HeXen: Descent Into the Abyss

[ArgonianLord]

Another update to fix issues that have been reported since the last one. Last update sought to fix repeats of one of the bookcase puzzle textures that confused the player, but during that effort to fix it I also replaced all instances of the textures with the "complete" version of the texture. This made the game even more confusing for the player, this particular bookcase was meant to look like this, but was filled in the last update even before the puzzle was finished. https://imgur.com/HFaihpg

Other issues that were fixed include.

1. Fixed a sequence break that existed in the first level involving the "lighthouse" at the start of the map.
2. The encounter in map3 where the player is ambushed by skeletons and a Duke of Hell has been changed to remove the skeletons, because the skeletons were unable to actually pass through the tight room you are holed up in during the ambush.
3. Fixed another spelling mistake for one of Tyrone's notes.

[Ichor]

I noticed that part of the speech right after defeating Medrike is underwater (specifically the part where you see the bell near the dark blue room with the traps). This makes his voice slower and deeper than usual.

Also, after I put in the two planets, I started walking and when D'Sparil showed up, I ended up stopped on a damaging floor for a few seconds and almost died.

[SallazarSpellcaster]

Hello! I've begun a playthrough of the mapset, and I'd like to share some thoughts! Since each map is its own, self-contained experience, my feedback will be on a map-to-map basis. I'm playing on difficulty 5, and I loaded Bolognese-Gore, and Nashgore on the side.

Character: Invoker.
I chose the Invoker for a single reason: Magic Missiles! Classic spell, grievously underrepresented in Hexen mods.

-The Invocation Wand is competent, it gets the job done; the projectile travel time took a little to get used to, but it's compensated by its homing capabilities; hitting monsters standing on a ledge can get tricky, however, as the homing tends to ram the projectile onto the ledge, but that's common in most homing weapons.

-Magic Missiles and Healing. I like this one; at first I thought you'd go the Hexen II way and make it fire in a quick succession; shooting five, slightly homing projectiles feels closer to its DnD roots; the 2 mana costs seemed slightly low at first, given its damage output, but it's compensated by the weapon being more efficient at a medium-short range. Healing is eminently a utilitarian skill, but it can really help out on a pinch.

Gameplay:

Using Elder Scrolls - Arena music is well appreciated, it sets the overall tone of the adventure nicely, making it immediately apparent that it's going to be a long, slow-burning trip.

The map pack has your usual brand of well-refined architecture and interesting environments. As you mentioned on the first post, it feels as its own self-contained hub, and that works really well; puzzles are self-contained, easy, and logical to follow, and each area is distinctive enough to traverse without getting lost. Going back and forth between the different elemental-themed areas to solve their respective puzzles and acquire their elemental glyphs is a fun task; I like the graphics of the glyphs themselves - the recoloring of Heretic's blue key looks nice in general; this segment of the first map feels to me as what the Seven Portals, and the Guardians of Ice, Fire, and Steel should have been like in vanilla Hexen.

The aether is especially intriguing - non-euclidean architecture, bizarre, otherworldly vistas, eerie lighting. It works really well, especially the sense of urgency as the castle is slowly consumed by the abyss.

The demon warlocks look great, but are ultimately disappointing. They look intimidating, and they can handle your ass the first time you face them, but once you realize you can simply duck under their attacks, they become trivial.

All in all, I really liked the first map, it encourages exploration, and logical thinking - great job on the puzzles, especially the one with the mushrooms in the forest area. I'd like to emphasize that the architecture you present, both familiar and corrupted by the aether is quite imaginative, and fun to look at.

Critiques.

The few critiques I currently have are mostly nitpicks.

Notes are at times difficult to read, but I understand this is because of resolution constraints. The difficult part is telling notes apart - there was a time when I wanted to go back to one of the important notes, the glowing ones, and it took me a solid ten minutes to find it. On this regard, I'd recommend using a different inventory sprite for important notes - a different sort of parchment, or something similar, would work well.

