Blood Train
Chaosed0
If form should follow function in the Brutalist philosophy, valuing the clarity and experiences of the people who inhabit spaces, BLOOD TRAIN feels like a strong example of how that could translate to a Quake map.
The premise and flow is simple, the police are coming for you and it's time to get to the BLOOD TRAIN and then get out of dodge. The BLOOD TRAIN, the train that runs on blood. Presumably the police would like it to run on your blood, but once you reach the train, you flip the script and need to kill enough police to fuel the BLOOD TRAIN and make your getaway.
The central set piece of the map, after a short hike through some urban corridors, is adapted (quite closely in a few spots) from North Seattle College. The author was slightly concerned about much credit they deserved for adapting an existing space, but even if it wasn't an impressive feat to bring a real location into a video game in a way that keeps it coherent within the rules and aesthetics of that game, they also make really smart use of that space. A large central plaza is blocked off by police barricades with sets of stairs and balconies at either end gradually leading up to the train platform. Parts of the stairs are blocked off by barricades and so through the course of some small diversions, you gradually end up behind and then dismantling these, giving faster access from plaza to stairs to balconies to the BLOOD TRAIN.
From the BLOOD TRAIN, you're given the big objective of the map, to fuel the BLOOD TRAIN; you're told that the supplies and powerups around the plaza have respawned, and the horde is then alerted.
At this point you won't have enough ammo or health to fully deal with all the enemies on the upper platforms and balconies, so you're left either fighting your way back down to the useful supplies and powerups on the ground floor, or just leaping over the balcony. From there you have a lot of fairly open combat in the plaza (though the monsters are varied enough and there are pieces of cover to play with. Not all monsters need to be killed to get enough blood for the BLOOD TRAIN, so once you've got enough kills you then have to fight your way back up to the train platform, shifting again to narrower stairwells, balconies and bridges to make your getaway.
It's here that adapting a real location really works well and sells the idea of form following function. It's aided by already tracking through the space once of course, but there's also really great clarity to the environment. Stairs, walkways and balconies are clearly readable, wide sightlines situate you within the plaza at all times. It feels like a space that values and was built for real people as well as being put there to blast monsters with. And hey, that makes for a pretty great Quake space to navigate too.
BLOOD TRAIN is a silly, but also pretty smartly designed map, I liked it quite a bit.
