Your thoughts on Hexen?

[Varis Alpha]

Centaurs are bearable for the reason that they can't really do much else other than get in your way. Slaughtars, on the other hand, their projectiles are pretty annoying to deal with. it doesn't help the fact that Raven re-uses the dumb part from Heretic where they're completely indistinguishable from their melee counterparts. i mean, why? if you can have brown and green Chaos Serpents, give the Slaughtar some flashier armor or something.

 

4 hours ago, 42PercentHealth said:

The problem with firestorm is that it costs 4 mana per shot. Yes, you can take down a chaos serpent in 2 hits (8 mana), but the fighter can do it in 2 hits (6 mana) and the mage in 1 hit (5 mana) with their third-tier weapons. Besides that, it usually takes at least 2 hits to kill a lowly afrit as well. NTM the effectiveness of that weapon's splash damage is very situational. TBH, firestorm is one of my least favorite weapons in the game.

i never found availability of mana to be a issue in the base-game, though. and it definitely beats being able to precisely nail down Chaos Serpents from practically any distance over the Fighter's slow hammer projectiles that take a while to reach their mark, and the Mage's arcs needing to be precisely thrown, as the effectiveness of its attacks vary depending on ceiling height. i also recall that Afrits would die to the Firestorm in one hit just as well, too.

 

i dunno. compared to the alternatives, i find the Firestorm to be incredible effective for long-range attacks.

[42PercentHealth]

But firestorm has limited range. I think the near-hitscan speed is the only real advantage it has over the other third-tier weapons.

 

My first playthrough as the cleric, I had a lot of trouble with mana (same in the Deathkings expansion). Subsequent playthroughs not so much, but I still find him to be the least satisfying character.

[Varis Alpha]

Firestorm has limited range? i was under the impression it had infinite range, probably due to the fact it's an almost-hitscan attack.

[42PercentHealth]

From the Doomwiki:

 

Quote

The Firestorm has a maximum range (1024 map units) at which the jet of fire fizzles out if it does not encounter an enemy or other shootable object.

 

[Avoozl]

I have probably said this one time before, but I wish I could get together with a few guys and do a co-op game of either two Hexen's.

[42PercentHealth]

4 minutes ago, Avoozl said:

I have probably said this one time before, but I wish I could get together with a few guys and do a co-op game of either two Hexen's.

Same!

[Obsidian]

Seven Portals can go get lost in Seven Portals, rest of the game is pretty good, Slaughtaurs can choke on their fancy shields and Korax is remarkably underwhelming. Only played as Cleric and had a ball.

[Lila Feuer]

9 hours ago, Da Werecat said:

I think maybe ZDoom fucks it up somehow. I remember it being better in vanilla?

It was, it did more damage. Ettins would rarely take more than two hits to kill, but in ZDoom it pretty much never one-shots them.
 

5 hours ago, Viscra Maelstrom said:

it doesn't help the fact that Raven re-uses the dumb part from Heretic where they're completely indistinguishable from their melee counterparts. i mean, why? if you can have brown and green Chaos Serpents, give the Slaughtar some flashier armor or something.

Agreed, they could've given the Slaughtaur gold armor, or made their skin red. Hexen sprite fix w/ recolor mod when?

[Jon]

Has anyone finished portal of praevus? Is it worth getting past the first level?

 

same question for heretic 2

[Lila Feuer]

Portal of Praevus is pretty much more of the same, but I think its pace and flow is better. More action-packed.
 

Heretic II is underrated, pretty fun for what it was, and amusingly enough a helluva lot more gory than Hexen II despite also carrying a T rating.

[Avoozl]

While playing Hexen I just discovered the Bright Crucible secret level for the first time and apparently it has a puzzle item named "Heart of D'Sparil" which appears as a red diamond, you can also get all armor parts here.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

9 hours ago, 42PercentHealth said:

Same!

I got people to play it many times on zandronum! A lot of the game breaking bugs are gone now so you might get people to join if you have 1-2 friends on the server.

 

9 hours ago, Viscra Maelstrom said:

Centaurs are bearable for the reason that they can't really do much else other than get in your way.

Centaurs aren't annoying because they are dangerous or anything. They KILL game pace in a very annoying way without being even remotely close to being a threat to any of the 3 classes. Hexen feels sloppy and unrefined because these shits are everywhere (Stalkers are annoying to mage and cleric but at least those are very rare). Centaurs are nothing but a time sink.