Other nitpicks are merely linguistic. Often through dialog and text, "Its" and "It's" are misused; a simple example that comes to mind is when Kallaxitus talks about the Aethereal Crown, he mentions "It's location," the correct form would be "its," as "it's" is actually a contraction of "it is" or "it has," while "its" is the possessive-neutral form. As I said, this is just a tiny nitpick, but I thought I'd let you know about it.

Also, in the final text of the map, when Kallaxitus says "They were Gryphon mages after all," Gryphon is misspelled as "Grphyon."

I'm enjoying the map-pack; it's not usual to see long, elaborate maps for Hexen, and these are some of the most fun to explore I've gone through. The encounters are balanced, the story and lore are interesting, and as I said before, the places are cool to look at.

Great work!


Edit: Finished map 2.

Though shorter than the first map, it's fun to explore your view of the mages' abode. The classrooms and interconnecting rooms, filled with experiments and other interesting things to look at give a good, imaginative look at how spellcasters live within Cronos.

Same as before, the architecture and the design of the map stands out the most. Especially the aethereal realm was fantastic - the texture used for the background looks properly, well, aetherial.

Sunstaff: Didn't like it. Though cool in execution, its damage output lags behind the magic missiles - throughout the map, it didn't get nearly as much use as weapon-2 did; in fact the only time I used it was merely to test out its damage and usefulness, but in the end I fell back on magic missiles.

I spotted a few more spelling mistakes.

Apprentice Dormatories is misspelled - Dormitories would be the correct spelling.

At some point, Medrike says "What do we want? Well for you to stop with this quest , there things..." it's missing an "are" after there; either that, or go for "there're."

Later, Kallaxitus says, about the library, "there must be something here that about the serpent halls." The "That" is unnecessary.

So far, so good, on to the third map!

[ArgonianLord]

Hello! I've begun a playthrough of the mapset, and I'd like to share some thoughts! Since each map is its own, self-contained experience, my feedback will be on a map-to-map basis. I'm playing on difficulty 5, and I loaded Bolognese-Gore, and Nashgore on the side.

Character: Invoker.
I chose the Invoker for a single reason: Magic Missiles! Classic spell, grievously underrepresented in Hexen mods.

-The Invocation Wand is competent, it gets the job done; the projectile travel time took a little to get used to, but it's compensated by its homing capabilities; hitting monsters standing on a ledge can get tricky, however, as the homing tends to ram the projectile onto the ledge, but that's common in most homing weapons.

-Magic Missiles and Healing. I like this one; at first I thought you'd go the Hexen II way and make it fire in a quick succession; shooting five, slightly homing projectiles feels closer to its DnD roots; the 2 mana costs seemed slightly low at first, given its damage output, but it's compensated by the weapon being more efficient at a medium-short range. Healing is eminently a utilitarian skill, but it can really help out on a pinch.

Gameplay:

Using Elder Scrolls - Arena music is well appreciated, it sets the overall tone of the adventure nicely, making it immediately apparent that it's going to be a long, slow-burning trip.

The map pack has your usual brand of well-refined architecture and interesting environments. As you mentioned on the first post, it feels as its own self-contained hub, and that works really well; puzzles are self-contained, easy, and logical to follow, and each area is distinctive enough to traverse without getting lost. Going back and forth between the different elemental-themed areas to solve their respective puzzles and acquire their elemental glyphs is a fun task; I like the graphics of the glyphs themselves - the recoloring of Heretic's blue key looks nice in general; this segment of the first map feels to me as what the Seven Portals, and the Guardians of Ice, Fire, and Steel should have been like in vanilla Hexen.

The aether is especially intriguing - non-euclidean architecture, bizarre, otherworldly vistas, eerie lighting. It works really well, especially the sense of urgency as the castle is slowly consumed by the abyss.

