Theoretical Discussion: Heretic Artifacts

Just thought I'd make another thread to go with the Heretic monsters one, because artifacts are a whole other interesting can of worms. The inventory system is the biggest thing that makes Heretic into its own unique game instead of just a reskin of Doom, and I feel like as a mapper, I don't have the greatest handle on some of the artifacts yet. Is Heretic simply not Heretic without the high level of randomness introduced by the inventory? What are some of the more interesting uses for each artifact? Are there any artis that are just pointless novelties, or do they all have an important purpose? If you could add one or two more artifacts to the game, what would they be?

Tome of Power: This is the big one, obviously -- the powered weapons are one of the key elements of strategy in Heretic combat, and using a Tome dramatically alters gameplay for a whopping 40 seconds. There's nothing remotely like it in Doom. As awesome as it is to be able to pull it out of the inventory in times of dire need, I don't think I'm alone in feeling that the Tome is unbalanced, and one problem with Heretic is that gameplay is too slow and annoying without it but is absurdly easy with it. I've attempted to address this in Wayfarer by creating the Sigil, a version of the artifact that activates instantly and lasts for a much shorter period of time. My feeling is that this makes larger battles more balanced and turns them into more of a tactical challenge, since the artifact usually doesn't last long enough to wipe out all the enemies in an area.

Morph Ovum: This is the next most interesting artifact, imo. Aside from just being funny, it gives players a great way to thin out heavy opposition in a pinch or punch through a wall of enemies when cornered. With Heretic's bestiary, there aren't any individual enemies that are ideal to use it on (either they're too weak to bother or it doesn't affect them), so it's purely a crowd control measure.

Shadowsphere: It was a great idea to add the ghost powerup in addition to making enemies aim poorly (which is at best a mixed blessing for any experienced player) so that it would be more useful in combat, but the implementation was pretty lousy. Becoming immune to exactly one type of enemy is better than nothing, but not very interesting in terms of strategy. I've thought a lot about how to make this artifact better but haven't had any success. I think ideally, I would want the player to be immune to melee attacks from the Gargoyle, Golem, and Sabreclaw, as well as Gargoyle fireballs and UW green axes --but red axes *would* hit. This would make the sphere useful in a wider range of situations but would not allow you to ignore UWs completely as you currently can. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to make enemy melee attacks go through a ghost player; you can give the THRUGHOST flag to weapons, but not monsters. Additionally, the more attacks you make ghosts immune to, the more you potentially screw up monster infighting, which may have been why the Heretic designers largely abandoned the idea.

Mystic Urn/Quartz Flasks: Simple but nice. I like that the Urn doesn't grant super health like the Soulsphere does; Heretic isn't really set up to accommodate a player with that much health, and not being able to tank your way through a battle forces you to rely on inventory management, which is exactly what Heretic wants you to do.

Time Bomb of the Ancients: Cool in theory, and I'm sure many players use them to great effect. I've never really gotten the hang of them, and I prefer to just use weapons. I suppose they're most effective against very large groups of enemies, but in that case I'd rather use a Tome.

Ring of Invincibility: Immensely overpowered in the context of Heretic, and should rarely if ever be given outside of difficult secrets. A powerup of this nature really requires a large array of powerful monsters like Doom has. Additionally, Doom's invulnerability powerup allows for more control over gameplay because it activates on pickup, which often requires players to think on the spot and decide how best to use it tactically, even in situations without extremely powerful monsters. In Heretic, it's just a way that players can choose to be lazy.

Torch: Suffers the same problems as the Lite-Amp Goggles, which are that it is rarely useful and tends to destroy the aesthetics of a map. It's slightly better than the Goggles because of the flicker, but still, I think it would be much better to have the arti only light up a certain radius around the player, gradually fading out as the light gets farther away. Not sure how to implement this.

