So I don't know how many of you remember this, but way back in the day, there was this mod called Vampire Slayer, for Half-Life 1. Browsing the demos on the Switch right now, I hit upon a game called "Vampire Slayer: Resurrection" and for a moment I'm obviously like, "No way that's the same game, right?"
As it turns out: Yes! It is! What???
I only ever played this for one night like fifteen years ago, but it left enough of an impression that I can still remember it by name and occasionally think about it. Vampire Slayer was, or I guess is, a team deathmatch mod where one team is the vampires and the other team is the slayers.
It's been forever, but to my memory, the vampires are just vampires. I think they function as a unified team. They're faster and significantly more agile than the slayers, almost being able to fly for how high they can jump and how fast they can run. The rub: they're melee only. Vampires can only attack by slashing with claws (and biting -- more on that in a sec).
Slayers on the other hand were a little more class-based -- I think you could choose from a four or five different loadouts, and they were mostly about ranged weapons. I remember there specifically being a priest, possibly with a sawed off shotgun and some kind of rosary attack? I remember somebody with a crossbow that launched wooden stakes, too.
The catch, of course, is that vampires can't really die. When a vampire loses all their HP, they appear to fall to the floor, dead. Then, a few seconds later, they... get back up again, just like in the movies. Unless -- and this is the important part -- a slayer can run in and stake the "dead" vampire before they get back up. That kills them for real.
As you can imagine, the character with the crossbow on the slayer side of things was a big deal, because they were the only slayer that more or less auto-staked a vampire instead of just knocking them down. But I also want to say that, much like headshots are important in other shooters, vampires must be staked in the heart in order to kill them, and nowhere else. This lead to interesting scenarios where panicked slayers rushed a downed vampire, missed the heart, and were torn to shreds for botching the stake.
This sounds like the game is balanced very heavily in favor of vampires, and to some degree, it is. I think ideally the balance tried to shake out that vampires were glass cannons and slayers were slow and tanky. I want to say vampires had a low HP cap, something like 75hp, and they didn't wear armor, whereas slayers could armor up like it was Counter-Strike. I also think slayers either had a healing class, healing items, or could find heals out in the map (or all three) whereas vampires could feed to regain health -- the rub being that vampires needed corpses to feed on.
(In order to maintain healing sources, I believe vampires could feed on the corpses of other vampires, but they got less from it or something of that nature. )
I think a freshly-fed vampire would even get a temporary buff to speed or health, to top it all off. So there was incentive to lure slayers in to a trap where the team could safely feed and then launch a counter offensive once they were all juiced.
Mechanically, you can probably see why it stuck with me after all these years. It's a hell of an interesting idea for a multiplayer game.
I just wonder how much demand there is for it in 2023. I guess I should download that demo.
Honestly, I miss the days of Half-Life mods like this. Vampire Slayer, Zombie Panic, Science & Industry, Pirates Vikings & Knights, The Specialists, The Hidden, Zombie Master... we've lost a lot not having these weird, experimental ideas anymore, even if they weren't enough to support player bases forever. They were often cool as hell in the moment.
Godspeed, Vampire Slayer Resurrection.