Mediocre, With A Twist

OK, lets get this out of the way first: Blood of the Martyrs or OBIWAN3 isn't a great map. It isn't even good. For its era - within the first year of Quake's release - it is a solidly mediocre map. OBIWAN3 isn't nearly as good as the author's two other maps, Prepare for HELL which is fun if confusing, and Office of the Dead which has cool architecture and serves up a big challenge. It does have the seed of something special, though.

OBIWAN3 is a typical military base level and has the player run through a series of squat rooms with handful of Grunts, Enforcers, and Rottweilers on patrol. Then there's a tedious series of backtracks as you flip switches that grant access to other parts of the base. The sections are connected by a genuinely well-constructed cavern system with high cave walls that disappear into a dark and unknown sky overhead. In it's time, multiple reviewers noted how good that cave looked. Aside from the special thing I'm going to talk about shortly, the caverns are the best part of the level.

The gameplay is frustrating guessing game: you'll hits a switch only to recieve a cryptic message about something opening up somewhere else. Then you run around the entire level looking for whatever it was that opened. And there are basic design problems, like a pair of doors that I didn't think to enter for fifteen minutes because they're textured just like a wall and I didn't know they could open. Then there's an elevator that really loves to gib the player if you don't pay very close attention to the scaffolding. Do you like instant deaths? Becuase this level's got railing-free walkways that lead to inevitable drowning in acid because there's no way out if you fall in. Worst of all, just like dinner at a wedding, the combat is dull and there isn't enough of it.

So why feature this level in the C:\QUAKE series, then? Because OBIWAN3 is secretly a Half-Life map.

Seriously, A Half-Life Map?!

To understand what I'm talking about, it's helpful to briefly compare the core gameplay of Quake and Half-Life. Quake takes most of its gameplay cues from Doom: put the player in an interesting but static environment with tons of enemies and force them to blast their way through the hordes to find keys that unlock doors and eventually to an exit. Half-Life is similar in the gunplay aspect only. Instead, goals are tied to a compelling narrative with the player at the center -  and there are no keys! The player must follow hints from NPCs and the environment around them to manipulate machinery, open up new areas, and achieve goals beyond merely completing a level without dying.

So now we focus on OBIWAN3. Unusually for Quake, it has no keys that lock off section of the level. Instead, the player follows hints from the environment around them (in the form of those aforementioned cryptic messages) to manipulate machinery (mostly bars that block switches from being pressed), open up new areas, and achieve a goal (discovering the puzzle nature of the base). The strongest connection between OBIWAN3 and Half-Life is a room that is surprising doppelganger to an area in the Blast Pit chapter of Half-Life. Let's take a look!

In both OBIWAN3 (released May 1997) and Half-Life (released November 1998), you enter a huge room with a central platform over a pit of corrosive acid. You crawl your way around on OSHA non-compliant ledges, and activate two switches. This powers up two narrow walkways which extend from the walls of the chamber into the central platform, which allows the player to activate some machine that opens up new areas of the level. It is a series of goosebump-raising similarities, and they're both great examples of environmental gameplay.

Obviously, Half-Life pulls off the illusion of the player affecting their environment with heaps of charm and visual excitement, while OBIWAN3 is clunky in execution and honestly boring to look at. But they share the same DNA. OBIWAN3 struck me multiple times as a rough draft of a Half-Life level. I felt that if you changed the textures, enemies, and sound in OBIWAN3 from Quake to Half-Life but kept the level geometry the same, you might be fooled into thinking you were back in Black Mesa.

According to the documentation included with OBIWAN3, the level was built as a deliberate attempt to "[try] something different, other than using keys." I think in this regard this level is a complete success - it really has something new. Sure, you need some 20-20 hindsight and a dose of imagination, but OBIWAN3 is an early example of well-executed environmental gamplay of the kind Half-Life would use to trasform the shooter genre forever.

But it still isn't a good level.

• Name: OBIWAN3.BSP aka Blood of the Martyrs
• Author: Obi-Wan
• Release Date: 15 May 1997
• Download: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/obiwan3.html 
• Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFRiofAJTvs ← This is my low-skill run through OBIWAN3 for your viewing pleasure. I get lost twice, but they've been fast-forwarded so you don't have to watch my crummy Quaking for long.
• Trivia: Compling the map took the author over two hours on a Pentium 133 with 32 megabytes of RAM. Quest was the mapping software used.
• Bonus: It took me less than five minutes to download the entire game of Half-Life of Steam, during which I looked up the cheats to get me exactly to the correct part of Blast Pit so I could capture a single screenshot. The future we live in is pretty awesome, never forget that!