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Warrior Souls 1: BladeForge

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(Should I include all Warrior Souls maps in the same topic, or make a new topic for each individual map that comes out? Not each version, but each MAP. Tis a series.)


Warrior Souls I:
BladeForge



1. Basic Map Info
It's an 8-player Hero Survival type of map. Pretty simple concept, you pick one of 8 playable characters and try to be the last man standing through waves of enemies and occasional PVP. You send spawns to kill foes, there are duels between all 8 players occasionally, and there's plenty of stuff to deck out your character.
All in all, pretty simple idea. But that's not the real beauty of this.



2. Custom Custom Custom
The gameplay itself may be fun, but the game is just decked out in custom effects. There are custom models, a custom BGM, and plenty of sound effects to keep the game alive. Don't overlook them either, the sound effects chime in for constant laughs. Be it letting you know someone is about to die, or telling you how badly you suck when you do.



3. Action/Reaction
Normally, hero-based games tend to have dead lifeless heroes that really are just a treasure chest full of deadly weapons. BladeForge kicks that out the window with the Reaction system. Characters respond to a variety of situations with Many action phrases. When they use their abilities, when they kill a player, or even when they're about to die.
Once enough players are killed off permanently, your character will even interact with the mastermind behind BladeForge.

All of this leading into a final cutscene ending based on your character when all of your opponents lay dead.



4. Ending it Already?
Out of everything going for the game, the endings have been a big reason players come back over and over. Each character has endings specific to them, and no one shares the same ending. And each character has 3 possible endings.
The ending you get depends on how you played. What did you do? What did you NOT do? Some actions, events, and items can affect your "Harmony" score, for better or for worse. If your Harmony is pretty high, you get to see the character's "Harmony Ending", but if your Harmony goes too low, you're stuck with their "Despair Ending".



4. Deeper Down
This is the big one. If there was only one reason to play again, it'd be this. There's only 8 characters in the game, but each character has a huge level of depth and variety to them. First of all, your hero only levels up to 15, so you miss out on 3of18 ability points. On top of that, leveling isn't very fast, normally a game will end before anyone reaches Level10.
While there is a "Basic" shop that is the same for everyone, there is also a "Warrior's Soul" shop that has items ONLY for the character you choose. These items can introduce entirely new playstyles, but they all require some lumber. Lumber is gained uniquely between each character. Hebron gains it when he kills a unit, Alexia gains it when she gets lucky with an ability, you get the drift.

The Spawns are another huge level of depth. Anyone familiar with most spawn-sending maps like Hero Line Wars or Legion TD will be familiar with the concept of "Some spawns have high income return, others have various bonus abilities". That's brought here too. There are a total of 9 different spawn monsters, and 4 "Spells" which COST income. Be it healing you, damaging an opponent's income, or just stunning everyone in the game. The three spells can easily save your butt from a brutal tactic or let you turn the tide and ruin your opponent.

Duels are another level of depths. By default, you win by being the last player to survive the onslaught of spawns your opponents will send. But you can also win by getting 14 Hero Kills. Every 2 minutes, all 8 players are called to the middle arena for a pvp slaughterfest. Each hero kills gives a pretty nice bounty to it, but if you spend too much energy trying to win the pvp, you might be caught off guard after the duel is over by your opponent's spawns.

There's also a Treasure Chest system. Kill a monster, find a chest. Kill another, find a key. Keys can unlock chests and give you some very nice prizes. Or they could be booby-trapped. But don't you just wanna squeeze'em anyways?

Finally is the Scoreboard. The scoreboard is BladeForge is a huge source of information on your opponents. Telling you their hero type, their hero kills, along with their HP% and MP%. Letting YOU know when it's time to try and take them out without having to scroll your screen over to them.



5. Extra Modes(no ejji modo)
There wasn't much to add in terms of modes, but they are there. Red can remove the "did not summon" penalty, or the "did not kill anything" bonus, you can also change how often duels occur. You can also do the classic "-ar" mode, or the "-canon" mode which prevents multiples of the same character.

-SafetyHigh and -SafetyLow will help prevent abusive spawn tactics right after a duel. Both disable income for 30 seconds, SafetyHigh will make everyon invulnerable during that time.
-TreasureHunt will double the odds of a treasure chest or golden key dropping, making it less of a super-rare event.

You can even affect the send order. By Default, players send Clockwise. Red->Blue->Teal->Red. And when Blue dies, it would go Red->Teal->Red.
-CounterClock will send that order in reverse. Red->Teal->Blue->Red.
-Pendulum will switch the game between CounterClock and NormalClock after every duel. So you start Normal, but after the first duel you switch to counter, after the second duel you go back to normal, and so on.