Chaos Device and Wings of Wrath: Both very interesting, but very hard to use because they make it so easy to break a map -- not just in terms of passability issues, but more importantly, they let players circumvent even the most well-designed combat setups. As a result, they severely limit what mappers can do in terms of level layout and flow. The Chaos Device is a pretty interesting last resort for a player who's about to die, but it doesn't do anything that a carefully planned system of teleports can't do better. Aside from another way to cheaply escape from combat, the only really good use I can think of for the Wings is to open up otherwise unreachable secret areas. But to allow these benefits at all, a mapper has to specifically design maps to accommodate the use of the artifacts. The Wings work with this philosophy because they don't transfer between levels. The Chaos Device does transfer between levels and can therefore break anything at any time. I've addressed this problem in my tweaks for Wayfarer by not allowing it to transfer.

Heh. I didn't think this post was mostly going to turn into a discussion of gameplay balancing problems, but there you have it. Heretic's inventory system is the biggest thing that makes it unique, but also the biggest thing that makes it difficult to make maps for.

If you let red axes touch a shadowsphered player, then a pack of ghost warriors will no longer be able to throw their axes through each others or through their ghost nitrogolem bodyguards.

59 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

Time Bomb of the Ancients: Cool in theory, and I'm sure many players use them to great effect. I've never really gotten the hang of them, and I prefer to just use weapons. I suppose they're most effective against very large groups of enemies, but in that case I'd rather use a Tome.

Time bombs are much "cheaper" than tomes, though. You can easily find a dozen TBs in a map, but the mapper is quite unlikely to give you a dozen TOPs. (And if there is a dozen TOPs, then there'll be hundreds of TBs.)

The key to effective use of a TBOTA is to predict where monsters are going to go in the next few seconds. Go there before the monsters do, drop the bomb, and (very important) back out. There are two situations where time bombs are useful (and they can be combined): thinning large hordes (where you can be reasonably sure that there will be monsters where you drop the bomb, because there'll be monsters everywhere anyway) and defending a chokepoint (where you can be reasonably sure that there will be monsters because they can't move around it). The combo being, obviously, defending a chokepoint from a horde of monsters.

As blast weapons, time bombs are effective against ghost, and can also be used as a last-ditch defense against ghost monsters when you're out of ammo. Generally, the time bombs can be seen as a sort of special type of ammo -- with the limits of inventory items (no more than 16, can carry only one across levels). If you're afraid you're being too generous with ammo, you can remove some ammos and compensate with added TBs, it will have less of an impact on the next map during continuous play.

When you think of the TB as a weapon rather than an inventory, you'll find out that it's one that encourages a bold, aggressive playing style. To make the best use of it, you have to get near a crowd of monsters -- kind of like how making effective use of the SSG or BFG in Doom encourages running up to the monsters' faces, and the bigger the crowd, the better as it'll increase your chances to get more bang (quite literally) for your buck. The SSG, at least the way I play, is more of a tango weapon, where you dance with a single mid/high-tier monster at a time while really dense crowds are more inviting for the rocket launcher. But the TB's dance is closer to moshing.

If I'm not mistaken, Shadowsphere deflects the Iron Lich's tornado attack too.

I think the Chaos Device can really work with a map that has many instances of inescapable death pits. Same goes with Wings of Wrath,  a map that has a lot of areas with damaging floor, canyons that the player need to traverse with wings in order to progress. 

Time Bomb of the Ancients always felt to me as a good early additional weapon, at least until I got either the Crossbow or the Dragon Claw.

51 minutes ago, Sky said:

If I'm not mistaken, Shadowsphere deflects the Iron Lich's tornado attack too.

Looks like that's not true...but it's definitely an interesting idea. I hate those tornadoes, and an artifact that grants immunity to them would be fantastic.

Anyway, looks like it's actually the ice ball you get immunity to, and the shards from its detonation can still hurt you. So if you have the Shadowsphere active, you can be hurt by the tornadoes, the fire, and the shards, but not the initial ice projectile, which is not an especially useful attack to have immunity against. It does protect you from getting hit by multiple shards from one attack detonation, but the ice ball is an easy attack to dodge.

54 minutes ago, Gez said:

If you let red axes touch a shadowsphered player, then a pack of ghost warriors will no longer be able to throw their axes through each others or through their ghost nitrogolem bodyguards.

