Masters of Chaos v 1.1 for Heretic

With its borrowed textures, monsters and music, Heretic never felt more like Hexen.

 

There are times when the visuals are breath-taking, and a few times when they're a little rough around the edges.

 

The foremost folly of the set is its progression, which can at times be scatter-brained. You'll spend 10-20 minutes looking for a switch, and then another 10-20 minutes looking for what the switch did. If you'd like hint, it's almost never what would make logistical sense.

 

What the Megawad lacks in polish, however, it makes up for in passion. The levels are grand in size and scope, and the occasional flourishes of environmental story-telling are immersive and creative. My favorite map of the set was E3M3's impressive boat set-piece.

 

Although it may have quite a few clunky bits, this is an epic and addictive ride from start to finish. If you're prepared to pace yourself through the longer treks of the set (such as the extended length of Episode 3), and the parts seemingly engineered to test your patience, this one is worth a go

My favourite Heretic wad to date and there are good reasons for that.

 

It's huge and adventurous, one episode has the lenght of an entire game. You'd think this would get boring and tedious, but the variety of the levels keeps it fresh, from arcane towers to frozen gardens, from swampy forests to a dream sequence that goes full A.L.T. on you.

The inclusion of new weapons and enemies adds some flavour and extra challenge, and none of them look out of place.

 

But it's not without flaws, the lenght can be an issue to some, and because of the size of the levels some parts have very little detail and look bland.

I have played this on "Bringest them oneth" (HMP) and I didn't have any problems with the difficulty, but others seem frustrated with it so keep that in mind; one of the frustration factors were probably the Ice Guys (Wendigos) from Hexen (although they were hair pulling in Hexen too).

 

Overall I would recommend this to anyone who's up for a long and challenging Heretic styled odyssey.

What a wonderful piece of work... Any news on version 1.2 of Masters of Chaos? The mod's Zdoom thread seems to be dead now :C

just what heretic needs, another mediocre wad that uses zdoom simply to work around the creators' lack of skill.

It's not bad, but it could be better if new weapons could be switched-in as secondary weapons rather than primary. It's really stupid having to double-tap 4 to get rid of the obnoxious ice cannon. Some levels are too huge for co-op play and keep breaking GZDoom/ZDoom sync.

Overall pretty good. I enjoyed E2 and E3 much more than the first episode.

Good architecture, but sadly overall pretty terrible. It can't be beaten using vanilla Heretic options (sans-jumping and crouching). This should've been mentioned in the .txt so I could've avoided it from the start. Poor design. Also, it oddly uses Hexen format for a Heretic level, even departing from standard level design such as having the sector type for secrets be 9; strangely, instead they're 1024. Minor gripe, but it indicates a lack of following standards, which is a bad sign. Don't bother.

two people got together and created a Heretic megawad that encompasses a lot of playtime. yeah, Heretic levels tend to be harder to speedrun through mostly because of the way the weapons and monsters are designed. well good news and bad news. bad news is that most of these levels are insanely huge, but they are really nice to look at and to play. good news is we get more weapons to play around with along with many new enemies.

 

the frost fang (slot 4) is extremely addicting to use, but a bit odd since it sometimes has pauses in between volleys of shots, its powered up version is okay but there's better. the skull staff (slot 8) seems like it could be a fantastic weapon by nature but it's basically a slower hellstaff with a different ammo pool which only really is handy. it's powered up version is actually kickass but the weapon sprite disappears for some reason. meanwhile, the blood scepter (slot 5) is also a slower hellstaff, which seems a tad more reliable with more damaging shots and a good powered up attack. the ember wand (slot 2) doesn't seem to hit any strides. the best new weapon is easily the jade wand (slot 3) with piercing shots, although it's useless against ghost enemies, it has the best powered up version which is a rapid-fire SSG-like hitscan, absolutely invaluable.