There's an -Endurance mode, which makes you summon on yourself. Duels go down to once every minute, and it takes 28 instead of 14 kills to win.
And lastly, the -fix command, which should fix most of the game's glitches when they occur.

Players have the choice of a few commands:
-mspd will show the movement speed of their hero.
-harmony will show their current harmony score, along with how much they need to get their "Harmony" or "Despair" endings.
-tct will show the chance of finding a Treasure Chest, along with what prizes are inside(and at what chances).



6. Credits
For the most part, this is purely a HeartCard project. Almost all of the mapmaking was done by HeartCard, including the terrain. But there's still some specifics:

Everything NOT listed below: Done by HeartCard.
Alexia's Model&Skin, Von Rose's Model&Skin, Medina's Model EDIT&Skin, "Dirty Victory" BGM: Credit goes to HeartCard
Hakoro's Model&Skin, the model&skin Medina was made from: Black_Stan


There was also a odd desync issue with the map at one point that was fixed by "Squall". I'm not saying his full name, because I don't want people bothering him about it.

Terrain: The playable area was mostly designed using an old Hero Square Wars map I had at the time. I couldn't open the map, so I just tried to redo the terrain as closely as possible. So I can only take partial credit on this. While a fair bit of the terrain was re-designed or enhanced, the base of it was from someone else.
IE the indestructible stone pillars were my idea, but the barrels were his idea.

There's a grim reaper model in the game too, I have no idea where it came from anymore, but I know it's not mine. If anyone knows the author of it, I'll gladly give credit. Or I could just replace it with the grim reaper model I made for another map, if credit isn't good enough.







7. Saiyan's Pride?
All in all, it's the only PvP map I've made that I'm actually proud of.
For those curious, there are actually 5 other maps in the series:
1. Warrior Souls 1.28F (The original map, based off Anime Fight's design for a hero arena. 128+ original characters. It falls short because it's a bit too simple, and it was actually meant to be that way sadly)
2. Warrior Souls 1: Seventh Sabbath (The 2nd spin off PVP map after bladeforge. 8 original characters. Kill a character=steal one of their powers. Unfortunately, the game is not only long, but it's a bit boring and once someone is in the lead, they've pretty much won).
3. Warrior Souls 1: Dragon Scrolls (A horrible story map that involved a lot of reading of some very bad poetry set to a type of slideshow sequence).
4. Warrior Souls 1: Cursed Guardian (The map was mostly finished, and played as a sort of single player hero line war. I may or may not finish this)
5. Warrior Souls 1: True Balance (This was a interesting DDR type of game. It WAS multiplayer, but all that mattered was that one player finish a level).

I'm thinking about finishing Cursed Guardian and True Balance. Since both are at about 80% complete.
The main thing is that I stopped playing warcraft3 for almost a year. And now I'm starting to do real game projects beyond WC3. So...yeah...





I'm not entirely sure what I want to happen here. Maybe that some people could enjoy a game that really had little wrong with it. It had a fair spike of popularity in Asia server during the DX version, but when a WC3 patch made that version useless, I guess the BluRay version never made it to Asia. In US East, it just didn't get hosted much. I was so busy mapmaking, that I never really hosted. I hoped my clan would do it. Yet whenever I DID host BladeForge, it got a fullhouse in a few minutes.
Or maybe I'm setting up a little pre-emptive promotion for when I start releasing Warrior Souls as an actual series, rather than just WC3 maps.
 

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I forgot to mention: I AM willing to improve the map.

If so, the next version would solve the following things:
1. There's a "Hiiiii" and "Looooow" result text in treasure chests that was used for whitebox testing, but never removed.
2. I'd probably add more options to the responses a unit can give, making it more varied.
3. I MIGHT add in Deadrule, Crevits Rets, Malame Rets, Eria Wyere from Warrior Souls 1.28, since they're relevant to the map.
4. Prevent shop access during duels. This is more of a gameplay choice really, since allowing and disallowing it changes the playstyle duels can take.
5. Might work more sound effects/etc. Also need to get rid of that god awful "Black Arrival" song that plays during bad endings. Then again...that song REALLY makes you want to NOT get a bad ending.



And for those curious: The number system of the versions is based on show release styles. You have the original, the Unedited version, the Canon, the Canon+Ending, the DVD, the Director's Cut(DX), and finally the BluRay.
So I guess the next version would be...Anniversary?
 
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