The demon warlocks look great, but are ultimately disappointing. They look intimidating, and they can handle your ass the first time you face them, but once you realize you can simply duck under their attacks, they become trivial.

All in all, I really liked the first map, it encourages exploration, and logical thinking - great job on the puzzles, especially the one with the mushrooms in the forest area. I'd like to emphasize that the architecture you present, both familiar and corrupted by the aether is quite imaginative, and fun to look at.

Critiques.

The few critiques I currently have are mostly nitpicks.

Notes are at times difficult to read, but I understand this is because of resolution constraints. The difficult part is telling notes apart - there was a time when I wanted to go back to one of the important notes, the glowing ones, and it took me a solid ten minutes to find it. On this regard, I'd recommend using a different inventory sprite for important notes - a different sort of parchment, or something similar, would work well.

Other nitpicks are merely linguistic. Often through dialog and text, "Its" and "It's" are misused; a simple example that comes to mind is when Kallaxitus talks about the Aethereal Crown, he mentions "It's location," the correct form would be "its," as "it's" is actually a contraction of "it is" or "it has," while "its" is the possessive-neutral form. As I said, this is just a tiny nitpick, but I thought I'd let you know about it.

Also, in the final text of the map, when Kallaxitus says "They were Gryphon mages after all," Gryphon is misspelled as "Grphyon."

I'm enjoying the map-pack; it's not usual to see long, elaborate maps for Hexen, and these are some of the most fun to explore I've gone through. The encounters are balanced, the story and lore are interesting, and as I said before, the places are cool to look at.

Great work!


Edit: Finished map 2.

Though shorter than the first map, it's fun to explore your view of the mages' abode. The classrooms and interconnecting rooms, filled with experiments and other interesting things to look at give a good, imaginative look at how spellcasters live within Cronos.

Same as before, the architecture and the design of the map stands out the most. Especially the aethereal realm was fantastic - the texture used for the background looks properly, well, aetherial.

Sunstaff: Didn't like it. Though cool in execution, its damage output lags behind the magic missiles - throughout the map, it didn't get nearly as much use as weapon-2 did; in fact the only time I used it was merely to test out its damage and usefulness, but in the end I fell back on magic missiles.

I spotted a few more spelling mistakes.

Apprentice Dormatories is misspelled - Dormitories would be the correct spelling.

At some point, Medrike says "What do we want? Well for you to stop with this quest , there things..." it's missing an "are" after there; either that, or go for "there're."

Later, Kallaxitus says, about the library, "there must be something here that about the serpent halls." The "That" is unnecessary.

So far, so good, on to the third map!

Thank you so much for this format of delivering criticism for Descent Into the Abyss, it greatly helps me discover reported problems straight away rather than me fishing around for it on my own.

I'd also especially like to thank you for clearing up my confusion with "Its" and It's". I've seen to it that this confusion has been cleared up for all the hudmessages in my maps, the notes will receive a similar fix in the next update.

[ArgonianLord]

I noticed that part of the speech right after defeating Medrike is underwater (specifically the part where you see the bell near the dark blue room with the traps). This makes his voice slower and deeper than usual.

Also, after I put in the two planets, I started walking and when D'Sparil showed up, I ended up stopped on a damaging floor for a few seconds and almost died.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I've moved the camera that the ACS script switches the view to during Medrike's speech after you've defeated him so this may not happen.

I've also made that corridor with the hurt floors no longer damage the player, so what you just experienced will no longer happen. Terribly sorry for the incovenience.

[ArgonianLord]

Update as of 09/11/2020.

Overall Changes: This update fixes multiple instances of "Its" and "It's" being used incorrectly throughout a lot of the subtitles for dialogue in the mod. I've also fixed some more typos in the subtitles. The Dungeon Keeper skeleton sprites have also been replaced by the

Level 1: Adds an extra stone pillar to block the player from sequence breaking in the middle of the courtyard with all the towers. Previously players were able to use boots of speed to jump across the gap and finish the map much earlier than intended.

