Doom vs Heretic

[NecrumWarrior]

5 minutes ago, Pegg said:

Both Raven's original games have strange as shit balancing. At least in hexen case it just goes in hand with many things in the game feeling unfinished. Sadly Heretic got a shittier deal where everything feels too easy (Hexen can fuck your shit in 2 seconds on 5th skill), I swear the guy playing the demos was drunk doing them, Can't forget him dying to afrits on e3m9.. Maybe they should add that you must completely wasted\noobish to play Heretic as intended :P.

 

I replay the Iwad all the time with harder patches (On Zdoom with all compat stuff on). Was fun (But masochistic at times) to beat it with the attached pwad. Warning : The wad is completely ruthless. I beat the original 3 episodes with it so they should be doable. It doesn't add anything new, Just buffs\nerfs things.

Heretic+++.zip

Now I want to try playing the game drunk...

[Graf Zahl]

About Hexen, what I find odd is that the Cleric and Mage have the most elaborate weapons, but it's this elaborate design that works against the player when fighting the bosses. Playing the Cleric can be really painful because the Wraithverge is absoliutely worthless with a Heresiarch or a shielded Centaur nearby. Get one ghost reflected and it's reloading time. And of course there's not enough Discs of Repulsion for the Cleric to push poison clouds around.

 

The Fighter with his blunt force weapons still fares best overall and normally I finish the game in half the time as with the Cleric. I never managed to get through to the end with the Mage, it's just too drawn out and tedious, with the first weapon being too weak, the second one too annoying with the ice corpses, so you have two entire hubs with only shit offenses.

[Cacowad]

Heretic is a weird one. Lately i've come to terms that it need a lot more setup to be challenging than doom(2): you need to make the player rely on the inventory system (*), abuse the ghosts immunity to physical harm to make the player use the appropriate weapon at all time (**) in addiction to environmental hazards and general crossfire. I have the idea that Heretic is a bit more tactical in it's approach to combat than doom, due to the large selection of artifacts (which are more or less problematic) that can potentially alter drastically the gameplay (the mere existence of the wings of wrath is a complete game breaker for the "standard" doom mapping convention).

 

There is a reason why Doom(2) is extremely more popular than Heretic, and some reasons can be found in this very thread.

 

(*)example: encouraging the player to use the bombs aggressively to clear large groups of enemies which would be inefficient or dangerous to clear one by one.

 

(**) a couple of examples:

1) Undead knights\nitrogolems can shoot trough ghosts, this meaning you, as a mapper, can use it to form a literal wall of projectiles if you need to and/or to protect the hard hitting monsters behind the ghosts.

2) Ghosts are naturally resilient to the crossbow, due the side projectiles not connecting and the already stated huge randomness of the damage of the central one, and flat out immune to staff and firemace, this make sure you need to switch your weapons accordingly to maximize clear speed.

3) Connected to point 2: Heretic have the bad habit of giving out massive amount of crossbow's ammo; this give the false impression that the crossbow should be the heretic's jack of all trade, which in turn encourage the player in using it on everything, which in turn slow down the gameplay every time a ghost is encountered. (this one is subjective, but at least it was like this to me when i started playing heretic some years ago)

[drfrag]

 As the author of that damned Heresy project (the old conversion of the Heretic levels to Doom , i think it was reviewed by Not Jabba) i know the Heretic levels very well. I must say that level design is top notch, with a lot of secrets, true there's not much texture variety but i don't think that's very important. IMHO there's a lack of monster variety, you face horde after horde of the same guy. The weapons are obviously too weak (that was intentional in order to include the Tome of Power), monsters are ammo sponges and what's more many of them are not much of a challenge specially all those slow golems. I must admit that i didn't like Heretic very much but after all it's a good game (a fantasy-themed Doom clone but a good one at it), of course Doom it's much better or else this would be Hereticworld and not Doomworld and there would be many more Heretic wads out there.
 
 
 

[savagegrant]

2 hours ago, drfrag said:

...of course Doom it's much better or else this would be Hereticworld and not Doomworld and there would be many more Heretic wads out there.

There used to be a Hexenworld once upon a time. ;)

[Ichor]

19 minutes ago, savagegrant said:

There used to be a Hexenworld once upon a time. ;)

I remember that, though it was almost all about Hexen 2 and it didn't last very long.

 

[42PercentHealth]

22 minutes ago, savagegrant said:

There used to be a Hexenworld once upon a time. ;)

Aw, I would have joined. :-( I like both Hexens quite a bit. Kinda sad that there isn't more content for them, though.

