Blood
From DoomWiki.org
Blood is ubiquitous in the Doom games and in other games based on the Doom engine (including Heretic, Hexen, Strife, etc), and is perhaps a large factor in making them controversial in some circles (and appealing in others).
In many levels, blood flows in rivers, over blood-falls, and gathers into pools. In Doom, standing in or moving through blood is often detrimental to a player's health (see damaging floor).
The Doom engine creates animated blood spatter when a shootable thing, including the player, is hit by a hitscan tracer (for example, a bullet). Besides enhancing the atmosphere of the game, this helps the player to know that their aim was correct. There is a special provision in the game code which scales these splatters proportionally to the amount of damage inflicted by given attack—thus, giving a rough visual clue to the player.
Blood also splatters when things are crushed.
In both cases, vanilla Doom treats blood as a transient special effect; only the source ports (initially Doom Legacy but later ZDoom and derivatives) allow for monster blood to splatter onto walls and stick there.
For realism, hitting inanimate objects, including Doom's barrels, produces a puff of smoke rather than a blood splatter.
Furthermore, as a player's health drops in Doom, the status bar face becomes progressively bloodier, or as the manuals state, begins "to look like raw hamburger."
In the original release of Doom, along with most source ports, blood will always be red. In some ports, blood can be colored. For example in Crispy Doom, if you turn on colored blood in the menu options, the following will happen:
- Hell knights and barons of Hell will have green blood;
- Cacodemons will have blue blood.
Furthermore, setting the option from "Blood" to "All", the following will happen:
- Lost souls will emit the same particle that a bullet would emit upon hitting a wall;
- Spectres will emit partially invisible blood, similar to the spectre itself.
Censorship[edit]
Some versions of Doom and related games were censored on a regional basis, either by removing elements of blood and gore or most often by recoloring the blood green.
Port | Changes |
---|---|
Doom for Super NES | Blood splats are removed, but this may be due to technical issues as other elements remain. |
Doom for Game Boy Advance | Blood splats and blood on sprites is green. Some gore textures and objects are removed. Corpses disappear, and enemies do not gib. |
Doom II for Game Boy Advance | Blood splats and blood on sprites is green. Some gore textures are replaced. Gore and gibs reduced or removed. Corpses disappear after a while. |
Doom 64 (Japanese localization) | Blood splats are green. |
Hexen (Nintendo 64) (Japanese localization) | Blood splats are green. |
Doom 64 (2020 version) | Gives the option to toggle between red and green blood splats. |