 

the one inventory item and a load of custom monsters come from Hexen. Discs of Repulsion aren't really that useful, and many of the Hexen enemies play rather well. Dark Bishops, Reivers, Green Chaos Serpents, and Wendigos are mainstays, but the Ettin holds the cake for most annoying custom enemy with multiple attacks and a bit of waiting for his dumb flame shield whatever to go away. there's a number of actually custom Realm667 enemies, like the darker bishop variants as well as roaches (green Shadows that shoot two green projectiles), Nightmares (those imp-like things that only are killable if visible), and some archers, along with an erratic-moving invisible warrior of sorts. the black Iron Lich boss is another weird one.

 

I enjoyed the forest levels quite a lot, E1M6 and E3M2, but most of the interior ones were not so good. E3M3 for example was more annoying than it should be. the town levels are okay with E3M9 being the best. almost every level will take over 10 minutes here, so prepare for the long haul and make sure to save all your resources throughout. the final boss at E3M10 was very cool to fight I'd say, make sure to actually press the four switches in the arena as monsters are teleporting, it's a good idea to run instead of fight so you can get the maximum out of the infighting that is liable to help weaken the main boss.

Best Heretic wad!

What port is this designed for? It's in vanilla ftp dir, and the txt file doesn't mention minimum port spec, but filesize and map numbers tell a different story. It's confusing...

Total Awesomeness. I don't know how to explain but this heretic magewad really great, I know there were few of wads for heretic, so such things like this became really great. Well, some small flaws like HoM in E3M10, overpowered new monsters(seems like ZDooM wad suffered this as always) and some weird mazey map designs. But overall I have lot of fun with this, great job! 4.5/5

Probably the biggest heretic megawad ever. Awesome! We need more heretic megawads like this!

holy smokes this is the best heretic megawad ive ever played 10/10 the thing is that i cant play it in Gzdoom i dont like that soo 3/5 = 13/10

Gran mapeado con mucha jugabilidad. Discrepo de Kristus y otros, es un gran trabajo.

Pretty good megawad for Heretic! I finished episode 1 and it's pretty challenging, I died few times (twice in ice level because of ettin boss and other times in secret levels because I have found none and had to warp to them with wand only) Also there were some bugs: example green door at end of E1M8 can be opened once, when closes it cannot be opened again. Other bugs are: ettin boss (bormereth) can be morphed, he is a mini-boss after all so it needs protection and some texture misalignments. Overall 4/5

Heretic deserve more megawads. and believe me, this one rocks! 5/5

I had great expectations from this one. Offers a very nice assortment of themes and environments, but sometimes level design is a bit too much blocky and symmetrical. The addition of several R667 monsters and weapons _in unmodified form_ does not help either. 3*

Agree with Kristus. I regret wasting my time. 1/5

First episode felt a bit raw when it was released as a beta, but the full thing is a big improvement. Some maps suffer from excessive switch hunting (looking at you E1M10) and the ice rod doesn't really get used but in looks, themes and gameplay it's a winner.

One of the best WADs i've played for Heretic, it doesn't rely on overdetailed level design but rather on classic style which is great. Don't listen to the naysayers and give this a go. 4/5 stars from me, good job. And full playthrough: http://www.youtube.c om/watch?v=s9Wx_E9bD 1g

I just finished the Frozen Wasteland and enter the Chapel of the Moon. Totally digging the dark atmosphere & the level design. Great work on the balance too, I find myself constantly having to switch weapons, running out of ammo for one while finding barely enough ammo for another. Also finally some maps where items are not only a commodity but a necessity!

Nice maps here and there, but overall felt very mediocre. I was waiting for more of the good ole Heretic feeling which was missing. 3/5 Trollmann

Played @ UV. Pros: nice long adventures, good fights, new monsters. Cons: often way, way too dark, way too many invisible monsters, some new monsters are unbalancedly strong, some levels are very repetitive, sometimes too much switch-hunt, and I really hate levels which are completely 'fog'ged-up. Overall: absolutely solid 4/5, but due to it's weaknesses not 5/5. Thanks for making this megawad anyway, overall I enjoyed it a lot.

You'd be doing yourself a big favor if you paid attention to this file and ignored the other nine most recent ones. This is the only one worthwhile. Good work. 5/5

Execellent mapset, really Good Job on this megawad.