Level 2: Mostly spelling fixing spelling mistakes and the likes. A camera during Medrike speech after you've defeated him could sometimes end up underwater, making it impossible to see what the player was meant to see, and Medrike's voice would also vastly lower in pitch because of the camera being underwater.

Level 3: Removed a hurt floor that could cause the player to take damage while a small cutscene was playing.

Level 4: Fixed a misleading bookcase where it looked as though the player could slot in the Liber Oscura and Daemon Codex into when the player enters the corrupted version of Gibbet.

[SallazarSpellcaster]

Map 3 complete!

As before, the aesthetics and architecture work very well in its favor. The moment where you see the entrance to the Serpent Halls is actually quite good; seeing the towers from above the cliff is a nice touch. I liked the areas you explore too, especially the catacombs of the impostor king; both the canyon and the catacombs offer a nice change of scenario.

---

Entering the Dark Crucible is also a cool touch, especially its abyssal corruption.

Wand of Cranvus: Standard rocket launcher, serviceable, gets the job done; there's not a lot to it but, as I said, it works nicely enough so I have no complaints about it.

-Story.

---

It also works really well! Throughout the adventure so far, people keep mentioning the Faceless One; as it's revealed that the purpose of the ethereal crown is to capture the essence of the Riders, I wonder if said Faceless One is, in fact Praevus? If so, don't let me know - I'd just like to let you know that if that's the case, then you did a good job with the foreshadowing, especially as it's the kind of detail that people who have played the Portal of Praevus expansion may catch on.

-Suggestions.

The only suggestions I can offer are just to add a little bit of polish, nothing game-changing.

First would be to change the sprites for the flame masks in the Catacombs, just to avoid repetition; something simple, such as removing the horns, the rictus, and lowering the brightness of the sprite should suffice; plus, renaming them "Mortuary Mask" would work. If you like, I can provide a quick sprite-edit of the flame mask sprite.

The second suggestion would be to add a few different lines of text for the abyssal monoliths strewn about, just to spice things up: "Klaatu, verata... whatever." "I should have paid more attention in my abyssal classes." "This says something about... my mother and... DAMN IT!" Just silly stuff for the player to discover, or to insert obscure references.

So far, I've had fun with the map pack, and I'm actually intrigued to see where the story's going; again, good job!


EDIT: Finished the fourth map!

Traipsing through the various locales of old Cronos was a nice romp; it's good to see that you chose the most characteristic parts of the vanilla game - seeing them corrupted is a nice touch.

Story.

---

Called it! We were being "aided" by good ol' Praevus - good call on not mentioning his name, as I said, it's something someone who's played Portal of Praevus will catch on.

I had a fun time playing through the map pack; though it's only four levels long, they're all large enough to encourage exploration provide a solid experience that doesn't overstay its welcome. Secrets were well hidden, but not bear-impossible to find. Keep the large-map format; it's not used as often as it should, and as I've mentioned before, each map has enough variety to keep one going without growing bored.

The Invoker was fun to play as. The Magic Missiles weapon is a power-house, it carried me through most of the playthrough, even against the game's bosses.

Suggestions.

Just as before, they're just tiny things for more flavor. The Liber Oscura and Daemon Codex found in map 4 can be spiced up by using the K, R, or X letters and minor edits to the inventory, pickup, and bookcase sprites; I don't know if it'd be too much of a coding hassle to manage, however.

Sunstaff: Increase its primary damage just a tiny bit, other than that, it works well enough. Its repulsion attack is situational, but it helped a lot against Traductus.

Staff of Cranvus: As I mentioned it gets the job done.

[ArgonianLord]

Map 3 complete!

As before, the aesthetics and architecture work very well in its favor. The moment where you see the entrance to the Serpent Halls is actually quite good; seeing the towers from above the cliff is a nice touch. I liked the areas you explore too, especially the catacombs of the impostor king; both the canyon and the catacombs offer a nice change of scenario.

