[DisgustedGrunt]

BlitZ, you made my previous comment into your signature? glad you liked it

[Jimmy]

It was an 11/10 post, my friend. Cheers!

[HulkNukem]

I've been having a LOT of fun with Youngblood; a bit too much actually.

Got about 10 hours in so far and I've still only completed one of the three brother towers. Taking my time exploring the environments and just having fun shooting nazis. I was uneasy about the RPG mechanics but they generally die at the same speed they did in New Colossus (so a bit slower than in New Order) save for a couple encounters. Using the right weapon to rip off armor or health also matters.

Items are all instanced which is both a good and bad thing. Good that it means one player taking all the weapon and ammo pickups doesn't matter because they only disappear for the player that grabbed them. Bad because it means if one player picks up money the other player has to pick it up themself.

Its fun in coop, though your human partner is prone to get seen by enemies breaking stealth or making human mistakes.

This also makes me want a Dishonored coop game in the same vein.

[Zaxx]

Well, now that I couldn't pick up Youngblood because of the microtransactions I've decided to give Blade of Agony a try.

The mod itself is good, I mean it's really quality stuff when it comes to the presentation but it's just I dunno, not as great as some people would like to believe. For example a lot of the level design is just a ton of shit where enemies are placed in such a way that you have to fight on two sides at once or they are just obscured by sprites. You're traversing this nice looking environment, you're having fun shooting a bunch and then suddenly a part designed by an idiot hits you.

It also doesn't help that the mod loves to throw you into situations where the weapon mechanics just fuck you in the ass. You can end up in a room where there are so many enemies that your weapons just basically stop working properly because there's not enough ammo in the clip and reloading takes too damn long and you're just like "okay, I've switched to 2 other weapons now and all of my clips are empty and well, there's no cover so I'll just let these asshole shoot me while I reload". I'm like what the fuck did these guys want to make, a Wolfenstein game or a semi-realistic World War 2 shooter? They should choose one because when you try both of them it will suck.

Also: sometimes I guess they were like "hey, let's make something challenging here" and usually those parts are the least fun an FPS can ever be. You like exploring the maps at your own pace and that's partially why you like playing games like Doom and Wolf? Okay, have this mission where you have to complete a level in 20 minutes that's way too fucking big for a timed mission and of course there's a bunch of enemy types you haven't even seen before. It doesn't fit the gameplay at all, it's infuriatingly frustrating (BJ runs out of stamina very fast so you can't just autorun and in a timed mission the mod's generally slow movement just makes you mad) and it plays around with the mod's worst mechanics (like jumping is god awful yet in the timed mission they give you a jumping puzzle).

So overall it's enjoyable but there are just too many parts that feel incompetent for this to be really something cool. Generally it should just play a bit better. Plus the devs make a habit out of making GZDoom choke so expect it to run like absolute shit at a few points.

[HulkNukem]

I put probably an hour or two into Blade of Agony maybe a year ago. I remember liking it a lot but wishing they made the levels a more traditional way of progressing. Instead of going to that home base and talking to people I would've rather just been thrown right into the next level.

I intend to go back to it some day.

[Zaxx]

The beginning is pretty misleading when it comes to the home base stuff. There really isn't much to do there, you just pick up your next mission, maybe buy some supplies and it's back to shooting. The stuff that seems to be a bit too much talking at the beginning is basically just a tutorial dump.

[Jimmy]

Something about the screenshots was off-putting to me. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I just knew it was one of those mods.

[MrFlibble]

I haven't played Blade of Agony but I was interested enough in the project to watch a vid of a playthrough a bit. Made a very odd impression on me because I got the feeling that it was a kind of WWII themed game that could've come out in early to mid-2000s (maybe actually somewhat better than those that came out back then) but for some reason using the low-res sprites from Wolf3D and some modified Doom stuff. It doesn't exactly clash for me but it's kinda odd. The kind of gameplay they're serving, I would rather much prefer low-res/low-detail 3D models, that would at least feel authentic, more or less, but the cartoony low-res sprites make this appear very kitsch.

Can't say anything about gameplay though as I didn't try it myself. It could be kinda cool at the end of the day, with all the emphasis on stealth and stuff.

[----]

 BlitZ, on 31 July 2019 - 10:48 AM, said:

Something about the screenshots was off-putting to me. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I just knew it was one of those mods.

To me the sprite-soldiers within a true 3d environment that has a totally different visual style was that what made me not even think about trying it out.

[DisgustedGrunt]

I had to stop playing Blade of Agony due lo low fps. It was bearable at the beginning, but in the 3rd mission ( i think) there's part where you're outside and there are train tracks, my fps went into the negatives there. A shame, i was really liking it.

[Zaxx]

 Lazy Dog, on 31 July 2019 - 12:33 PM, said:

I had to stop playing Blade of Agony due lo low fps. It was bearable at the beginning, but in the 3rd mission ( i think) there's part where you're outside and there are train tracks, my fps went into the negatives there. A shame, i was really liking it.

Oh yeah, performance can be a real problem but there's a "trap": the mod comes with a pre-configured GZDoom and settings are just really bad. They have all the advanced graphical settings turned on so you get stuff like ambient occlusion and MSAA, those cripple the performance in some situations if you don't turn them off. It's not purely the mod's fault honestly, GZDoom generally has a few problems because how it performs is based around your single core CPU performance.