[Da Werecat]

Praevus becomes very linear in the second half. Depending on why you're playing the game it might be a good thing or a bad thing.

 

Heretic 2 is weird. The visuals felt surprisingly inconsistent after both Hexen games. Some disco lighting in weird places, sky textures are horrible. Very linear up until the end, when the game suddenly turns into third Blackmarsh hub.

 

And that voice acting. I'd rather see them go with minimal story bits again, but I guess they had to start somewhere if they wanted to get on with the times.

[Uncle 80]

6 hours ago, Jon said:

Has anyone finished portal of praevus? Is it worth getting past the first level?

 

same question for heretic 2

Portal of Praevus was so easy to get through that I don't remember a single map :D Haven't played it in 10 years, maybe I should dig up my CD and give it another run. I remember it as a bit bland compared to base H2 though - and the new music was dull...

[Jon]

24 minutes ago, Uncle 80 said:

Portal of Praevus was so easy to get through that I don't remember a single map :D Haven't played it in 10 years, maybe I should dig up my CD and give it another run. I remember it as a bit bland compared to base H2 though - and the new music was dull...

Thanks, interesting to know. The daemoness was kinda interesting and I remember wandering around the first level or so with the snow which was pretty interesting, but watching a youtube walkthrough the rest looked a bit more mundane. I've got ripping (to archival quality) my CD-ROM on my TODO list as well as a bunch of other DOS games.

[Master O]

On 6/29/2017 at 4:09 PM, leodoom85 said:

There's Wolfen, Tower of Chaos and A New World...great mapsets...Necrosis, Centromere...

 

It makes you wonder if a Hexen mod has ever won a Cacoward.

[Grain of Salt]

2 hours ago, Master O said:

 

It makes you wonder if a Hexen mod has ever won a Cacoward.

 

Shadows of Chronos won, very deservingly.

[Jade]

Am I the only one who absolutely hates the hub system? I remember liking this game a lot as a kid but now, going back to it (after re-playing Doom and Heretic), I don't like it at all. Lots of backtracking between levels, confusing level design, stupid puzzle elements etc. And the class system sounds like an excuse to limit the player to 4 weapons, instead of having all of them...

 

And is Heretic being a Doom clone something bad? For me it's good, lol. If only there were a dozen more of them haha.

[SOSU]

On 30/6/2017 at 1:35 AM, Not Jabba said:

Not to derail this with lore discussion, but I'm pretty sure that *each* Serpent Rider has its own Chaos Sphere, so there are three total, and the one in Hexen/Deathkings is separate from the one in Hexen II. The real question is, what happened to D'Sparil's?

That's what fan made sequel Megawads are for ;)

[Cruduxy Pegg]

6 hours ago, Jade said:

Am I the only one who absolutely hates the hub system? I remember liking this game a lot as a kid but now, going back to it (after re-playing Doom and Heretic), I don't like it at all. Lots of backtracking between levels, confusing level design, stupid puzzle elements etc. And the class system sounds like an excuse to limit the player to 4 weapons, instead of having all of them...

 

And is Heretic being a Doom clone something bad? For me it's good, lol. If only there were a dozen more of them haha.

It is a cool system in idea but in-game they are just the annoying maps where you place totally unique items on a different sprited object. 

[Ichor]

When you boil it all down, a hub in Hexen is really not much different than a really complex map in Doom. For instance, you could take the first hub of Hexen's expansion and combine them all into one single large map in vanilla Doom. The first key (silver) would be there as a blue key or whatever. The other 4 keys which open the way to the other maps in Deathkings would be switches that open the doors to their respective map sections in Doom. The gem pieces could be replaced with switches that lowers a wall where the gem puzzle wall would normally be. Lower 4 of them and it reveals the exit. Find the secret switch (which would be the ruby planet in Deathkings) and you would see a teleporter to the secret part of the map (which would be Pyre). There might be some slight differences here and there, but the logical progression of the map would be exactly the same. The hub system simply breaks down that Eternal-like map into several smaller ones to make it easier to run (kind of a moot point now, but it was a big deal back in 1995), and it actually can make it less confusing, though that could depend on the hub.

 

And as for "totally unique items on a different sprited objects", keys operate in much the same way. You find a key and bring it back to the door it opens. You find a shiny puzzle piece and bring it back to the pedestal or wall to open a door.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

That's what I meant by "totally unique items". Most of them are glorified keys when they could provide more interesting puzzles. Like the gem bass-relief could have different combinations to different doors until you place all of them to trigger the heresiarch.