True, but regular UWs could still do the latter pretty reliably. Another idea: suppose the player were immune to Weredragon fireballs and green axes, but not red axes. Then you could have Weredragons take on the role you're describing for Ghost UWs. Overall, I think it could be worth it to give the Shadowsphere more depth.

I've pretty much scrapped my ideas for changing the artifact for now though, since I can't change the melee attacks. It feels kind of ridiculous to mess around with making some magic-looking projectiles be "magic" and some be "not magic" when I can't stop the only truly mundane attacks (claws and blades) from hitting a ghost player.

There is one little known feature of the chaos sphere, most likely meant for deathmatch. If you have one and you get hit with a powered up mace sphere, you get teleported automatically and you lose half of your health. The only way this can trigger in single player is if you are telefragged by one of your own shots. Certainly not easy to do, but it's possible.

For Heretic mapping, it's a bit annoying, but for Hexen, it's a nightmare. Let's say you pick up a key, and the door closes behind you, and you need to defeat all of the enemies before it opens again. However, you decide to use a chaos device, and you zip back to the beginning of the map. The enemies are never killed, and that door never opens, and the map is probably broken now. You could make it so the door can open from the outside, but that's just more headaches. Also, suppose you plan on the player returning with the key and the event you so meticulously planned ends up triggering early and without the necessary requirements. Well, the map is even more broken now. And all of this due to one annoying little artifact.

The torch is nice if you want to make an optional area. For example, there is a secret area that is easy to find (probably 75% or more the player discovers it on the first play-through. It has to be a place that is distinctly out of the way and has nothing to do with the main quest of beating the map. This optional area would be pitch black, fairly minimalist detailing involved, and it would have zero-brightness. Obviously there could be a few hallways that are pitch black, with basically no monsters and perhaps 1 sabreclaw, just to let the player know: yeah this could be a pain in the ass if I don't have a torch. There could be stairs that lead to a foreboding room, basically give some warning this place is bad unless you have the torch. At the end of the darkness quest, there can be a small reward of something rather strange, like 2 chaos devices! That way the player doesn't have to walk back through the darkness quest room once the torch's usefulness expires. Just cut the crap and get back to the main quest and the player will be thankful for how the author rewarded an example of thoughtful planning.

Basically, if the player is using the torch, they have explicit knowledge this is a temporary artifact, so they will be moving quickly through a dark area. They don't want to get caught with their pants down. If I was that player, I would not care a lot about the detail of the optional dark secret anyway, since I'm strafing around looking to accomplish whatever I can before the artifact wears off.

Gez explains Time Bombs more articulately than I could hope to, so that's that, I'll just add that they can do tons of damage if you use them right and should definitely not be underestimated.

One thing of note about the Morph Ovum (and the other morph artifacts in the series, for that matter) is that you can look at them as an attack that does damage even though it will never kill on its own.  The chicken always has the same HP no matter what it's morphed from, so you do more "damage" using it on high-HP enemies like Ophidians than you do if you just hit a Gargoyle.  For the same reasons, it's best used on enemies that you haven't already done damage to (because by morphing an injured enemy, you're basically wasting the damage that's already been done to it.)

Invulnerability objects in FPS games have always tended to be a bit weird.  The ring, I find, often ends up being used like a glorified radiation suit if it's not being saved for bosses.  I think someone already put a Heretic "radsuit" on Realm667 a long time ago.  You can also do Ring + Tome + Gauntlets to full-heal yourself off of enemies with impunity.  The bit where the shadowsphere only effectively counters one enemy, though, is pretty interesting, I think, though it does make it pretty niche.  Theoretically getting axes to pass through you could be a good way to incite infighting but I'm not sure I've ever seen a map set up to encourage this.  The Shadowsphere's maybe more of a useful item in deathmatch since there are more player weapons that can't hit ghosts than there are monster's ones.  Also the Iron Lich does have an attack that passes through ghosts, I believe, but it's the ice ball rather than the tornado (having it work on the tornado probably would have been more useful...)