[Avoozl]

Hexen II should still have a source port somewhere.

[42PercentHealth]

5 minutes ago, Avoozl said:

Hexen II should still have a source port somewhere.

Yup. Hammer of Thyrion.

[Graf Zahl]

 

Here's the link, for anyone interested: http://uhexen2.sourceforge.net/

 

[Ichor]

25 minutes ago, 42PercentHealth said:

Aw, I would have joined. :-( I like both Hexens quite a bit. Kinda sad that there isn't more content for them, though.

Hexenworld wasn't like Doomworld. Just a news site with no forum and a single page of short comments that passed as some kind of messageboard (this was the 90s after all). Instead, Hexenworld was actually an offshoot of Quakeworld, which allowed people with potatoes for modems to actually play Quake in multiplayer. Hexenworld was the same way, though Hexen 2's multiplayer was far more barren than Quake's.

[Avoozl]

All this talk of Hexen 2 makes me want to play a co-operative session of it since I haven't been able to do so before.

[42PercentHealth]

14 minutes ago, Avoozl said:

All this talk of Hexen 2 makes me want to play a co-operative session of it since I haven't been able to do so before.

Do it, man! You only live once...

[savagegrant]

Can I just be on record to say that Hexen II shits all over Hexen? I've clocked Hexen II a few times but every time I play Hexen I barely get halfway before losing interest. heh

[Not Jabba]

35 minutes ago, savagegrant said:

Can I just be on record to say that Hexen II shits all over Hexen? I've clocked Hexen II a few times but every time I play Hexen I barely get halfway before losing interest. heh

I feel totally the opposite. I've played through Hexen plenty of times, but I had to force myself to finish Hexen 2 the one time I played it. I hated all the enemies except in the first hub, and I couldn't even find a class I liked.

[Da Werecat]

The first hub isn't much better. One of the first things you encounter is a tiny little spider, and even that spider somehow has legs long enough for you to take damage when you're trying to engage it.

 

Melee combat is thoroughly unsatisfying in H2.

Edited April 19, 2017 by Da Werecat : I don't like typos.

[Graf Zahl]

Don't remind me of those annoying spiders. They nearly killed the game for me.

 

[42PercentHealth]

Things about Hexen that annoy me:

• Lack of enemy variety
• OP weapons
• Heresiarch shows up twice, and is usually invincible
• Inventory system is balky -- if you really need to use an item, you'll probably die before you can select it.
• No clues to help solve the puzzle
• 4 weapons per class (and no tome of power)

Things about Hexen 2 that annoy me:

• Lack of enemy variety (mostly archers, spiders, and golems)
• Bullet-sponge enemies throughout
• Small encounters render most inventory items useless

Overall, I find the combat system in the first Hexen more satisfying, but admittedly neither did combat very well. The puzzles and game mechanics of Hexen 2 were generally better, so I think I'd pick it over the first Hexen. Both could have really benefited from having a broader spectrum of enemy types, and larger encounters.

[Ichor]

13 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Don't remind me of those annoying spiders. They nearly killed the game for me.

 

 

Same here. They seemed to have some kind of "spider armor" or whatever that made them tougher than the golems in some areas.

 

But what really did it was that...ONE...PUZZLE! You know which one.

[42PercentHealth]

3 minutes ago, Ichor said:

But what really did it was that...ONE...PUZZLE! You know which one.

I assume you mean the floor tiles?

[Ichor]

5 minutes ago, 42PercentHealth said:

I assume you mean the floor tiles?

That's the one. At least there wasn't any of this in Portal of Praevus. That prayer wheel puzzle was a minor nuisance though, but at least that one had a set pattern that I could write down and use later when I need it. In the floor puzzle, you walk through what you think are the right tiles and...POOF! You're back in that courtyard and you have to do it again.

 

Oh yeah, I seem to remember a hidden boots of speed somewhere under that puzzle.

[42PercentHealth]

4 minutes ago, Ichor said:

That's the one. At least there wasn't any of this in Portal of Praevus. That prayer wheel puzzle was a minor nuisance though, but at least that one had a set pattern that I could write down and use later when I need it. In the floor puzzle, you walk through what you think are the right tiles and...POOF! You're back in that courtyard and you have to do it again.

 

Oh yeah, I seem to remember a hidden boots of speed somewhere under that puzzle.

Yeah, that's the one and only puzzle I could never quite figure out. :-\ Except for the "Temple of Mars" goodies -- I never actually found all the secrets to get all of those.

 

I haven't played PoP yet -- was thinking of doing it blind on my YouTube channel sometime in the near future.

