Faithless: Trilogy - BETA 1a released!

[Jimmy]

 

 

Download "Faithless: Trilogy" BETA 1A (29MB):

GZDoom required. 4.4.0+ recommended. Only tested in this port/build.

Powerhouse Mirror

Dropbox Mirror

 

Screenshots!
Click images for full size.

 

Story:

Parthoris is ablaze - ravaged by an invasion of unholy beasts it was not prepared for. The gulf between the once-distant realms of Parthoris and Cronos has all but disappeared as dark portals continue to open across your homeland, and vast hordes of the undead and their cohorts from beyond Hell's Maw spill forth, slaughtering mercilessly in their bid to find you and exact their vengeance upon the Faithless One.

 

You have already brought ruin to the first major guardian in your way - the fearsome Iron Sentinel and its army of liches - but this has enraged your pursuers further. You now face the treacherous labyrinthine grounds of the Iron Fortress - a sprawling breeding ground for unholy knights, malevolent magicians, and terrifying beasts pulled from the underworld's deepest recesses. This vast mountaintop fort is steeped in a dark aura of demonic possession that now reaches far across the realm, corrupting the earth and its citizens beneath. Beyond this foul structure, who even knows what lies.

 

Questions flood your mind as you enter its unholy gates - who or what is the soulless evil opening these portals? And why do you feel a cold sense of dread, as if someone may be watching you from the shadows? Perhaps an old foe? Or a new evil from some other realm? Could it somehow be both...?

 

Name: Faithless: Trilogy
Map Format: UDMF
Ports Tested: GZDoom 4.4.0
IWAD: Heretic
Map(s): E1M1-M9, E2M1-M9, E3M1-M9
Gameplay: Single play/co-op
Difficulty Settings: Yes
Multiplayer Placement: No
Build Time: 15 months
Textures: hexen.wad, shadowtex.wad, bak_leg.wad, various other sources
Requirements: No jumping or crouching (enforced). Freelook allowed.

 

Features:
- 3 episodes of 8 levels each!
- 3 secret levels and 1 super-secret level! For a total of 28 levels.
- Hub-style progression

- Mapping by wayfaring Heretic meister @Not Jabba, who chiefly designed E2M1
- Three new weapons, several new enemies, an array of more inventory items to use
- Unique puzzles
- Two possible endings!

 

Disclaimer:
There are certain visual bugs that occur in some maps when running the GZDoom software renderer, which I'm already aware of. These include glitches that appear in various levels that feature fog (including E2M6 and E2M9), as well as actors "clipping" through both 3D floors and line portals. There's not much I can do about these, aside from attempting to fix them map-side (which could take a lot of trial-and-error altering), until these are bugs are reported and fixed.

 

Maplist:

EPISODE 1: "Faithless"
E1M1: The Belltower
E1M2: Dockside
E1M3: Odious Gardens
E1M4: Kingdom of Roots
E1M5: Savaged Lands
E1M6: Unlit Serenity
E1M7: Halls of Atrocity
E1M8: Ironclad
E1M9: Breathless Wastes (secret)

 

EPISODE 2: "Merciless"
E2M1: The Iron Fortress - featuring @Not Jabba
E2M0: The Unholy Font (optional)
E2M2: Treasury
E2M3: Clock Tower
E2M4: Willowwood
E2M5: Fractured Monasteries
E2M6: Vulture's Point
E2M7: Sunless Temple
E2M8: The Rune Forge
E2M9: Deathwind City (secret)

 

EPISODE 3: "Soulless"
E3M1: Dark Chapter
E3M2: The Mana Flow
E3M3: Bilious Depths
E3M4: Scarlet Outlands
E3M5: Cloister of Tears
E3M6: Cloister of Venom
E3M7: Cloister of Ichor
E3M8: Audience Chamber
E3M9: Phoenix Chapel (secret)

Edited June 8, 2021 by Jimmy : Updated download links

[Jimmy]

Bridgeburner56 is testing this right now!

 

https://www.twitch.tv/bridgeburner56

 

Edited October 10, 2020 by Jimmy

[Endless]

Why yes, I become m o i s t

[ReaperAA]

Oh Hell yeah. I was just wondering today how much of the Faithless sequels are developed right now

[Terminus]

Oh my.

I loved the first Faithless episode, can't wait for more!

[Doomkid]

All my 5 r belong to this!

[Not Jabba]

Yay! I am super hyped to play this before anyone else find out how much people hate the guest map see the full public release!