Torch is ugly, yes, but Cupboard's idea for how to make cool use of it is a pretty good one.  Otherwise it's something I use sparingly both in playing and mapping since it does tend to be a bit lame.  I also sometimes treat it as something to put in a map flagged just for easy mode somewhere on maps with areas that are dim.

As for Chaos Device... a map that can be broken by using one is also going to be broken for playing in co-op mode.  I'd say this is a problem of bad map design, not a bad artifact.

Thanks guys! Lots of interesting stuff to think about here.

About the idea of the torch having just a radius of brightness, that actually would be relatively easy to implement. You'd need to increase the "visibility", and possibly increase global brightness by one or two notches instead of all the way.

Try messing with the r_visibility setting in ZDoom-based ports when using the software renderer to see what I mean.

1 hour ago, Blastfrog said:

About the idea of the torch having just a radius of brightness, that actually would be relatively easy to implement. You'd need to increase the "visibility", and possibly increase global brightness by one or two notches instead of all the way.

 

Try messing with the r_visibility setting in ZDoom-based ports when using the software renderer to see what I mean.

Thanks! I'll look into that.

After messing around with the Lich some more, it looks like the Shadowsphere does effectively make you immune to the tornado. It can still technically damage you, but it loses the "heat-seaking" ability and fires off course, so it will almost never hit. In fact, if you activate a Shadowsphere with a tornado coming at you, it can have the appearance of deflecting the attack. The first time I tested, I activated the sphere with the tornado coming at me and then just stood there, so it hit me. But if you activate it with an oncoming tornado and then step to the side, it will just go straight past you. Hard to believe I never noticed this before, but I rarely use the Shadowsphere because of its other limitations.

Given that the artifact is very useful against both a common enemy (UWs) and a miniboss (Iron Lich), it seems unnecessary to change it further -- although if I ever find a good, clean way to grant immunity to Sabreclaw swipes, I'll implement it.

I was also going to say about the chaos device / escaping from a closed area resulting in broken map... The closed areas should be accessible from the outside. One easy way to do it is to open some teleporter outside the area, this way the area doesn't become open (temporarily or permanently) until player has killed the monsters, hit a switch or found some item.

Wings could be given at the end of the level like in Hexen. Or give a whole lot of them in a secret level.

Time bombs are a good way to give player access to some explosives before giving the phoenix rod. The morph ovum is quite the same.

Regarding the Heretic artifacts and their balance-breaking properties: It's sort of a philosophy thing, not unlike Doom jumping, or no-clipping, or even idkfa. Sure they all can break things - specifically, the obstacles the map designer carefully engineered. And, yet, depending on your play philosophy, that may or may not be ok.

What I mean is: If I've been playing a Doom map over and over, and keep dying in the same spot, maybe because I am out of ammo, I am inclined to idfa, or idkfa. Or, if I'm really stuck, and don't know how to proceed, and I've been frustrated for 15+ minutes, I'll noclip that sucker. Cause, basically, I'm in it to have fun, and I don't mind a cheat here and there, to keep the fun rolling. In fact, I appreciate that those tools are available, though I only use them after trying legitimately.

Now, the Heretic (and Hexen) inventory can provide some of that same functionality, but with a difference: The "cheats" are sanctioned by the map author: the items were added to the map by the author! Which is cool, cause they let me "cheat" when I need to, without feeling like a dirty cheater! I can collect a bunch of them, or I can use them as necessary, effectively allowing me to play the way I want to.

If there's some tower with goodies on it, and instead of finding a obscure switch deep in a cave, I fly over to the tower instead, I'm still having fun. That may help me discover the "proper" way of opening up the door to the staircase leading to the tower.

I grew up with the text adventure games:

>GO EAST
Ok.

>LOOK
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. There is a shiny key on the ground.

>GET KEY
Ok.

>PLUGH
????

Now, those games would be severely broken with cheat codes. But, Doom and friends are different - they are action games first, and puzzle games second. So, with my play philosophy, it's ok to have "unbalanced" inventory items. The more the merrier. I can always choose to challenge myself, and not use them.