Remake Blood Gulch

An excellent remake, true to the original. While most of the map is pre-made, I think you did an excellent job of capturing the true Halo feel of Blood Gulch. Whenever I play capture the flag on Hemorrhage, I wish it was Blood Gulch. The warthog sprees, the roar of the scorpion, and who can forget the epic flag runs. As a die hard CE fan, you, sir, have made my day.

 

can you jump on the pillers around the base?

 

the struts.

 

So what actually changed from the Bungie version except less rocks on the map?
Cuz less rocks on the map only make it worse since there is no cover.

 

Turn each base 45 degrees to the right (so they're parallel from above) and it should be good

 

I applaud your dedication to accuracy, and this does look good. But I feel compelled to comment on a couple of things about the thread (and not really about your map per se - more so about every other part of the conversation here).

First of all, the sales pitch I find a little puzzling. The heart pounding awesomeness of Blood Gulch (sometimes - though often not, and I would know having played it week in and week out for years!) is not really in dispute. But I don't see how your map offers this somehow while Hemmorhage does not. There's not anything particularly special about the Blood Gulch weapon/vehicle/rock layout that magically creates great games, and there's nothing about Hemmorhage that magically prevents them. I've played some great games on both, and plenty of duds on both as well. For instance I played lots of horrible spawn-rape games on Blood Gulch, which had arguably the worst spawn problems of any official Bungie map in any Halo game - especially when the scorpion was involved. I also played plenty of boring CTF games where one team held the middle and just forced the other team to scratch and claw their way out of their own base for many minutes at a time. Conversely, I've played some great games on Hemorrhage - last minute flag or bomb runs, epic back-and-forths in team slayer, and so on. Put plainly, I don't believe the Gulch is quite as awesome as its reputation suggests, or that Hemmorhage is somehow a huge failure just because it's tweaked and changed a little bit.

Which brings me to my second point. I've never understood the depths of outrage at Bungie's "pathetic" reimaginings. Maybe I'm just not a purist or a competitive MLG type player enough to understand, but most of their remade maps have been fine with me. They play very similarly. The differences are not enormous enough to ruin the basic gameplay. Sure, you can argue about missing jumps and closed windows on Blackout and I can kind of appreciate that logic, but this is a sprawling map of great size where the fundamental gameplay comes from just a few elements: the shape of the canyon, the middle hill, the design and location of the bases, the caves and ledges that overlook both bases, and the weapon and vehicle set. The majority of that was preserved here - the changes are minute compared to the similarities. Personally I like that it's not exactly the same. I like learning the quirks of a map that is at least a little new. I like that they fixed (or halfway, sort of fixed) the spawn problems, and preserved the extra cover from Coagulation, which was frustratingly hard to come by in the Gulch. And I think where Hemorrhage fails is largely in areas that Blood Gulch also failed in - mostly in being a big, flat, vacant piece of real estate that was too hard on infantry and too forgiving for vehicles. To my mind, Valhalla was the best possible "reimagination" of the Gulch, and I wish like hell they had remade it for Reach instead. Ah, to dream.

Anyway, not trying to rain on your parade or anything - just hoping to bring a more moderated perspective to the discussion. Carry on!

 

Because it offers the opportunity to fix issues and to try a slightly different spin on a well-liked core design. Sometimes they have succeeded and sometimes they've failed, but few (if any) Halo maps are so awesome and perfect that they should never be messed with, at least in my opinion. I never liked Coagulation as much as Blood Gulch, for reasons that are hard to pinpoint, but I think as a re-imagination of the same basic concept, Valhalla was vastly superior to both. I also thought Avalanche was a far better and more fun map to play on than Sidewinder, although it's so very different that it's barely a remake at all. Blackout wasn't as good as Lockout but it played very similarly. The remake of Derelict (whose name I forget) was a superior map in one key aspect, providing another couple of ways up to the top level; that's a perfect example of a map that needed some tweaking. On the other hand, the remake of Hang 'em High messed with a good thing and didn't really succeed in its revisions, at least as far as I'm concerned.

The other reason to re-imagine (or just slightly alter) is that each of these games plays differently. Reach is a far cry from Halo: CE. Even a pixel-perfect remake of Blood Gulch won't play like it because too many other things are different - the vehicle speeds and physics, player speed, armor abilities, the weapon set... even a very fundamental thing like the camera view from the player's perspective affects how the map feels to you as you walk through it.

So for those reasons, I welcome remakes that aren't simply perfect re-creations with better graphics. I get a certain nostalgia from walking around on somebody's perfect forge remake of an old map, but truthfully, they rarely play better or are more fun than Bungie's takes. And like I said above, I think a few of those re-imaginations outdo the originals in most respects. Valhalla and Avalanche are much better big team maps to me than Blood Gulch and Sidewinder, and both of them would have been far more appropriate to Reach than Hemorrhage is. Opportunity lost there.

 

What made Hemmorage not as good was several things. 1, Blood Gulch was much smaller, and this gave infantry a little more CQB, which leads my to my next point 2, the DMR. Introduced in Reach, this weapon is able to pick off anybody trying to make their way on foot throught the map, which again, wouldn't be so bad if the bases weren't so far apart. This doesn't help with Hemmorage's lack of cover. Hemmorage is not a bad map, but it's changes from it's older models do not mix with Reach's gameplay as well, and does not live up to the family name. Anyways, I will be sure to download this map and see how it compares to the CE Classic.