[DisgustedGrunt]

 Zaxx, on 01 August 2019 - 04:44 PM, said:

Oh yeah, performance can be a real problem but there's a "trap": the mod comes with a pre-configured GZDoom and settings are just really bad. They have all the advanced graphical settings turned on so you get stuff like ambient occlusion and MSAA, those cripple the performance in some situations if you don't turn them off.

I disabled all those, but still.

 Zaxx, on 01 August 2019 - 04:44 PM, said:

It's not purely the mod's fault honestly, GZDoom generally has a few problems because how it performs is based around your single core CPU performance.

Yeah, i get like 100 fps in vanilla Doom e1m1 in opengl and around 150 in software. ZDoom never drops below 300, i just dunno

[Zaxx]

I was looking at a video of "Elite Hans: Die Neue Ordnung" (the alternate history version of Wolf 3D in Youngblood) and these look like new maps to me:

Somebody had time during development to make 2 episodes of maps for Wolf 3D?

[MrFlibble]

For a second this reminded me of a level from one of those Gary Acord "mods".

[gemeaux333]

The more I play Youngblood, the more I have the feeling to play Wolfenstein 2009 improved and with coop setting...

[HulkNukem]

 Zaxx, on 03 August 2019 - 01:19 PM, said:

I was looking at a video of "Elite Hans: Die Neue Ordnung" (the alternate history version of Wolf 3D in Youngblood) and these look like new maps to me:

Somebody had time during development to make 2 episodes of maps for Wolf 3D?

I thought those were new when I played them...

They also made that free Quake episode. I think its apparent Machinegames likes id Software's past

[Ninety-Six]

I'm surprised they didn't use the Spear levels. They must really like making levels for these old games.


Wonder if they'll ever release them as a level pack like they did DOP.

[MrFlibble]

What makes me wonder, even from the first appearance of this Wolfstone game in the previous game (New Order or what was it) is why they made the poor Aryan chap this much thinner than B.J. on the HUD, he looks almost emaciated, or at least very scrawny. Is that a reference to a character from the new games or just some kind of aesthetic choice to make him different from B.J. (or is that supposed to be a girl?)

It's hard to judge the new levels from the video posted above because the guy played the entire episode on wimp difficulty and there wasn't even a boss fight. I do like how they recorded new lines for the enemies in English with similarly low quality though. I think the guard says "Look out!" and not "Luft raus!" as the guy in the video suggested

[Zaxx]

In TNC this whole "alternate nazi videogame thing" was a lot more elaborate since there they changed all 6 episodes of the original Wolf 3D. For example instead of Hitler you had to fight BJ in episode 3 and when he died he said "Anya, goodbye."

Elite Hans was also something they came up with for TNC:

[MrFlibble]

Yeah, I noticed that they called BJ "Terror-Billy" in the third episode of Wolfstone from TNC. I'd suppose "Bandit" would be more in line with the actual vernacular of the time but anyway.

[gemeaux333]

The end of Youngblood make me think about Rise of the Triad (especially the remake)

[MusicallyInspired]

How so? (spoiler tag your answer if you feel like it, but I don't care about spoilers for this game)

[gemeaux333]

The (hand of) god mode, the elevator, the El obscuro wannabee general... not to mention all the soldiers looking now axactly like in ROTT...

[Mr. Tibbs]

Youngblood didn't even make the top 20 for the July 2019 NPD, and before people say digital, if it had done even slightly okay it would be here when only accounting for physical sales.

https://www.gamesind...takes-the-crown

[----]

And according to Steam Charts it doesn't reach 1000 concurrent players anymore (yes, I know, you can also buy it directly from Bethesda).

[OpenMaw]

Youngblood was some really bad shit.

[Zaxx]

OMG, a revolutionary technological feature that will reshape the gaming industry has been implemented: the ability to PAUSE THE GAME IN OFFLINE MODE! MachineGames at the forefront of innovation!

[t800]

Pausing in offline only? What about pausing online? They want to tell me 2nd player cant have pause/inventory screen too while 1st one is AFK? We are not talking about some big MMO or something. Just 2 players coop. Silly Bethesda...

[Putrid Pete]

So has anybody here been following the development of LZWolf? It's a source port of the original Wolf3D forked from ECWolf, that expands it with newer features (mostly for modding) such as parallax skies, in-fighting and weapon damage types and resistances.

Anyways, I've been checking out some of the LZWolf exclusive mods, and currently having a lot of fun playing through Wolf3D Demolition. It's even compatible with Super 3D Noah's Ark!

It seems the team has been working on porting some classic Wolf3D mods to ECWolf (which are also compatible with LZWolf).

[LAW]

I have never played the new Wolfenstein titles because of the robots. That is not what I expected. I was remotely interested in the Old Blood - too bad it wasn't released on the previous generation of consoles.

But for some reasons I really like the 2009 Wolfenstein, despite the fact that it mixes too many things in one game. I like it even more than RTCW, which never has been my cup of tea. And I just love the sound of the MP40 in that title.