Wolfen preview

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Cyb
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Post by Cyb »

yeah the fighter is hard because he only gets two projectile weapons, and once you're out of whatever mana the hammer uses you're pretty much screwed against anything tougher than a centaur
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Zell
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Post by Zell »

i havent made it that far in hexen :( i dun even got the hammer
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HotWax
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Post by HotWax »

Cyb wrote:yeah the fighter is hard because he only gets two projectile weapons, and once you're out of whatever mana the hammer uses you're pretty much screwed against anything tougher than a centaur
Yes, and the other classes' ranged weapons are weak. Not my idea of a party. :cry:

Sometimes, I fantasize about bringing my shotgun in there and ripping apart demon flesh.
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Enjay
 
 
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Post by Enjay »

HotWax wrote:My guess is it screwed up in the part where each class got a whopping 4 weapons, were using their base weapon 90% of the time anyway, and all weapons did piddling damage, requiring dozens of shots to kill the weakest enemies.
That's my biggest gripe. Too few weapons for each game, most of them not especially powerful either. OK, there may be 12 weapons in total, but you only get access to 4 at a time.

The assembled weapons are a cool idea, and pretty powerful (esp Wraithverge IMO). Generally there doesn't seem to be much progression up to that point though. Weapon 1, fairly weak, weapon 2 and 3 middle to weak, weapon 4 poweful.

Well, that is my main gripe. That and taking ages to find one key tucked away in the back of a dark tunnel IIRC.

I think there was a lot about Hexen that was counter-intuitive, unfortunately.

The game had so much potential and such useful advances in the engine, yet very few people were inspired enough to do with it what was possible. We had to wait until Randy made the engine features available in Zdoom before we saw people really putting them to good use. I remember a magazine article anticipating all the wonderful stuff Doom map editors were going to do with Hexen, and for the most part, no-one did. Was it because it was counter intuitive? Was it because it didn't appeal as much? Who knows?
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HotWax
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Post by HotWax »

Well, given that they would have to work within a class system where the weapon selection was paltry and they had to keep the maps working for 3 classes at a time, I can see why the idea of mapping for it might have been unappealing.

I'm also not a fan of most of the enemies, either. I don't know why, but they just don't have that menace that the Doom enemies provide, nor the variety. The swamp creatures were a good idea, kind of a stealth monster thing, but other than that there's nothing there that really makes me sit up and say "Now that's a cool enemy."

IMHO, Heretic was a much better "medieval-hunting-down-hellspawn-with-magical-weapons" type game.
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Enjay
 
 
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Post by Enjay »

HotWax wrote:Sometimes, I fantasize about bringing my shotgun in there and ripping apart demon flesh.
Heck, why fantasize? You know it can be done in Zdoom. 10 minutes to throw together a WAD and you'll be able to rip as much demon flesh as you like. :)

As far as cool enemies... I actually think behaviour wise there are quite a few. Temporarily invulnerable centaurs, a flying wyvern, little flying things that start off as rock like objects on the ground, the attack of the dark bishop, the ice monster that shatters, the wraith that rises from the grave, I don't like the Heressiarch - but plenty people do, the class bosses, Korax with his scripted events and varied attacks etc etc. But on the whole the graphical style, and to be fair, the genre makes them less menacing (although some are reasonably so). There's nothing too out of place about a bunch of fantasy creatures in a fantasy setting - obviously it's standard fare, and what you'd expect. In doom you have vile, twisted hellspawn invading and corrupting human space - far more menacing as a basic concept IMO, and realised - albeit in a very pixelated way - in quite a disgusting visceral manner.
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Graf Zahl
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Post by Graf Zahl »

Enjay wrote:I don't like the.

Finally someone who says it!
Both of Hexen's bosses suck.
I think of all the bosses in the 3 games the Heresiarch can be the most annoying one. Once you have figured out how his invulnerability works he is just a major pain in the ass because half of the time you just have to wait until it drops and then fire everything you have until he executes his next attack. Once I was able to completely surprise him and blew him away in less than 30 seconds. He wasn't able to start even one single attack...
Admittedly, Korax is even worse as a boss. At this point in the game you should have stacked enough Icons of the Defender that he isn't the least bit of trouble. At least he doesn't become invulnerable so the fight against him is normally shorter.
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Biff
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Post by Biff »

