Heretic on Steam

[MarekKRK]

How many episodes does Steam Heretic have? I have recently seen someone playing a 5 episode version on YT. Was there an Ultimate Doom style edition with extra episodes?

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

5.

 

"After its big success, two additional episodes were released for free, upgrading the normal Heretic to Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders (v1.3). The original version of Heretic with three episodes was subsequently discontinued."
- DoomWiki

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Most sites give the shadow riders version. It is harder to buy the unpatched (3 episodes + different title screen) version to be frank. 

[SirJuicyLemon]

I'm not sure how is the experience of playing Heretic via Steam.

I can tell that the experience of playing the classic Dooms via Steam suck. I'm glad I bought the Ultimate Doom and Final Doom when they were at sale so it was cheap but got really disappointed when I realized it was just the game emulated on a pre-prepared DOSBox with some additional configuration files on the folders.

 

But then again, I'm not sure what I was expecting. You just can't play Doom directly like on DOS on newer OS (or at least Windows). Maybe I was expecting Doom95 or a launcher of some similar kind.

 

At least for the case of Doom I suppose you have three ways:
1) You can buy Doom on Steam (or other website that sells it, if there are) and feel good that you are buying it legally. Then, after you download it you can take the .WAD and play it on a modern source port (unless you want that crappy DOSBox experience)

 

2) You can get the freedoom .WAD and play it without concern of piracy and not spending any of your money.

 

3) You can just search for the original .WADs and play it thanks to piracy. (Not saying you should, that's up for everyone's own decisions and risks).

 

This applies for Heretic too I guess. I suppose that Heretic and Hexen on Steam follow the same pattern of using a premade DOSBox configuration for the game. I'm not sure if there are freeheretic or freehexen .WADs though...

[MarekKRK]

GZDOOM and Chocolate Doom support Heretic. I Just need legal WADs from Steam.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

The steam version comes with heretic.wad.

[unerxai]

The original title screen was way cooler wasn't it?

[Paar]

Yeah, I like it better. And don't forget that SotSR breaks original demos which get desynced after a while. Fortunately the two new episodes are fun and make up for it.

[Master O]

5 hours ago, Paar said:

Yeah, I like it better. And don't forget that SotSR breaks original demos which get desynced after a while. Fortunately the two new episodes are fun and make up for it.

 

Except E4M1: Catafalque.  That level was a bit on the cheap side. 

[blackthorn]

On 3/8/2019 at 6:16 PM, Pegg said:

Most sites give the shadow riders version. It is harder to buy the unpatched (3 episodes + different title screen) version to be frank. 

Is there actually somewhere selling the original version?

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Am sure people sell the original disks but the discs might not work and most likely you won't have a floppy driver. 

 

[blackthorn]

Ah I see - I thought you meant it was being sold digitally somewhere.

[cybdmn]

5 hours ago, Pegg said:

Am sure people sell the original disks but the discs might not work and most likely you won't have a floppy driver. 

 

 

I made backups of all my floppy discs using dd.

[unerxai]

23 hours ago, Paar said:

Yeah, I like it better. And don't forget that SotSR breaks original demos which get desynced after a while. Fortunately the two new episodes are fun and make up for it.

I used to think the guy playing just sucked. Shame they didn't bother making new demos.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

11 minutes ago, UNERXAi said:

I used to think the guy playing just sucked. Shame they didn't bother making new demos.

 

He does die to the dumbest stuff, especially in the catacombs tease. The demos desyncing just lets his shame be buried! Unless someone youtubes them that is lol.

[Master O]

3 hours ago, cybdmn said:

 

I made backups of all my floppy discs using dd.

 

Heretic: Shadow of the Data Destroyer

[chungy]

The only real downside about Steam is that Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel  is not the latest patched version, but the rest of the WADs sold are. There's ways to patch it, such as the iwad-patches repository or the official patch in DOSBox.

[Dark Pulse]

8 hours ago, chungy said:

The only real downside about Steam is that Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel  is not the latest patched version, but the rest of the WADs sold are. There's ways to patch it, such as the iwad-patches repository or the official patch in DOSBox.

Pretty sure I can just make some XDelta patches an end-user can apply so that they can patch their old IWAD to the new IWAD effortlessly. Hell, technically could make the patches so that you could upgrade/downgrade to any version of any IWAD, since all an XDelta is is a difference patcher.

[Worst]

5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Pretty sure I can just make some XDelta patches an end-user can apply so that they can patch their old IWAD to the new IWAD effortlessly. Hell, technically could make the patches so that you could upgrade/downgrade to any version of any IWAD, since all an XDelta is is a difference patcher.

The first link in chungy's post contains pretty much what you are describing here, XDelta patches that can be used to upgrade/downgrade IWADs to different versions.

[Dark Pulse]

Ah, didn't catch they were XDelta due to the vcdiff extension, as well as not seeing the Readme.