BloodNet: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

A nice summation of the game's two major themes.

      

BloodNet

United States

MicroProse (developer and publisher)

Released in 1993 for DOS, 1994 for Amiga

Date Started: 30 October 2022

Date Ended: 6 January 2023

Total Hours: 28

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 42

Ranking at Time of Posting: 420/483 (87%)

     

Summary:

An adventure/RPG hybrid from the old Paragon Software team, BloodNet offers an original cyberpunk/horror setting and plot and some deliciously weird visuals and NPCs. But it suffers from many of the problems that plagued the developers' previous efforts (e.g., MegaTraveller, Space: 1889), including very limited character development, useless skills, confusing combat, and unnecessary plot twists. The environments look interesting but are mostly non-interactive, and plot progression mostly involves going from one place to another instead of any real puzzles. As with most Paragon games, an interesting misfire.

    

*****

 

Well, I managed to blunt-force my way through the endgame by trying it several times a day. The key problem was that you have to face seven enemies in a row with no opportunity to rest in between. Melissa Van Helsing is the only hard one, but even fairly low probabilities of dying at the hands of the others accumulated. I think I ended up trying about 15 times, dying to Melissa in almost 10 of them. In the end, I made it. The enemies I had to defeat one-on-one were:

   

• Lash Givens. I don't remember what he was armed with. I think I beat him every time with a shotgun and Kevlar armor.

• Melissa Van Helsing, armed with a White Noise Blaster. I found that a Force Field worked best against it, and a Blessed Soul Blade worked best against her.

• Nimrod 7, armed with a laser rifle. I barely remember him from the game. I beat him with an EMP Focalizer and a Reflection Shield.

        

This guy went on to be the villain in Season 4 of Buffy.

       

• Sir Anais, armed with a Blessed Soul Blade. Again, I defaulted to a shotgun and Kevlar armor, and most times killed him with one blast.

• An unnamed Security Officer, armed with an Electrical Storm. I tried a lot of defensive items, but none seemed better than the other. I killed him a few times with a shotgun, a few times with an assault rifle.

• Sabaccatus St. Aubuens, armed with a flamethrower. Again, several types of armor seemed to work well against it and an assault rifle took him down.

    

After these six, Dracula appeared again and attacked me himself.

      

Hey, Gene Simmons was looking for you.

       

Oddly, he was far easier than Melissa Van Helsing. I killed him on my first try with a Blessed Soul Blade.

      

But is he?

       

An image showed me piercing Dracula's heart:

     

Or, at least, his clavicle.

      

Somehow, somewhere, I freed Deirdre Tackett, and a cut scene showed her and Mother Mary curing my vampirism with some combination of the Incubus program and a good old-fashioned Catholic exorcism.

   

But Incubus had one final twist up its sleeve. "Your friend Tackett underestimated her talents, Stark. My artificial intelligence has evolved. I've learned to learn. And I'm about to teach New York a lesson. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Incubus. And cyberspace will be mine."

     

Transition to credits.

        

I can't help but think this would have been a stupid sequel, and I'm glad the team never followed up.

       

If BloodNet were this team's first game, I'd say it was a bit rough around the edges, but I looked forward to what they developed next. But by now, we're getting towards double digits, and it's clear that the old Paragon Software crew simply never understood RPGs. It is likely that their experience developing GDW titles did them more harm than good, as even the tabletop versions of the GDW properties lacked hard rules for character development.

   

I note, for instance, that Ransom Stark gained an impressive 38 points of strength throughout the game (66 to 104) but never budged in any of his other "Physical" statistics. He didn't gain a point in any of his "Cyberskills" despite all the decking, nor a point in any of his "Combat" skills despite all the fighting. He did increase 10 in "Leadership" and 38 in "Will," but he lost all but 1 "Faith" point. None of his "Mental" statistics went anywhere. Despite all the time I put into it, BloodNet doesn't really pass my definition of a CRPG.

       

My ending skills, not much different from my beginning skills.

        

Even worse, so many of the skills turned out to be useless. Combat skills were the only clear exceptions, and even here, I'm not sure the skills governed the weapons they were supposed to. ("Blades" isn't even mentioned in the manual.) As for the rest, I didn't find a single place in the game to use "Stealth" or "Pickpocket" (there aren't even mechanisms for these). Others, like "Observation" and "Jury-Rig," had clear uses, but having six party members with the PAL system meant that it was trivial to find someone who could pass the skill checks. Some of the skills are the subject of outright lies in the manual. "Fast-Talk" is supposed to help you persuade NPCs, but there aren't even any dialogue options where that would come in handy. "Leadership" is supposed to determine what side places its combatants first, but in practice, the player always goes second and would always want to go second. "Courage" is supposed to force enemies to retreat from combat, but they never do. The manual also says that, "Whenever characters in your party successfully perform a given task, the skills related to the task will increase," which as we've already seen doesn't happen.