Guys, you ought to watch LWM's demo. She plays as cleric and kicks some serious butt. I had never seen those "magic red hands" before, dealing attacks reminiscent of the Heretic Maulotaur. The fire key defenders were made hash of. Great use of the poison green gas too. It's all new to me. :)
Cyb
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Post by Cyb »

heh, I think the major flaws of hexen are not only the lack and seemingly misbalance of weapons, but also the stock maps are a huge turnoff. Hexen isn't amazingly popular, and there are very few people who have actually gotten past the first hub, I myself only did it over the summer after owning Hexen for like three years (I think I mentioned that earlier in this thread, too lazy to check tho hehe). All the map jumping and the mazelike features of the maps and hitting a switch in one map and having it do something you have no idea about in another map, ugh. In LWM's wolfen thing at least all you had to do was collect keys and all the doors were clearly labled and easy to find, very nice, if only the first hub of hexen had worked that way.

personally I think the hexen sprites/monsters are pretty cool, and much more intersting than most of the doom monsters who all essentially shoot fireballs/bullets at you and follow you around (exceptions being the arch-vile and revenant to an extent) waiting for you to kill them. hexen monsters do stuff like block/reflect your attacks, disappear under water and spring from the ground to attack you, change the level (korax) and some are even dangerous after they die (bishop and to a greater extent heresiarch). as a contrast I always felt the sprites and mechanics of the heretic enemies were too cartoony and, well, exactly like doom's for the most part (respectivly I mean, doom's sprites look less cartoony).
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Enjay
 
 
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Post by Enjay »

Yeah, the biggest problem with actually playing the original Hexen maps was the lack of apparent logic to them. Even a lot of the keys seemed to be randomly scattered around the place, but the puzzles were just obsure a lot of the time. They made sense to someone, but they would - that someone designed them. It's bad enough on a Doom level when you flick a switch and are not sure what it did, but at least you have usually passed an apparently locked door or get ambushed by a bunch of recently set free monsters soon afterward if the author is worth their salt.

In Hexen you'd press a switch, not entirely sure you were even on a "quest" in the first place and have some vital thing change in an apparently totally non-special area of an entirely different map. OK, you might get a cryptic message like "you have solved one third of the puzzle" but if you didn't even know there was a puzzle, much less that you were trying solve it, and even less than that, which level the effect of your 1/3 was on, what chance did you have of working out what it was all about?

In saying that, I did finish Hexen a couple of days after getting it, which was shortly after it came out.

Cyb is right. Wolfen handles this aspect of Hexen much better. The bulk of the progression is find key, use key stuff, but there are puzzles. These are on the whole logical if you spend a bit of time thinking about them. ie they are solvable by thinking, not just by chance. Any text messages with them are helpful and even the more cryptic ones have given you enough clues to allow you to get on the trail.

As for Heretic, I'm really not sure what my attitude to it is. I know I like it, and I think I like a lot of the graphics, although it is perhaps a little more cartoony than Doom. The thing I found a little weak was that a lot of it was just "Doom in tights" as it was dubbed back in the day. A few of the weapons clearly were equivalents of Doom ones, as were a lot of the enemies. It didn't feel different enough from Doom. It didn't stand out on its own and in many ways feels more like a TC than a different game.
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Enjay
 
 
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Post by Enjay »

OK, just played through P3. No additional problems/gripes. It all seems very logical to me now, even if the castle key turned up in a place I'd never seen it before. :)

I like the sinister audio clues that a trap might be nearby - just enough of a "heads up".

Your spikes look better than the ROTT ones in the context of these levels.

I tried to play your demo with 47i, but things desynched almost as soon as you arrived on the bog level.
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Hirogen2
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Post by Hirogen2 »

The demo went fine for me until I quit since you it showed something I had
missed and I wanted to continue play myself.
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Biff
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Post by Biff »

Enjay wrote:I like the sinister audio clues that a trap might be nearby - just enough of a "heads up".

Your spikes look better than the ROTT ones in the context of these levels.

I tried to play your demo with 47i, but things desynched almost as soon as you arrived on the bog level.
That stroked piano strings sound is great. LWM said, "From Thief".

Demo went A-OK for me with 47i (Win2k machine). From the demo, I saw the one thing I'd missed in playing before (where the final piece of the class's super weapons is).

Edit: Just finished playing it all the way through! What a great twist at the end, it might qualify for one of those "The Best Thing Ever" spot awards!
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Xaser
 
 
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Post by Xaser »

Hmm... The link to the file doesn't work. That sucks, I really wanted to play this. :cry:
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Biff
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Post by Biff »

Xaser, just for you, go here http://home.earthlink.net/~mjblakely/data/

You will see both the Wolfen mod and also LWM's zipped demo.

zdoom -iwad hexen.wad -file wolfen_p3.wad -playdemo wolfen_p3

The demo runs through about 2/3 or 3/4 of the wad. Enjoy!
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