[SOSU]

3 hours ago, Jimmy said:

- Three new weapons, several new enemies, an array of more inventory items to use
- Two possible endings!

I am very excited about these two.

I hope you had a lot of fun making maps for dark fantasy projectile hell bullet sponge Doom Jimmy :)

(Also when you doin' a pure vanilla Heretic wad called Textureless? I'd put a throughline here but it seems i can't do that on mobile, ehh...)

[Eric Claus]

Looks good!

[CherubCorps]

Just watched Bridge play this. Can't wait for it to come out.

[Bridgeburner56]

Can confirm that this is a hell of a piece of work. Y'all are in for a treat :D

[Phobus]

I'm most interested in this because I think Jimmy is the right guy to make Heretic feel interesting, something I've not really experienced before, even when playing it through for the first time.

[Manhs]

Hype! This wad was really cool, nice screenshots!

[Da Spadger]

Looking forward to this!

[Jimmy]

16 months of work later...

 

It's out. Please play/stream/feed back.

 

Download "Faithless: Trilogy" (29MB):

GZDoom required. 4.4.0+ recommended. Only tested in this port/build.

Beta 1a

Edited November 3, 2020 by Jimmy : Updated to beta 1a

[ReaperAA]

My body is ready

[SOSU]

Looks like this year might get another cacoward winning Heretic project ;) <3

[Jimmy]

Please redownload -- Beta 1a.

 

I'm releasing a hotfix to address an embarrassing polyobject glitch in E2M4.

 

If you see this nuttiness, don't bother reporting, I already know about it. :P

[StoneFrog]

Jimmy- I've been lurking on DW for like ten years now and always loved your music. I've been working on some Heretic maps for a while now but the last Heretic PWAD I played was Curse of D'Sparil, I think...so glad to have some new content. Looks great!

[PetalousPanoply]

It looks absolutely incredible. 2020 has been a great year for Heretic maps and this is just the cherry on top.

[Dominic Tarason]

Pretty far into the first episode, and this really does feel like all the good parts of Heretic and Hexen combined by a a master surgeon. It's rad. Keep on rustling, Jimmy.

[Bridgeburner56]

3 hours ago, Jimmy said:

Please redownload -- Beta 1a.

 

I'm releasing a hotfix to address an embarrassing polyobject glitch in E2M4.

 

If you see this nuttiness, don't bother reporting, I already know about it. :P

 

Come on Jimmy, a man of your experience should be blaming your testers for missing this :D

[Jimmy]

Ah yes, indeed. This is all your fault mister!!

 

Spoiler

Seriously it kinda is! When you suggested the forest section should have an introductory bull torch so the player understands the mechanic, I moved the whole northern section of E2M4 up a bit to account for the new room, but the polyobject anchor points in that area did not move up with it.

 

You've ruined Christmas.

 

[Endless]

15 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

You've ruined Christmas. 

You've done it again, Bridge! How much pain can you cause to us, mortals?

 

Spoiler

Freaking congrats on the release Jimmy! Bugs aside, this is pretty much a perfect Heretic work <3

 

[plums]

Finished the first episode on skill 4, loved it so far. It feels like a good Heretic/Hexen hybrid that even I, a grouchy Heretic purist, enjoyed. This is mostly down to the level design, I think; it captures a lot of the moodiness of the original games while building on the actual level construction, keeping the Heretic combat/feel, and makes good use of the hub system without going off into switch-hunt land.

 

It's too bad you didn't release this a week earlier so I could have voted for it in the DWMC! Oh well, next month.

 

A few things that I liked in particular off the top of my head:

 

* The ice stalker and swamp golem enemy variants were pretty cool.

 

* The swamp level and the secret level were both really good and memorable.

 

* The 3-way portal in the dungeon was awesome, especially as a callback to areas we'd seen before in the hub.

 

* I'm not totally sold on respawning enemies (though I understand why you put them in) but I very much appreciated that ammo regenerated as well.

 

* The end boss fight is cool and an appropriate challenge without being a massive difficulty spike or a bullet-sponge.

 

* And of course, the music is great.

 

 

I didn't have any major problems, but here are a few minor things. You could say "I'm not going to fix any of those" and I'd still be quite impressed with what you have already.

 

Actual bugs: I'm using GZDoom 4.5.0, not sure if that has introduced errors.

 

* There are numerous (probably harmless) warnings on loading the pk3.

 

* Entering a map always gives me an error: "acs/faithdef.o: invalid ACS module". I poked around at some of your script stuff and it looks like maybe some things aren't being called, like whatever is supposed to happen when you "clear" a level, so I don't think this one is entirely harmless.