  

The game's setting is definitely a plus. I'll never be much of a cyberpunk fan, but I think I kept an open mind throughout the game. While the visuals, NPCs, and various plot points made good use of the sub-genre, there were some key areas of disappointment. While the game offered a few role-playing opportunities in the quests taken and completed and the choice between violent and nonviolent solutions to problems, I would have liked to see some dialogue options. The game reminded me of some modern quasi-RPG action games like Red Dead Redemption, where you can "role-play" in small ways but never have any control over what the character says or how he handles main plot developments.

        

Killing people was a little too easy. How did I "dispose of the body" in the middle of a club?

     

More important, I think the developers squandered the opportunity to introduce some highly-original role-playing elements relating to Stark's vampirism. The template is there: Stark's a vampire; he needs blood; every time he takes a life, it reduces his humanity. This setup could have offered a role-playing bonanza as the player has to decide exactly which of the many NPCs must fall to Stark's bloodlust. Instead, it's almost a non-issue. Even ignoring the alternate sources of blood that the game provides, a player would have to be spectacularly inept to take so long that he honestly risks losing Stark's humanity before the end of the game.

   

Incidentally, you're probably wondering what happens if you are so inept. First, if you let Stark's "Bloodlust" get too high without slaking it, he loses control and feeds on a party member.

        

So some of them aren't?

    

If you feed so many times on people that you get your "Humanity" down to 0, the game ends as Stark turns into a feral vampire:

        

Gained some hair, though.

          

I got caught up on Will's coverage over at The Adventurers Guild, and I was surprised to find him enjoying it more as an adventure game than I would have expected. My problem with BloodNet as an adventure game is that it only has a couple of honest puzzles, and those are pretty silly. Plot and quest progression is almost entirely about going to places, speaking to people, and finding items in a particular order. And what bothers me about the locations is that they're almost entirely non-interactive. They're just pictures accompanying text. I don't know why the authors bothered to put an avatar for Stark on the screen; there are only two places in the game where it even matters where Stark stands. Talking to NPCs, searching for items, picking up and dropping items, connecting to the Internet, and other tasks can be done from anywhere.

     

Oh, I have a lot of other complaints, but I'll save it for the GIMLET categories:

   

1. Game World. Memorable, evocative, and original for its year, although I wish the authors hadn't included so many names from Brahm Stoker. The game never seems to decide whether it's just making an homage or whether it's meant to serve as an actual sequel to Dracula. There are a few places in which the player's actions effect permanent changes to the world, and the main quest is generally clear. The whole cyberspace part of the "world" didn't really work for me, but I'm allowing some points for originality. I really enjoyed the uses of Manhattan, partly because I'm familiar with the city and have been to many of the places depicted in future squalor. It's always fun to see what game authors do with a real location. Score: 7.

       

I just wish I'd ever learned what this enormous thing in the middle of East Harlem was.

       

2. Character Creation and Development. I like the creation system, in which you answer various hypothetical scenarios to establish your skills, but as discussed above, the whole thing turns out to be a sham. "Development," if you can even call it that, is sporadic and does not follow any consistent rules. Score: 2.

3. NPC Interaction. A strong element of the game except for the lack of dialogue options. I enjoyed the different NPC names and personalities. Some of them were goofy, sure, but in general they went with the setting. There is so much NPC text in the game that it could have used an export or search feature. There is a "Dialog Replay" option that I kept forgetting to highlight. Score: 5.

      

The useful "dialog replay" option.

     

4. Encounters and Foes. Enemies in the game are basically humans or vampires; other than that, there's not much to distinguish them. There are only a few encounters other than what I already awarded in "NPC Interaction," and as noted before, the puzzles are mostly either unchallenging or illogical. Score: 3.

5. Combat. The interface fails what is otherwise a relatively solid combat system. It has the types of tactics that I generally enjoy. There are a lot of options; positioning plays an important role; damage is specific to individual body parts; there's an autocombat function if you don't feel like micromanaging. The problem is that too many of the options don't work, particularly switching weapons, and too much of the result seems random. Score: 4.

