? It's pretty hard to decouple Blood from Duke3D and SW, and I don't think it's simply a matter of them all using Build, considering most other games that used it were crap. There was a lot of shared DNA underpinning them despite their unique aesthetics.
So ultimately, here was publisher with an IP to milk, a measly budget, and the original developer seemingly oblivious to all the things that made the first game good and simultaneously wanting to follow many of the [terrible] FPS trends from the period, while being too mismanaged/inexperienced to realize that neither the time nor money existed to make any of it possible. To be fair, that last part seems to be an issue that plagues the majority of game studios. Honestly, I think the main reason Blood2 gets shit on as badly as it does is because it attempts to pass itself off as a sequel to a highly regarded shooter. It was the bastard child of a game with shoes too big to fill.
