Original "boomer shooter" Dusk gets free HD remaster, five years in the making
New and expanded modding tools "a few weeks away"
New Blood Interactive have released a free HD DLC remaster for their reputation-making retro FPS Dusk, almost five years to the day since the original shooter launched on Steam. Honestly, the idea of remastering an alt-history "199X"-style homage to Half-Life and Doom does a number on my sense of time - which multiversal branch are we in now? Still, those gibbable demon Klansters certainly look swish. Find a comparison trailer below:
According to New Blood's announcement post, the HD remaster is "primarily" the work of two devs - Ben Moir, who has rewritten the game's engine over the past five years, and David Bonin, who has remade all the original Dusk visual assets and created a few new ones. In a show of company munificence, they'll split all the profits from any Dusk sales in December between them.
3D artist Cody Lambert has also contributed new enemy and weapon models, while Don Antonazzo and Lachlan Milne have made new animations. All these developers started as external contractors, but have become full-time New Blood employees in the course of Dusk HD's development, which is nice.
The HD remaster lands "a few weeks" ahead of the much-trumpeted Dusk Development Kit, a new set of tools that will put power in the elbow of the game's existing modding community. "While Dusk has indeed been somewhat moddable and mappable for years - shout out to DUSKmods.com - we've always envisioned a world in which Dusk was just as moddable as Doom and the other classics that inspired us," the announcement post continues.
As of right now, you can use the game's basic software development kit and Steam Workshop tools to "make and play custom maps, (even basically drag and drop Quake and Half Life maps) use texture replacements and sound replacements" and make use of every file from the base game. You'll need to wait for the DDK before you can introduce custom models, entities and weapons or use files from the HD remaster.
One last thing: New Blood have added a new weapon to Dusk HD, or rather, restored and polished up a weapon from the original Dusk beta. It's sort of a trash claw grabber that shoots demon energy. Here, have a gander.
One other last thing: one of my personal Optional Secondary Quests is to track down whoever actually coined the phrase "boomer shooter" and say things like "did you know that the OG Doom creators are strictly speaking members of Generation X", while revving a chainsaw menacingly. (I will admit to having used the term non-ironically in articles in the past.) What do you think of the much-abused label at this point?
One other other last thing: did you know that it's Doom's 30th anniversary? Here's John Romero with more.
Final other last thing: Dusk creator David Szymanski is working on a new game inspired by Manhunt and Condemned.