Doom vs. Hexen?

No matter how you look at it, Diablo was the badass one. No competition. While Mephisto was easy to beat, Baal looked like an alien reject, diablo was the one that gave me a run for my money. Heh, he made ALL my money run away too. :P

Imo the inv bar in Heretic and Hexen was really easy to manouvre and I always had use for the items I carried. Wich is probaly why I'm stil unbeaten in DM in those 2 games.. :p Everyone that would give me a good match in Doom had no chance against me in heretic nor hexen. anyway, the only gripe I had with hexen was the first time around when the so called puzzels were mainly about finding obscure switches (there's a bunch that also require some thinking, although they are quite easy and are easily spotted) but once you played it through, it was a whole lot more fun to play again and again.. Specially in COOP and DM.

IMO you can't really put Doom and Hexen against eachother, as they are so different. If you ask me wich is best.. I dunno.

EDIT: BTW dan, the gems go in the sockets, I IIRC you just have to press the correct sockets.. keep trying..

Yeah, I think I should also play on a lower skill setting, because there are like 59452025258 monsters per level and the fucking ettins keep respawning. It makes it that much more of a headache.

It's not nearly as bad as Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, where tons of enemies, big enemies, spawn every couple of minutes. If you don't kill them all before the next time enemies spawn, it may get a bit ovewhelming.

I like Hexen more, yet I PLAY Doom more. Hexen I just have to be in a mood to play. With Doom i'm generally always in the mood for insane demon killing.

A gripe I always had about hexen was that there werent enough weapons. If you add all 3 characters then there's plenty...but each character should have more.

While I'm in the thread and it's somewhat on topic, does anyone know of good sites for Hexen wads and a site that have a good GL Hexen? I downloaded one version of GLhexen and i couldnt get it to run properly.

Hexen just never managed to draw me in. I want to like it, but every time I go through I just get fed up or just plain bored. The enemies all looked too goofy and I felt that the difficulty factor rose too quickly.
The inventory system also didnt appeal to me. I found I was often maxed out on many items. I preferred heretic where you lost all but one of each item at the beginnging of every level.

Here are some good Hexen maps:

caldera
cent092b
chuxen
colin4
fury_ch1 - Comes with its own version of JHexen (based on 0.996)
fury1fix - A patch which fixes a couple of bugs
hexquake
k_d11
kmod22 - Also comes with its own version of JHexen
lychgate
shannara
starship - Good if you can find a copy
temple2
vaults13

CacodemonLeader said:

though Hexen can be quite difficult at times (I spent tons of hours just finding a way to continue through the fourth hub until I realized that there was a switch in the Dungeons that allowed you to enter an area that takes you to another level in the hub. After that, the rest was a piece of cake).

Also, the fifth difficulty is fubar, in fact, the Heresiarch is abusive of his shield and the only way I could beat him on that difficulty was by laying out tons of flechettes as Parias the Cleric!

You think HeXen is difficult? Have you tried HeXen 2? THAT one is fucking hard - the first time I played the demo of HeXen 2, I got my ass handed to me and by what critters? The lowly spiders dammit! Why? Because they are so fucking hard to hit.

I dunno how HeXen64 is to play, but I usually find that any FPS is hard to play on a console (because of those shitty joypads) - on the PC, the Heresiarch is challenging on level 5, but far from impossible - you just need to stick around and keep him in view constantly. Once you see the purple shield disappear, open fire!

He's quite easy when you are the fighter (the fighter rulez!!!), but a bit harder with the two others: The Cleric's Wraithverge is pathetic against bosses, use the firestorm spell and the Serpent staff on him - they're quite efficient (though not compared to the Quietus) - the Mage is the most useless against the Heresiarch. His Arc of Death is the best choice against the Heresiarch, yet not completely un-problematic, the Bloodscourge can be used too, but it's friggin' dangerous to use because the fireballs travel so slow that the Heresiarch can bring up its shield in time to reflect them!

For a few laughs, play as the mage and when you're fighting the Heresiarch, use an Icon of the Defender. Then fire the Bloodscourge when he has his shield up. The fireballs will reflect off of him and back to you. However, because you have a reflective shield of your own, the fireballs will bounce off of you and back to him again. This will continue until one of the reflective shields wears off, or an enemy or wall gets in the way.