[Da Werecat]

PoP feels a little too straightforward for a Hexen game, especially in the second half. But people seem to like it for that.

[42PercentHealth]

Just now, Da Werecat said:

PoP feels a little too straightforward for a Hexen game, especially in the second half. But people seem to like it for that.

Aw, that's too bad.

[Fletcher`]

3 hours ago, 42PercentHealth said:

I assume you mean the floor tiles?

The one thing that could possibly defeat Quasar.

[fraggle]

23 hours ago, CapnClever said:

I've looked into what makes Heretic inferior to Doom when it comes to gameplay, and [...]

 

Other significant factors include:

This is all really interesting; thanks for sharing. This actually matches some of my own experience in the times I've made attempts at playing Heretic. The difficulty seems to be all over the place and the weapons seem too variable inconsistent.

 

It would be interesting to see an attempt to "rebalance" the game, maybe just through some simple Dehacked-style tweaks to adjust hit points, weight, etc. A lot of the stuff you describe can be changed through HHE (the Heretic equivalent of Dehacked).

[Not Jabba]

49 minutes ago, fraggle said:

It would be interesting to see an attempt to "rebalance" the game, maybe just through some simple Dehacked-style tweaks to adjust hit points, weight, etc. A lot of the stuff you describe can be changed through HHE (the Heretic equivalent of Dehacked).

You might start with The Wayfarer, as it aims to address many of the balancing issues CapnClever mentioned, primarily the weaker player weapons and low enemy damage. The beta levels also include an alternate, weaker artifact called the Sigil of Power that's similar to the Tome but creates less balance issues. The Tome still exists, but being able to choose between the two artifacts makes it easier (for me as a mapper) to keep gameplay in line.

One thing I would note is that variable damage applies to all projectiles in Doom engine games and is sort of irrelevant; it balances out over time. Projectile damage is always dealt in d8s -- The Imp's fireball is 3d8, the Baron's is 10d8 (the same as the center bolt of the Ethereal Crossbow), the rocket is 20d8 plus splash damage, and so on. The problem with the stock Crossbow, imo, is that it concentrates almost all of its power into the center bolt, which makes it pointless as a shotgun-type weapon; the side projectiles barely do any damage at all, so you're stuck with whatever the RNG gives you on the center bolt.

[NecrumWarrior]

A lot of people have brought up the variable damage dealt by attacks and their wide margin, something covered quite well in the post above me, and the thing that comes to my mind is the fact that that wide margin effectively emulates a dice roll in a tabletop game, something that all the id tech 1 games are sort of based on. However Heretics place as a fantasy game makes it even more so, which to me is why you have attacks that can deal a small amount of damage or a large amount of damage. It's more so trying to emulate the table top than other games which is probably why the game was built around that incidental combat mentioned previously. That's how the balance was intended to work rather than being a balls to the wall shooter like Doom. Maybe that wasn't the wisest decision from a design standpoint, but that's what Heretic is. 

[Cruduxy Pegg]

The weapons of heretic are still extremely effective even untomed. The game lacks high-tier monsters to fill between the bosses and medium tier monsters. That and texturing are the two things holding back modding the game (Or buffing some monsters to actually fill high tier mobs role.. Am looking at you useless Ophidians).

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v8KBYImLkKt0ZX6vG9CtqBY5lovN8FvIoWyblC00Wv8/edit#gid=0 <- Just look at the average dps of each weapon then look at the monster's health.Some observations:

1) Even the firemace can be extremely powerful if you are in melee range + lucky\shot a lot :P. The splitting is just icing on the cake if attacking a full room from distance.

2) Dragon Claw and Hell staff deal an extreme amount of damage. Bow can't even compete unless you are killing things where it kills a mob and hit others at same time.

3) Pheonix Rod and balanced should never be used in the same sentence.

4) Necro Gauntlets are extremely good since monsters have high chance to get stunned by it. Beware since tomed gauntlets is nothing compared to other tomed weapons and is only good to reserve ammo\regain health.

 

Notably the tomed Pheonix is EXTREMELY overpowered that it trivializes anything if you give the player both a tome of power and a ring of invulnerability. It shoots an extreme number of projectiles all for the high cost of 1 ammo! Please forgive any mistakes I did that at a very late time :P (You can comment on the doc and I'll fix them).

 

Edit: Pheonix Rod should have an even higher dps since direct hits should inflict the full aoe damage not half.

Edited April 20, 2017 by Pegg

[Jon]

Hexen 2's first hub is so drab compared to the later ones, it's a shame they led with it.