Hexen

[TigerQuoll]

#4024

I know that Heretic has been bouncing around on Dos Game Club for ages, and that it has come really close to being accepted a number of times. But as it turns out covering Heretic when you could be covering Hexen is actually not permissible.

I can’t divulge all of the details until after the journal Nature has published my paper, by I’ve done rigorous scientific studies on this and the results are undeniable.
I’ve also convened with the Elders of DOS gaming and the Elders of Video Game Podcasts, and they unanimously agreed that it would violate every known scripture.

That being said, we could definitely cover them both in the same podcast. It’s just that there’s not much you can say about Heretic that you can’t say about Hexen as well – they’re both dark fantasy FPSes by Raven software using the Doom engine, and are even loosely connected by plot. But with all the extra things Hexen adds (it really is a massive evolution of the formula – I can’t stress this enough), it just makes Heretic, as good as it is, look like a Doom reskin by comparison.

[yozy]

#4025

I will second this opinion. Hexen is just way better than heretic. One thing I remember about playing it that I either finished, or almost finished it before learning that you could jump. I think it was originally mapped to / or \ key. Until very late I’ve understood why I wasn’t able to get so many of the “secret” items.

[aamiralavi]

#7172

Loved the setting and gameplay but also found it frustrating. What would be a super hidden secret door in any other game is often the main way forward in the game!

[fastwinstondoom]

#7174

Hexen is indeed BEYOND Heretic ;D In all seriousness, I kind of agree, if nothing else the atmosphere and art style of Hexen is amazing, even if the puzzles and backtracking are somewhat hit and miss.

[patrick_wd]

#7802

I agree that Hexen would be a better pick for an episode, since Heretic really is essentially a doom total conversion, with the most notable innovation being the ability to store items in an inventory for later use.

Hexen has a fundamentally different game design, with the non-linear hub-based map structure and emphasis on thorough exploration. Also, Hexen brought several interesting technical advancements to the Doom engine. Firstly the custom ACS scripting language which adds much more dynamism to the maps with elaborate scripted sequences and puzzle triggers. Second, there were “polyobjects” which were specially marked sectors that could move and rotate in ways previously impossible for Doom, allowing things like the swinging doors on the first level, or the sliding crusher walls seen later.

My friend and I couldn’t get enough of Hexen and played through it with all the classes on progressively higher difficulties just to get more out of the game, and would do co-op runs over modem, much to the frustration of our parents for tying up the lines 🙂