---

Entering the Dark Crucible is also a cool touch, especially its abyssal corruption.

Wand of Cranvus: Standard rocket launcher, serviceable, gets the job done; there's not a lot to it but, as I said, it works nicely enough so I have no complaints about it.

-Story.

---

It also works really well! Throughout the adventure so far, people keep mentioning the Faceless One; as it's revealed that the purpose of the ethereal crown is to capture the essence of the Riders, I wonder if said Faceless One is, in fact Praevus? If so, don't let me know - I'd just like to let you know that if that's the case, then you did a good job with the foreshadowing, especially as it's the kind of detail that people who have played the Portal of Praevus expansion may catch on.

-Suggestions.

The only suggestions I can offer are just to add a little bit of polish, nothing game-changing.

First would be to change the sprites for the flame masks in the Catacombs, just to avoid repetition; something simple, such as removing the horns, the rictus, and lowering the brightness of the sprite should suffice; plus, renaming them "Mortuary Mask" would work. If you like, I can provide a quick sprite-edit of the flame mask sprite.

The second suggestion would be to add a few different lines of text for the abyssal monoliths strewn about, just to spice things up: "Klaatu, verata... whatever." "I should have paid more attention in my abyssal classes." "This says something about... my mother and... DAMN IT!" Just silly stuff for the player to discover, or to insert obscure references.

So far, I've had fun with the map pack, and I'm actually intrigued to see where the story's going; again, good job!


EDIT: Finished the fourth map!

Traipsing through the various locales of old Cronos was a nice romp; it's good to see that you chose the most characteristic parts of the vanilla game - seeing them corrupted is a nice touch.

Story.

---

Called it! We were being "aided" by good ol' Praevus - good call on not mentioning his name, as I said, it's something someone who's played Portal of Praevus will catch on.

I had a fun time playing through the map pack; though it's only four levels long, they're all large enough to encourage exploration provide a solid experience that doesn't overstay its welcome. Secrets were well hidden, but not bear-impossible to find. Keep the large-map format; it's not used as often as it should, and as I've mentioned before, each map has enough variety to keep one going without growing bored.

The Invoker was fun to play as. The Magic Missiles weapon is a power-house, it carried me through most of the playthrough, even against the game's bosses.

Suggestions.

Just as before, they're just tiny things for more flavor. The Liber Oscura and Daemon Codex found in map 4 can be spiced up by using the K, R, or X letters and minor edits to the inventory, pickup, and bookcase sprites; I don't know if it'd be too much of a coding hassle to manage, however.

Sunstaff: Increase its primary damage just a tiny bit, other than that, it works well enough. Its repulsion attack is situational, but it helped a lot against Traductus.

Staff of Cranvus: As I mentioned it gets the job done.

Glad to hear you enjoyed this latest installation in my mod series! Terribly sorry for any hiccups or Inconsistencies that may have cropped up during your playthrough.

I've also taken your criticisms into account about the weapons and gave them all a look, this segwayed into adjusting the Elementalist's Fire Wand and Ice Wand weapons' damage capabilitles.

[ArgonianLord]

Another smaller scale update:

Player Classes' Weapons have been updated for both the Mage Specializations pk3 and Descent Into the Abyss itself. These changes can be seen below.

---

Invoker:

Sun Staff's primary fire has been upped to 9 damage in place of the 8 it had before, enemies should go down a bit faster now without making the weapon too overpowering.

Elementalist:

The Ice Wand has like the Sun Staff gone from 8 damage to 9 damage. This makes it feel less wimpy.

The Fire Wand has been increased to 6 damage instead of the 5 it used to have.

The Chaos Wyvern's old Decorate has been replaced with the fixed Decorate by the original uploader of the R667 enemy. Now it's flamebreath will no longer stunlock players into a cheap unfair death.

Some notes have also been fixed, along with the subtitles for some voice acting in the ending.

