Synthetic Deities - Heretic Made Hideous! [2014-05-25]

[Matt]

Download the mod

Inspired by the discussion here. If you have no idea what is going on or how any of the controls work, just figure out how Hideous Destructor works and you'll be fine. (hint: bind your run and reload keys)

This is, like, a pre-pre-alpha embryo. Bugs everywhere, not everything replaced.

Stick: Sucks slightly less. Gets tangled easily. Primary and alt strikes available; alt is better for defence, while for primary, watch for that perfect sweet spot where if you hit at exactly the right distance at the right time you do non-suck damage. Tomed will one-shot a lich or uselessly attempt to block a tornado, depending.

Wand: GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER
With tome, FLACK CANNON GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER GLITTER

Shotgun Bow: Shoots one projectile at a time. Can overpenetrate. Tomed, shoots bouncing axes.

Chaingun PDW Claw: 30-shot street sweeper. Altfire or reload to recharge directly from your supplies. Tomed, automatically recharges and upon firing cooks off all your ammo in a spamming frenzy of slower, parallel triple-shots.

WestboroHellstaff: Point and click to set someone on fire. Use too much and you get set on fire too. Tomed shot uses up all your ammo in exchange for a permanent and rather large spot of fiery rain. Is fueled by your getting hurt or angry. To get angry at an arbitrary time, gather lots of hell runes and use them to generate a message - the more you have before you use them, the bigger the effect will be, but you will always use as many as you possibly can at once!

BFG P.Rod: Fire to shoot a killer rocket with a lingering sparkle attack. Altfire is the flamethrower - you can still shoot the rocket after without reloading if you've still got 20 charge or more, but the rocket will be greatly weakened in proportion to your flamethrower use. Tomed shot just makes the primary shot bigger (and throws in a BFG spray immediately before launch).

Baby rattle F.Mace: Now a one-shot grenade launcher with variable force, still pretty unimpressive but not quite doomed to uselessness as before. Tomed shot (once you've loaded enough rounds) summons a huge, intelligent ball that fights for you. You do not want to be anywhere remotely near it when it finally dies. Seriously.

Gauntlets: Zaps things slowly but painfully. Altfire drains energy for use in the main, consistently damaging zap but is a bit sporadic and averages out to zero damage if not tomed.


Tome: Instead of... uh... whatever it is it does in vanilla, now you just tear off a page, enchant a specific weapon, and it'll be there until you need it! You can switch weapons, enchant both, even change levels and it'll still be enchanted until it's used. Right now each page is worth 1 shot.

Wings: Use it to turn it on and off. Enchantment wears off with use (gauge not yet visible). This just propels you up and forwards a little while you press space, so you'll need to work a bit to try to hover. I almost puked while testing them. Have fun!

Phial and Phlask: Not quite the same as in HD. The blue one heals wounds (still not implemented) before healing HP, while the pink does that plus more HP healing over time. Your carrying capacity is much lower - 5 blue, 4 pink.

[HexaDoken]

obligatory

this is literally my first time playing, I even found out midway through that I forgot to bind a sprint key(and instead of just quickly binding it pretended for the duration of the entire video that I don't want to sprint)


Having to rely on my health meter instead of visual feedback in form of red flashes turned out to be pretty weird after all this time playing HD. This scares me somewhat. Inb4 HD will ruin my ability to play normal FPS properly

Tome of Power in vanilla makes your weapons enter powered up mode for 30 seconds-ish.

If there is some "crit range" on the staff(at least description makes it look like so), it doesn't seem to be apparent.

Wand suffers from major effect overdose.

[Matt]

The sweet spot is basically last couple inches of the staff's maximum range - you know you're in that range if you one-shot a (non-leader) gargoyle and/or you don't get pushed back by the impact at all. It's very difficult to pull off if both you and your target are moving, so it's best to wait until something steps into range. ("Steps" as it's also very difficult to time this against a garg rush) I'll see if I could make that spot just a little bit bigger and more forgiving, or at least a little bit more obvious.

[HexaDoken]

A special, longer and more powerful animation(see hexen's fighter three hit combo) would be a dead giveaway that a crit exists at all.

Then players should be able to figure out crit conditions themselves with a bit of practice.