And War (the third rider boss) is darn near impossible to beat. He constantly throws axes around (like once every five seconds), and every one of them homes in on you like a Revenant missile, but much faster and a lot more painful. Not only that, it's a wide open area, so there's no way to dodge them all for very long. The Icon of the Defender is practically useless since it only lasts for what seems like 10 seconds.

dsm said:

You think HeXen is difficult? Have you tried HeXen 2? THAT one is fucking hard -

True, it made me think it was designed for multi-player (coop) and not really for single player mode. I suppose having two or three classes it would be easier to tackle the monsters.

Heresiarchs are easy with the cleric. Run up to him and drop a ton of flechettes in his face. When he gets caught in the cloud he'll hardly be able to move, and once the shield wears off you can open fire while he's still stuck. You can probably kill him within 20 seconds with that strat. :)

As for Hexen 2, it wasn't too tough, though some of the egyptian puzzles were a bit finicky (the button puzzle stands out in my mind as one that barely worked, even with the right combinations) and trying to outrun War's battle axes used to be hell. There's also a trick to beating him without even letting him come through the wall at the start, but it's pretty cheap. :)

EDIT: hmm, I'm not sure if the flechettes hurt the heresiarch while he has his shield up, but it really seems that way when he gets caught.

myk said:

True, it made me think it was designed for multi-player (coop) and not really for single player mode. I suppose having two or three classes it would be easier to tackle the monsters.

My beef with HeXen 2 is primarily the control feel and the fact that some enemies (the spiders and, I assume too 'cause I haven't tried the full version, the scorpions) are damn hard to hit - you have to time your melee attack just right (I'm talking about starting weapons) and I don't like when the simplest enemies are that hard.

Gimme back HeXen 1 with the Ettins and the Fighter's gauntlets will be a marvel to use in comparison, namely because you don't have to aim down.

For HeXen 2, they should've made the spiders just large enough so that you wouldn't have to worry about vertical aiming.

I wouldn't neglect one of the HeXen 2 classes - I think that all four classes add a little something to HeXen 2 (although some of the weapons seem a little pathetic compared to the weapons in the first game).

dsm said:

I wouldn't neglect one of the HeXen 2 classes - I think that all four classes add a little something to HeXen 2 (although some of the weapons seem a little pathetic compared to the weapons in the first game).

Same here, that was a great strength of the games. I could choose a favorite from the group but I can feel like playing any class when I start up a game. Overall I liked Hexen better than Hexen 2, which seemed to lose inspiration in the last two hubs.

Portal of Praevus, on the other hand, was damn cool, even though it was more linear in design. I've seen reviews calling it one of the best commercial addons ever, along with other titles like Opposing Force for Half-Life. I think Avault gave it a better score than the original game. :)

Can't deside both are great games. I can never get enuf of the two of them.

dsm said:

Faults with HeXen:

1. Puzzles are just too damn difficult - sometimes you're fucking forced to look for secrets to be able to proceed --> way NOT to do a good game. At one point in the Shadow Wood hub, I was close to put my fist through the monitor. Puzzles should be involving, but not frustratingly difficult, because what most people really want in an FPS is to kill stuff.

Funny, I thought they were a little easy.

2. No Tome of Power - it's weird, there was a ToP in Heretic and people really liked it...why the Hell did they keep this great item out of HeXen?

*Sigh* That DID suck.

3. Complexity - the items that you can carry around at all times are very neat and all, but in the end, it can be quite hard to exploit these items to their fullest potential. Especially the Discs of Repulsion are hard to use efficiently. I usually wound up having tons of 'em with tons more lying about in the map, and it is in these situations that it kills me to know that I could have used some discs to avoid taking hits a few moments ago. If you could ready discs to autocast, it'd already be a lot easier.

That's funny. Porkelators + Repulsion discs = fun. >:)

dsm said:

You think HeXen is difficult? Have you tried HeXen 2?

Some hard parts, like War. Eidolon was just a big ol' puff of smoke if you ask me. :P

Ichor said:

starship - Good if you can find a copy

If you go to the download page on the hamster republic site, you will find starship.wad. At least I think that's the one you mean.

