Re: Heretic is a really bad game
Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 4:02 pm
Heretic has a flamethrower, which makes it a good game in my book!
Heretic has an intentional art style? I guess I just assumed they didn't really aim for anything specific. Is there a bible or anything out there for it?Amuscaria wrote:The textures also looks really bleh. I know they were going for that old cartoon style, but most of them just look really flat and generic.
I actually like that. For one, it helps the level designers control weapons and monsters better (the fact that a shotgun zombie drops a shotgun means any time a mapper places a shotgun zombie, the player is guaranteed to get a shotgun out of it; if you don't want them to get one yet, you have to use a different monster which may not have the desired difficulty or theme). Secondly, it helps the monsters feel unique, that they are different than you with different abilities. The creatures you face are either beasts, undead, or people transformed/given power by D'Sparil or whoever, and you're a heretic for not following them. So it would make sense that they do things you can't/won't.Matt wrote:On that note, that's probably what really bothers me about Heretic: the total and absolute disconnect between the player's weaponry and the monsters'.
I don't believe the engine had the capability for arcing projectiles until later on. Even in Doom and Doom2, the imps, barons, cacos, etc, shot in a straight line to the target with no gravity. It would certainly complicate the aiming if the firing angle had to account for distance, which might not have been so easy on a 386 (not to mention the difficulty of dealing with lowered ceilings that don't block LOS but would either block the projectile or require aiming lower for the feet).- knights threw arcing axes that returned on impact, which of course the player could also obtain
Some of them kind of do. I mean, if you consider the early level gargoyles to be normal, then the fireball-throwing ones can be considered powered-up variations. Same for the mummies. And certain enemies, like the undead knight, will randomly throw a different projectile (a bloodied axe, which does more damage and is unaffected by wind).- all the above projectile-shooting enemies could randomly go tome of power
In the original Doom, there was really only one enemy that had a weapon that the player also used, though: the shotgun zombie. Doom 2 added the chaingun zombie and gave us a second one, but even then, the players still only have those two weapons in common with the enemy ranks.Matt wrote:The lack of direction might be what I'm responding to with the monsters... yes strictly speaking there is more diversity, but it always feels like diversity for diversity's sake whereas Doom's monsters all feel motivated by either
1. they had a specific gameplay niche and needed a monster for it, or
2. they needed a monster that shot this weapon that the player already had
Yeah. Couldn't even stand to play thru the fist episode of Hexen 2 without just outright cheating to the other episodes or getting all the weapons from the classes to see what they did (frankly, was massively disappointed even at those). It's gotta be one of the most boring FPS games I've played. I swear there were only 5 enemies in total for first episode, but each one was a bitch to fight because they had too much health and did too much damage. At least, that's how I remembered Hex2.leileilol wrote:Hexen II is far far worse. Early Haktoria predev involved picking out the worst points of Hexen II design to avoid reproducing (in hopes to getting back to Heretic/Hexen-ish gameplay without their bad parts). In the end it ended up making nothing because everything in Hexen II was bad*
*- being snagged by a dreadful mdl pipeline and the source ports that operates strictly with checksum hexen2 paks. Probably the best part of the project were amuscaria's concepts, which i really really wanted to put the effort into living up to, but software hit me hard then
You should probably start thinking the other way, because that's exactly what Heretic is. A sword & sorcery-flavored Doom game with more features.Matt wrote:Maybe my problem is that I'm still trying to think of Heretic as a coherent fantasy setting rather than just an arcadey shoot-'em-up with vaguely fantasy-genre aesthetics pastede on...