 

* The Belltower map got *really* choppy by the end of the game. It seems to get worse every time the map gets loaded? Might be a GZDoom error, or you might have some script that's leaking memory or an item that is not despawning properly. My first guess would be something to do with the rain?

Miscellanious gripes: You can probably safely dismiss all of these as "old man yells at cloud."

 

* Putting Afrits and Imps together always looks a little funny to me, since they're obviously based on the same sprite/model but the Hexen enemies in general look a lot more refined. The same goes with Disciples and Dark Bishops, but I feel like you also realize this since you didn't mix those two at all.

 

* The recoloured spawn cubes as monsters just looked kind of goofy to me, I don't know how else to describe it. Maybe because it's such an iconic Doom sprite (and texture), it just sort of took me out of the game when I saw them. I would have much preferred a recoloured Heretic Imp, or Reiver (maybe you use these in the next episodes, I didn't check), or some other skull thing...

 

* I didn't really find the medium-sized ammo pickups added anything. It made for a few more things to figure out, and other than the arrows, it was often hard to tell them apart from one of the other ammo sizes.

 

* It took me a while to figure out what the artifact amulet did. Kind of hard to introduce it in a spot where it's immediately useful, since you can't be sure when the player will get the first one, but maybe you could rename it to something like "anti-poison amulet?" (Except a better name 'cause that sounds dumb.)

 

* The first Maulotaur fight was really just fodder for tome+gauntlets, which is pretty boring. The obvious answer is "so don't do that," but the layout and my current ammo situation made it by far the best strategic choice. I don't know how you'd feel about giving the Maulotaur a melee attack that was more damaging and knocked the player back; tomed gauntlets are a classic anti-Maulotaur strategy, so maybe you don't want to deny that, but it's not a very interesting one.

 

* For the flames on squares puzzle in the dungeon, what was going on wasn't obvious until the flames had already all came up, and I'd saved already by then, so I just ended up brute forcing it. Also even when the switch falls into the floor, you can still use it, which makes more flames appear without removing the old ones. Maybe solve both problems by leaving the switch out, and have it reset the flames? Also sometimes I didn't get crushed by the platform and just came down unharmed once it lowered.

The secret level:

 

Spoiler

 

I thought the secret level was *very* hard to get to, and I wouldn't have even done it without opening up SLADE and poking through your scripts. On the one hand, it's a secret map, and it gives you a lot of stuff, so maybe that's fine. But it's also really cool (hah), and it would be a shame for people to miss it. I also got almost all the normal secrets in the rest of the maps, so having it be hard to get made it feel a little out of place.

 

I found the initially inaccessable Granite Icon in the alcove, but I didn't give it much attention, because I thought it was just a shadowsphere when I first saw it, or just some other new powerup I hadn't encountered yet. When I (finally) got it, I wandered everywhere looking for statues to put it on, as the message when trying to use it was "This belongs atop a statue," and Hexen has a statue head inventory item.

 

In retrospect there were several clues about it being special, and where it was supposed to go with the mirrored area in the fire level, but I pretty much missed all of them. I can accept that that's maybe just on me. But since I got almost all of the other secret things (excluding the other secret there that lowers the alcove for you to pick it up, of course!) it personally felt like it could be a little easier to figure out. At the least, I think the use message should be changed.

 

 

 

 

 

That's it for now, excited to play the rest!

Edited November 5, 2020 by plums

[Firedust]

Will this work with Wayfarer?

[ReaperAA]

4 hours ago, Firedust said:

Will this work with Wayfarer?

 

If you mean Wayfarer's Tome, then yes it should work. Atleast the original faithless.wad (1st episode wad) played perfectly fine when I played it some months ago.

[Firedust]

2 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

 

If you mean Wayfarer's Tome, then yes it should work. Atleast the original faithless.wad (1st episode wad) played perfectly fine when I played it some months ago.

Yep, that's exactly what I meant! Much obliged :3

[Gez]

I wasted some time thinking this was a secret passage hint before realizing it was just a texture tiling issue. (First map of second hub.)

 

 

Also in that map, I'd want to suggest moving the Hexen dripping body to a place that's not right above water. The splashes are excessively loud for just a blood drop, and it leaves a little blood pool sprite that just doesn't make sense.

[Not Jabba]

8 hours ago, Firedust said:

Will this work with Wayfarer?

Probably not yet, because there are more changes to the player class and more new weapons in Faithless Trilogy. I will patch it in the future. I've played FT unmodded though, and it's great.