Yeah I played Starship several times. Very cool, and has a sense of humor to boot :)

That's where I got the idea for using those clock gears as coins. I might also throw in a slot machine in a later map which uses basically the same principle.

You people had/have issues with Hexen's puzzles? Color me weird, but I actually enjoyed them. Asking/receiving an answer or hint through the phone from a friend who was playing it along me for the first time simultaneously (he's a hardcore Hexen zealot too), is one of my fondest gaming memories ever. You know, describing to each other what rooms we were in, complaining about the casual Ettin wave respawn, shedding tears of frustration and curses after manually checking every single sector of the hub for the last half an hour not from one person's view but from actually two separated pair of eyes. And then, the unthinkable: a hidden switch, a secret wall, a hidden passage shows up and we go like OMG!!!11 and throw away the phone so we can get the edge again. Somewhat competitive, but cooperative-ish long before I actually got the beat the game on multi.

All in all, Heretic was in many ways better than Hexen.

Vulg@r said:

All in all, Heretic was in many ways better than Hexen.

?????

In what ways?


I get the feeling that many Doom players are simply overwhelmed by the higher complexity of a game like Hexen. Hexen is a game where you actually have to THINK to get it done, unlike Doom and Heretic.

I have to agree, though, with anyopne who says that Hexen 2 is too hard. This was the most frustrating gaming experience I ever had and I had to finish it with God Mode permanently on. (Needless to say I sold the game as soon as I could...)

Zaldron said:

You people had/have issues with Hexen's puzzles? Color me weird, but I actually enjoyed them. Asking/receiving an answer or hint through the phone from a friend who was playing it along me for the first time simultaneously (he's a hardcore Hexen zealot too), is one of my fondest gaming memories ever. You know, describing to each other what rooms we were in, complaining about the casual Ettin wave respawn, shedding tears of frustration and curses after manually checking every single sector of the hub for the last half an hour not from one person's view but from actually two separated pair of eyes. And then, the unthinkable: a hidden switch, a secret wall, a hidden passage shows up and we go like OMG!!!11 and throw away the phone so we can get the edge again. Somewhat competitive, but cooperative-ish long before I actually got the beat the game on multi.

Well Zaldron, I guess it's because you're more of an rpg fan than most of us here, which means that you like to explore your surroundings more in-depth in a different way than guys like me (who just want to slaughter).

But now that you mentioned the coop-ish feel to it, I must say that I can very well imagine that it could've been fun to play HeXen cooperatively without having played it before, because there'd be more than one person to search for the puzzle pieces and switches etc.

I think it's amusing how a lot of you complain about the respawning Ettins - I think that was a great asset to HeXen. You wander about in the hub thinking that you've cleared it and then suddenly you round a corner to come face to face with a growling Ettin. It gave you a sense of never being completely safe.

All in all, Heretic was in many ways better than Hexen.

I could write a whole assignment about why I think it's the exact the opposite - or more like: "Why HeXen rocks while Heretic doesn't", but I've been bitcching about Heretic far too many times already, so I'll just shut up instead.

I get the feeling that many Doom players are simply overwhelmed by the higher complexity of a game like Hexen. Hexen is a game where you actually have to THINK to get it done, unlike Doom and Heretic.

The first Hexen game I tried was the demo of HeXen 2 - back then I thought the puzzles in the demo were a nuisance that "were just in the way, preventing me from having my fun". When I first tried HeXen, I played the first map and a bit of the first hub and thought "this is just AWESOME" (I judged it by the Fighter's weapons, the enemies, the sounds and the action). Later on, I tried the full version and my enthusiasm was lowered somewhat because of the puzzles.

It's not that I hate puzzles, but they should be 'solvable'. What really put me off in both HeXen games was that sometimes, you would have to look for secrets. An example would be the old tower in the Barbican level of the Blackmarsh hub in Hx2 - and I thought I had to look for the damn mill key somewhere logical, but no. Then again, I WAS playing it in a demo where the OpenGl support was fux0red and didn't work (the readme file claimed that you could play it with OpenGl, but it just displayed an error message in which it said that an important dll file was missing - teh suck), so seeing that the tower was filled with cracks wasn't easy (it was not until after I had found out that it was made of breakable walls by accidentally hitting it with the ballista and solving the puzzle a number of times that I noticed that "hey, the walls on that tower are filled with cracks! How come I didn't see that before?").

