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kristus

Hexen : Curse of the demon lord. (A sequel)

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kristus said:

The biggest issue I am having is figure out how to balance the overwhelming power of the Mage's Sapphire Wand.

Hexen.wad seems to balance it. Its levels are mostly cramped and mazy enough not to let many monsters appear in view, and if they appear, they're either behind (after a respawn) or just too close for the wand to be fast enough. Ettins at melee aren't safe to kill with the wand, unlike most other monster types. As a mage my character was often killed by rampaging shooters or angry mobs of two-heads. Think of his low endurance (and then speed) as his weakness.

Also, a rather fundamental feature of Hexen unlike all other Doom-like games is that the player is unable to budge other monsters, unless being a fighter.

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Yeah. Hexen solved it by making cramped and narrow maps. But it doesn't make for good game play. Deathkings took it to an extreme. In the end it instead made the wand virtually the only weapon usable for Mage. The ice shards do work, but only at melee then. And the arc of death doesn't really work well at all in cramped spaces as they make it terminate almost instantly.

Ettins rarely get close enough to be any danger to the Mage btw. Though there are some nice traps for it.

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kristus said:

The biggest issue I am having is figure out how to balance the overwhelming power of the Mage's Sapphire Wand.


IMO it's a choice between balanced gameplay (by nerfing it or replacing it using decorate) and supporting all ports. And even if you did make it for ZDoom, you can still use vanilla specials etc. and just change the wand.

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kristus said:

Yeah. Hexen solved it by making cramped and narrow maps. But it doesn't make for good game play.

Maybe the poor vanilla Hexen texture set was designed to fit with the dinky level design :)

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Really? Cool. I tried replacing the startup screen in Heretic though, and that would induce a crash in Vanilla. So it's possible the same will happen here.

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Yes and no. It's a nodebuild bug. I dunno why it comes. But I'm not to busied by it right now.

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You really love your giant swarms of innumerable enemies, don't you? :P Looks awesome.

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I'm actually really excited to play this because I felt as though Hexen in itself did not have enough fighting. I hope you don't intend to hide a million keys and switches throughout this episode so you have to constantly search out areas you've already been in.

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kristus said:

Really? Cool. I tried replacing the startup screen in Heretic though, and that would induce a crash in Vanilla. So it's possible the same will happen here.

I've tested replacing the startup screen in vanilla Hexen; it's ignored. It looks for that lump only in hexen.wad. So the upside is no compatibility problem, the downside is that it'll only actually work in ZDoom (did other ports also implement graphical startup screens?).

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Nah. It's basically only Zdoom and Chocolate Doom of all ports that emulates any of the classic loadup screens. And Chocolate Hexen won't run this anyway because of VPO etc.

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Is this level possible by Fighter? And I think it will be easier for Mage, than the others, because Mage's wand can hit several enemies by single hit (and Slaughtaurs cannot repulse Mage's shots).

But anyway GL - nice level - never seen much of enemies in Hexen before. Maybe we will see the same for Strife in the future...

P.S. Now I understand, why my ideas (except secret levels) are incorrect:)

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This map is hardest with Cleric. (Which is in part why I chose that class for the video) And currently easiest with Mage. But there are several things that are different between the modes. Like the Cleric for instance gets a lot more flechettes than either of the others.

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It looks really good. I can't tell where the player is expected to go in this map, but I suppose there is a lot of it I have yet to see.

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Good to have some news on this project. That aqueduct-looking thing is gorgeous.

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Hi, this is a public announcement to anyone who may be expecting this mod.

At this state, it's idling on an irc channel waiting for a +v promotion from one of the ops.

I've not worked on any of the maps in quite some time. (something like two months) because of IRL BS. It's however my aspirations to pick this up again as soon as I can muster. Because I have so many wonderful ideas for it. But to work on it, I really need to have some kind of free time and energy at the same time. Something that both are running on short supply lately.

I think everyone could be rest assured that I'll continue work on it at some time at least. It's just a question of when. (I may point out that Phobia was a project that I cancelled once in 2001 or 2002 to later pick up again in 2004 and release early 2006)

Of course I never anticipated this project to hit this kind of snag. I actually after the flying start I had, I expected it to go rather smoothely. But that obviously turned out to be a wrong perception I got.

I guess some are asking why I even bother making this post. It should be obvious by the lack of updates that nothing is happening... maybe? I dunno. I wanted to be frank about the status. It was bothering me for some reason.

Anyway. Till we meet again. (Or whatever, it's not like I am going anywhere)

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Alright, thanks to warning us. Good luck with whatever that is that bother you.

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