[ArgonianLord]

After playing the Invoker in some other mapset, I discovered that the Magic Missiles & Heal spells weapon was in dire need of a nerf to make the Sun Staff not feel redundant.

The weapon has been changed to use 3 Blue Mana per shot and do 6 damage per projectile. This prevents most enemeis from being one shotted by the weapon as they were before with it's whooping 7 damage.

The change has been applied for both DITA.pk3 and MageSpecializations.pk3.

EDIT: Damage was switched to 6 per projectiles rather than 5, as it was too weak to justify the 3 Blue Mana per shot.

[ArgonianLord]

Made another smaller update for DITA and the Mage Specializations that adds some notable features.

For DITA I made the original HeXen Mage class a playable option in the levelset, it is known as "Universalist" in the New Game Selection. I also made it so the weapons for the elementalist won't show up on a Necromancer playthrough and such, so now you should only see the weapons your class is meant to be seeing in the campaign.

For Mage Specializations & DITA I also added some more offsets to the 3 new classes' weapons so they look less stiff compared to the vanilla HeXen weapons and weapons like the Gauntlets and Raven Staff. The invocation wand was also upgraded to shoot faster but with less homing function, the magic crossbow for the elementalist was also made to shoot faster and do more damage so it feels like less of a chore to use.

Also made some bugfixes and such that I ran across, and Magistrate Medrike received a new unique sprite so he stands out from the other Gryphon Brotherhood mages, sprite edit is by SunMadCat.


To close off I'd also like to announce that this will be the last time I make any more major overhauls for DITA & Mage Specialization, from now on I will only be making bugfixes and such.

[ArgonianLord]

Another minor update to fix the Mage Specilizations mod a bit for multiplayer. Compared to earlier versions I have made it so players can walk through each other, as should the projectiles of allies.

This should prevent any jankiness you might've otherwise experienced if you ever played the mod in multiplayer. DITA itself had some minor update as well, but I am afraid I forget exactly what was altered in the previous version compared to the update I just uploaded. Must've been something very minor.

[UnknDoomer]

For those (like me), who don't like to read the notes and, as result, stuck at the first level while trying to find blue and green keys.

---

1. In the south of the first level, in order to go further, you need to destroy poisonous mushrooms in the hollows of trees.
2. Problematic keys. Collecting 3 keys in the towers, black, red and blue, should not raise questions. With the other two, the picture is much less obvious, and without reading the notes it seems almost impossible to find them.

https://www.old-games.ru/forum/attachme ... ng.261390/

2.1. Blue key. In the center of the location, next to the gray tower, climb by the stairs, exit to the balcony. From here make a series of jumps through peculiar smoky clouds to the switch, which will lower the platform with the blue key.

https://www.old-games.ru/forum/attachme ... ng.261392/
https://www.old-games.ru/forum/attachme ... ng.261393/

2.2. Green key. In the hut that is next to the portal in the east, you need to lower the bookcase. Behind it in the cave you can find a green diamond. Then apply this diamond at the point shown on the map - it will grow a tree, and the river next to it will change the color. Now you can grab green key.

3. After collecting all the keys at the beginning of the location, a tower with a pedestal will descend, where you will need to place a gray diamond. Subsequently, it will be possible to go to the north, which from now on will be available along the bottom, where 5 keys can be used. This will eventually open up a portal to the south leading to the second level.

The rest must take no troubles.

[ArgonianLord]

On popular demand and the occasional complaint that some weapons were a little dull, I release an update for both DITA and Mage Specilizations that spice up the weapons a bit more, particularly the Elementalist who many felt were a bit lame compared to the other classes.

The Necromancer's super weapon is also more impactful now, and its primary fire (it has an alt now) now shoots many more blades and also resurrects enemies it kills! All this is thanks to the help of my good friend Krazy Commando who was so kind as to help.

[Opus132]

The download link doesn't seem to work. Media fire tells me its generating a new download key but then just resets itself.