If the cracks had been more noticeable, I don't think that puzzle would have bothered me at all.

And as for the HeXen 1 puzzles, the only puzzles that really DID bother me after I learned to use my eyes a bit more than usual, were the switch-finding puzzle in Shadow Wood (I HATE that hub and just for that) and the clock puzzle in the Castle of Grief. All the other puzzles were straightforward and seemed perfectly acceptable in comparison.

I do like the basic idea of a more puzzle-oriented game, but more often than not, it ends up being just a little too hard and bothersome. I like puzzles, where you need a little bit of regular, common sense, but not puzzles where you need to be overly clever or where you need to have really sharp eyes.

Just out of curiousity, how did you like the puzzles in the Fury mod...TC...whatever it's called? Since it was only the first hub, I tried to make the puzzles fairly easy, but still fun. The only really complicated puzzle was with the three Yorick's Skulls, but that was just for the secret level and you really didn't need to complete it to finish the hub (although it certainly helps, since you'll get a lot of nifty items to help out at the end of map 5).

Ichor said:

Just out of curiousity, how did you like the puzzles in the Fury mod...TC...whatever it's called? Since it was only the first hub, I tried to make the puzzles fairly easy, but still fun. The only really complicated puzzle was with the three Yorick's Skulls, but that was just for the secret level and you really didn't need to complete it to finish the hub (although it certainly helps, since you'll get a lot of nifty items to help out at the end of map 5).

Hmm, hard to say really.
The first time I played Fury, I couldn't get that missing book in the first puzzle so I got fed up and abandoned the game. It's odd, 'cause the second time I played it, I had no trouble finding the book - I suspected a bug, because I did find a book sprite the first time I played it, but I couldn't pick it up.

I never got very far in Fury, because I suddenly discovered that the mod had fucked up the regular HeXen so instead of my beloved Ettins, there were these goddamn howling scorpion monsters from Heretic that had replaced the Ettins in the mod (I've forgotten what these are called) and after trying a few times to get HeXen back to normal I gave up, removed HeXen and Fury completely and reinstalled HeXen without installing Fury.

In hindsight, I'd say that at least the first puzzle was very good, since I wasn't in the right mood to solve puzzles the first time I played - the idea of the missing book and the coins to buy items was interesting. It was fairly simple to find out what to do with the book puzzle - just search in places with books and you shalt find, only trouble is actually finding it, but that will work out too if you put a little effort into your search.

Well, there were other books there, but they were just decoration sprites. The puzzle piece was fullbright, and it had a letter on it. And I think you could have just used DeuSF to restore the iwad back to normal. It's odd, since that batch file should have restored it automatically.

Graf Zahl said:

?????

In what ways?

Primarily, I enjoy the feel better. Which is an aesthetic argument. Secondly, I greatly enjoy the enemies and powerups available in that game; the bosses are some of the best, and challenging, I've played against in a shooter. I just enjoyed it all around -- the maps were made well and the game was fun. More fun than Hexen, again, IMO.

No matter how you look at it, Diablo was the badass one. No competition. While Mephisto was easy to beat, Baal looked like an alien reject, diablo was the one that gave me a run for my money. Heh, he made ALL my money run away too. :P

I agree on pretty much all of it - I only view them slightly differently:

Mephisto: He looks like a wuss, but his horns are ok and the fact that he floats around and seems more or less rotten makes him kinda creepy, especially with all these etheral skulls swarming around him. He sounded far more badass in the cinematic sequence with the gate (my overall favorite Diablo 2 cinematic!) than in-game.

Baal: Wtf? He looks like some fucked up human sorcerer with the legs of some crap. He looks more like a corrupted mage than a Demon Lord of Hell - where the Hell are the goat-like features? Where are the horns? If he had looked more fucked up and powerful, it wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest that he didn't have any goat features (but then again, he's the brother of Diablo and Mephisto so...).

I just know that he looked like nothing I had envisioned him to be from reading the story about his binding near Lut Golein and I did not like what I saw.