[Matt]

It's not a "crit" at all, in the sense that you randomly get lucky with a special attack and damage spike - the projectile's damage actually increases as it travels, and your movement is the same and it's where your weapon lands that makes the difference. I'm kinda hoping the difference in knockback plus the target's reaction should be feedback enough.

[XutaWoo]

I think he meant crit as in any increase in damage - kind of like how Borderlands does it, where critical hits are headshots and entirely skill-based.

It would probably be nice to have a certain sound for the sweet spot hit, if you decide to add in some new ones.

[Matt]

Maybe!

Just saw Hex's vid... you are, in fact, landing those good hits properly, they take 2 hits to kill a golem.

Also, I should clarify that the wand has an altfire - it is a slow-moving triple-shot that uses 2-3 ammo but is much less accurate.

(and yes, I'm aware of the vanilla Heretic game mechanics of the tome, it's just what that means to the characters in-game that seemed lacking. Why is it completely used up? You're obviously not reading it, so how do you interact with it to enchant yourself?)

[-Ghost-]

This is a great idea. The basic wand looks better already, hopefully you can turn all the heretic weapons into satisfying, useful ones. Or even just replace them.

[HexaDoken]

In Heretic 2 the tome is actually a sentient artifact that provides guidance to the player and occassional powerups when used.

Though doesn't make too much sense in H1, but well.

Maybe they have D&D style words of power that provide certain effects when read aloud, and despite being a handful of words they still take an entire book for whatever reason, much akin to D&D again.


Most of the wand mechanics were somewhat unobvious for me due to the effect overdose - it's virtually impossible for me to see the actual projectile and all I get is just "well something happened". It really should be toned down.

[Tux]

Something hideous I might finally like! Wasn't a big fan of the Doom version, but this looks sweet indeed- not mentioning that I'm Heretic's big fan.
I really hope you know what you're doing; Heretic had no hitscanners besides the player so it was pure skill dependant (the dodging)

[Matt]

An early concept I had was to make the ophidians the player-equivalent that the zombies are in HD. That has yet to be finalized.

Anyway, NEW UPDATE!

Changes:
- Read more about both Spong and Calvin. I'm changing the difficulty levels to descriptions of specific heresies to avoid making further ignorant blanket statements.
- Restored crosshair for wand.
- Removed limits for some sounds.
- Made it a little more obvious when the wand was tomed and ready to fire.
- Some tweaks to wand projectiles.
- Imported more player states from HD.
- Increased sweet-spot range of staff as well as damage. Now you can even oneshot golems!
- Added flasks. Both blue and pink are carryable.

[Jack Mackerel]

Aww, I kinda of wanted to go Ghost Recon on Dark Souls, but this'll do.

[Matt]

Once the bow is in it'll definitely get a lot more ghost reconesque.

EDIT: A whole bunch of things had been bothering me about Heretic's setting versus gameplay for a long time:

- Why do the enemies drop ammo for weapons they never use?
- Why, on that note, do none of the enemies use anything remotely resembling the player's weapons, despite clearly having access to them?
- On that note, why is there nothing among the enemies that is depicted as even remotely similar in both form and function to the protagonist?
- Why would all the nations of the known world just up and start worshipping these nasty devil-looking dudes that came out of nowhere? What did they have to offer?
- Why in the world would an entire kingdom's fate be entrusted to one little candle being held by one closed, homogenous group of old dudes?
- What are the Tomes of Power and why do the Sidhe keep them, when their only apparent in-game use destroys them after 30 seconds?
- If these monsters are supposed to be so hellish why do they just look like very earthly monsters from Greek myth?

I think I've found an answer to them all. Next update will include it.

[Matt]

NEW UPDATE!

Changes:

• Slowed down player while reloading and using tome.
• Added crossbow. Altfire unloads and reloads. Tome launches axes with a red one last.
• Added backstory to explain various oddities about the game and why it is impossible in Heretic's setting to achieve the sort of player/enemy near-parity I was aiming for in Hideous Destructor.
• Reduced wings of wrath to 30 seconds' worth of power and made your supply visible as your supply of the artifact itself.
• Added dragon claw. Reload using altfire.
• More tweaks to the gold wand.

[twinkieman93]

There actually is an answer to the question of why people worshiped the Serpent Riders when they arrived; apparently there were some really nasty wars in one part of the world, and with what was essentially a flick of the wrist they quelled them with what appeared to be the power of gods. It's in the manual, I believe.