6. Equipment. Usually, I fault games for having too little to offer in this category. BloodNet is the rare game that offers too much. Even though the manual spells most of it out for you, I couldn't begin to keep track of what most of the stuff was for. There was a whole drug/pharmacology mechanic that I never explored, and I gave up on the "implant" and "jury rig" systems after getting lackluster results. Despite all the detail, the game lacks information on what you really need, such as the relative damage done by different weapons. And why are so many inventory slots unused? Score: 4.

       

It would have been nice if grenades had offered some actual function.

       

7. Economy. On the plus side, there are a lot of ways to make money. On the negative side, there aren't nearly as many ways to spend it. I like that you can just buy some of the major plot items (e.g., InstaPigment, the TransTech security badge), but otherwise most of your money is spent on ammunition, hiring NPCs, and a few plot choices, and I think Stark's starting bank account is enough to get through the entire game. This is all too bad because it hurts the otherwise-admirable side quest system. Score: 3.

   

8. Quests. While lacking an understanding about many other RPG elements, the Paragon team is among the few developers of the era that at least understood the importance of side quests. The MegaTraveller games and Challenge of the Five Realms are particularly full of them, and that tradition continues here. I completed some, abandoned some, and didn't even find some, which is the way I prefer it. I also see from Will's Adventurers Guild coverage that there are alternate ways to solve a few of them. I would venture that some of the side quests are more interesting than the main quest, which has no options or alternate endings. Score: 6.

   

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. I loved the scene graphics. Since realism isn't important to navigating the environments, I don't mind that the artists took such an avant-garde approach. Throughout the game, we saw interesting uses of color, lighting, and proportions, grotesque imagery, and unique perspectives. It almost ruins it to have such uninspired figures for Stark and various NPCs hanging around these scenes. But on the negative side, sound is so uninspiring that I just had to check to verify that it has any. The "hidden menu" interface works okay, but I would have liked to see more keyboard backups. For pity's sake, I won't rate the quality of the voice acting in the CD version, which would almost certainly give a net negative score to this category. Score: 4. 

      

The "camera" on this scene seems to be inside a plant.

          

10. Gameplay. We finish relatively strong. BloodNet offers some modest nonlinearity, modest replayability, modest difficulty (until the end), and good pacing. The overall time is just about perfect for a game of this amount of content. Score: 6.

    

I have to subtract 2 points from the subtotal of 44 for so many things that are just broken, particularly the ability to change weapons in combat, which gives us a final score of 42. That's exactly 1 point higher than I rated Challenge of the Five Realms and MegaTraveller II. I went into this GIMLET thinking that it should rate at about the same level as those two games, so I'm satisfied with the result. I "recommend" them all, but boy are they choppy.

       

This guy looks like a vampire telemarketer.

      

My views line up with those of Douglas Seacat, who reviewed the game in the February 1994 Computer Gaming World. He praises the successful fusion of Gothic horror and cyberpunk, the nonlinearity, the colorful NPCs, and the evocative graphics. He notes some story elements that I overlooked, or at least didn't think about, such as the parallel between blood-sucking vampires and "blood-sucking" corporations. Like me, he was underwhelmed by cyberspace ("vast and empty"), "confused and frustrated" by combat, and occasionally lost in the game's nonlinearity. He has nothing to say about character development, but Seacat was never much of an RPG reviewer. "A dark and wonderful gem of an idea, but a gem without polish," he concludes. The same year, the magazine nominated BloodNet for "RPG of the year" but gave it to Betrayal at Krondor.

   

Sandy Petersen gave it 3/5 stars in the April 1994 Dragon. His review doesn't cover anything that we haven't already discussed except that "drug use, implied sex, theft, and violent murder is the name of the game in BloodNet," which I feel is overstating it a little. But he has a point that the game offers darker themes and more moral grayness than the typical RPG of the era, another point in its favor. MobyGames's round-up of reviews shows a median score in the high 70s, with most reviews making the point that the mechanics fail an interesting plot and setting.

    

The old Paragon team was just getting started with its fusion of cyberpunk and horror, but they mercifully gave up on trying to make any of their games RPGs. Over the next few years, after wrestling back their studio from MicroProse and starting Take Two Interactive, they'd produce Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller (1994) and Ripper (1996), with Black Dahlia (1998) featuring some of the same elements. The developers certainly learned their lesson on voice acting; Hell has a cast led by Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones, and Ripper features--wow--Christopher Walken, Burgess Meredith, Karen Allen, Ossie Davis, John Rhys-Davies, and Paul Giamatti. That must have cost a fortune. I am not aware that Take Two ever produced an RPG, so we're seeing this team for the final time. I'm not that sad, but I do wonder what would have happened if the company had ever hired a developer who had heard of "experience points."