[Da Werecat]

Hubs = great.

[Impie]

Could've been fleshed out a bit more. Played the shit out of it anyhow. Hexen 64 is in my top 5 on the N64.

[SOSU]

4 minutes ago, Impie said:

Could've been fleshed out a bit more. Played the shit out of it anyhow. Hexen 64 is in my top 5 on the N64.

It's not that surprising considering that the N64 has like 8 games
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When i sure do love Hexen :D
I love the Hubs,classes,weapons,theme,music and all that other generic shiiet.The only real problem i have with it are Centaurs.

[Impie]

8 minutes ago, SOSU said:

It's not that surprising considering that the N64 has like 8 games

Feh, theres a ton of fun games on it. Battletanx 1 and 2, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Hexen 64, Doom 64, Turok, Wrestlemania 2000, Mischief Makers, Pilotwings, San Francisco Rush, Mario Kart, Mario 64, Mario Party, Majora's Mask...etc etc. And that's not counting the shit games like Turok 2 or Ocarina.

 

Now I'm flashing back to when my brother and I redesigned the entire WWF in Wrestlemania 2000. That was a blast. We had the dumbest wrestlers ever, like Toastmeyer Baconsizzler, Hentaimaru, the Bitchslap Kid, and Earlemeyer the Butt Pirate.

 

Anyway, Hexen. Played the hell out of it on the 64, modded the hell out of it on PC with the Karnak mods. Used to be able to give guided tours of the game for newbie players. And one time my friend and I did a lan game and skipped to Korax before realizing we didn't know the cheat codes to get our full arsenals, so we were two dumbass fighters running in and punching the bastard once or twice before we got horribly murdered. The map was littered with fucking corpses and it took hours to kill him.

[SOSU]

1 minute ago, Impie said:

Feh, theres a ton of fun games on it. Battletanx 1 and 2, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Hexen 64, Doom 64, Turok, Wrestlemania 2000, Mischief Makers, Pilotwings, San Francisco Rush, Mario Kart, Mario 64, Mario Party, Majora's Mask...etc etc.

 

Now I'm flashing back to when my brother and I redesigned the entire WWF in Wrestlemania 2000. That was a blast. We had the dumbest wrestlers ever, like Toastmeyer Baconsizzler, Hentaimaru, the Bitchslap Kid, and Earlemeyer the Butt Pirate.

This reminds me of what i said once in a PS1 vs N64 debate on a Megaman Discord:
"Count all good N64 games that aren't made by either Nintendo or Rare"
"Now do the same but with PS1 games and with 2 companies of your choice"
I made them speechless B)  (the dude i said that to was a N64 collector XD)

[Varis Alpha]

Hexen's puzzles aren't really puzzles as much as they are fetch-quests of various kinds, yeah. i guess back then it wasn't feasible to make really brain-taxing puzzles, or Raven was more interested in making an FPS (a lot of the death animations are absurdly gory after all, moreso compared to Doom). i don't think it's a detriment to the game overall, though, although it did make me get stuck in the game several times, due to tiny keys and switches being very easy to miss, and progression not being the most obvious (what prompts you to go back to the little shrine-thing in Shadow Wood to get to the portal to the Caves of Circe, for example? i don't think any of the switches that "solves the puzzle" in the Shadow Wood has anything to do with it, but hitting some unrelated switch/getting a key, or getting back to the main hub via some portal that triggers it).

[Ichor]

There were a few thinking (as opposed to fetching) puzzles. Mostly, they involve matching a symbol with another symbol (i.e. Brackenwood, Zedek's Tomb). I kind of liked those, since they were all done well. Hexen 2, on the other hand...

[Lila Feuer]

Hexen's hubs and 'puzzles' is half of the appeal of the game for me. It may just be nostalgia speaking, but it added this incredible sense of mystery and tension to everything I did when I first played the game as a kid, keyboard and all. I was genuinely afraid of what would be around the next corner or what a new room would imply when not seeing monsters right away, or even at all. Only to see the environment shifting in real-time as it came alive, like the level itself was trying to kill me, or halt my progress in some diabolical fashion. It was one twisted test after another, this paired with the sinister music and the dark art style just makes Hexen in particular one of the most memorable and enjoyable 'FPS' experiences I've ever had.