Diablo: Awwwwwwesommmmmmmme! He looks cool. Not really all that frightening or fucked up and he'd be cheesy in a game like Doom 3, but he just looks too cool imo with that big, muscular red body, that evil-looking goatface, the spikes and those really cool horns (the horns are one asset that makes me like the cyberdemon more than any other Doom demon). Oh yes, and then there's the deep, evil voice.

He really acts and sounds immensely powerful - his two brothers sound like wusses in comparison.

Returning to HeXen, I also have my preferences, but contrary to Diablo, there isn't a single one that I think looks out of place or shitty.

D'Sparil: Ok so he wears a cloak. I always like robed figures in goth fantasy games, but it also leaves me very curious as to what D'sparil's true form looks like (one of many reasons why I hope we'll see the Serpent Riders in a new Raven game, be it a Heretic game or, even better, a HeXen game). My guess is that he's brown :-P

Korax: He has this really cool face that gets my imagination in gear, but his full form disappoints a little. I don't like that his head seems so big compared to his body. It's really not his head which is the problem, but his body seems too thin and fragile (and his many arms also seem weak). Granted, his insect-like appearance is kinda interesting, but I do wish he was more burly and seemed larger.

Eidolon: Ok, so I've only seen screenies of him, so my judgement is based solely on his appearance on these screenshots. But basically, I'm a bit disappointed that he just looks like your standard, goat-style demon. Of course, goat demons are my favorite type of demons, but I feel that they could have made Eidolon more spectacular and more fiendish and fucked up (like Korax).
Apart from that, I think he does look pretty cool and he looks big and powerful, but maybe a bit thin.

Ichor said:

Just out of curiousity, how did you like the puzzles in the Fury mod...TC...whatever it's called? Since it was only the first hub, I tried to make the puzzles fairly easy, but still fun. The only really complicated puzzle was with the three Yorick's Skulls, but that was just for the secret level and you really didn't need to complete it to finish the hub (although it certainly helps, since you'll get a lot of nifty items to help out at the end of map 5).

I still havent beaten the haunted castle yet. Damn, that's hard. I should play it again, to see where I left off though. :o

dsm said:

I agree on pretty much all of it - I only view them slightly differently:

Mephisto: He looks like a wuss, but his horns are ok and the fact that he floats around and seems more or less rotten makes him kinda creepy, especially with all these etheral skulls swarming around him. He sounded far more badass in the cinematic sequence with the gate (my overall favorite Diablo 2 cinematic!) than in-game.

Baal: Wtf? He looks like some fucked up human sorcerer with the legs of some crap. He looks more like a corrupted mage than a Demon Lord of Hell - where the Hell are the goat-like features? Where are the horns? If he had looked more fucked up and powerful, it wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest that he didn't have any goat features (but then again, he's the brother of Diablo and Mephisto so...).

I just know that he looked like nothing I had envisioned him to be from reading the story about his binding near Lut Golein and I did not like what I saw.

Diablo: Awwwwwwesommmmmmmme! He looks cool. Not really all that frightening or fucked up and he'd be cheesy in a game like Doom 3, but he just looks too cool imo with that big, muscular red body, that evil-looking goatface, the spikes and those really cool horns (the horns are one asset that makes me like the cyberdemon more than any other Doom demon). Oh yes, and then there's the deep, evil voice.

He really acts and sounds immensely powerful - his two brothers sound like wusses in comparison.

Ever thought of drawing your own depicitons of them? :)

ravage said:

Ever thought of drawing your own depicitons of them? :)

Of the Diablo bosses or the HeXen ones?
I once did a half-assed sketch of Baal the way I was hoping for him to end up before the Xpansion came out.

Doing my interpretation of the Three Serpent Riders would be a cool task too, although personally, I think that an artist like Spike could do a better job of making a freakier interpretation of them than I. I have this problem that I tend to stay too strictly to the looks of a game character when I draw it - I'm not always that good at using my own imagination.

dsm said:

..one of many reasons why I hope we'll see the Serpent Riders in a new Raven game, be it a Heretic game or, even better, a HeXen game...

heh, the little backstory involved the universe being contained within some sort of bubble and some moron flying through the bubble and sealing it just after he realised he fucked up but not before three powerful demons came through (guess who), so I doubt we'd see the Serpent Riders again.