Good Doom/Heretic/Hexen WADs

[NecroLord]

Mortals being proud of beating Sunlust's map 30 without saves.
Kinetic: "Hold my beverage!"

That's all 32 maps beaten in under 3 hours with 100% kills and secrets, and 0 deaths.


He also did a commentary stream here.

I'm about to play Sunlust myself and I must say I am not looking forward to the Arch-vile parties...

 

[Average Manatee]

Meh, didn't do fast monsters and pistol start.

 

[Baron Dupek]

https://www.moddb.com/mods/ashes-2063/news/announcing-ashes-hard-reset

Hard Reset (HR) is the prequel expansion for Afterglow and will be a linear campaign in the style of 2063. Take the role of the veteran scav Walker as he guides a team of elite soldiers into The City. As events spiral out of control Walker finds out that a long forgotten foe has caught up with him... and that not all injuries are of the flesh.

Planned features include:

• 7 new weapons, including the stealthy suppressed Police Pistol and Xbow, the stylish Lever Action Shotgun and the highly versatile Modular Rifle.
• 9 new enemies: trade fire with the Black Water Bandits and their immortal chief, flee in terror from the Cannibal Gladiator, and learn that even your own eyes can't be trusted when encountering the Possessor Worms.
• 12 maps, including entirely new locations and some that might be familiar to you, from the backwater town of Junction, into the irradiated concrete and glass canyons of The City.
• New ammo, new items, new music, new voices, and more.

TDG, our writer, continues to toil away thanklessly in the word mines when he's not ranting about how much Fallout 3 sucks or how garbage modern Star Trek is. He occasionally pens articles for NMA, so if you like complaining about how shit modern games are on a forum that's probably older than you are check them out

Vostyok, the main man himself, can be found here. His time is split between Ashes and his work alongside Zan developing a "Sexy Goblin DLC" for Hedon. Yes it's really truly real and not a joke. He also recently had a bike accident where his face lost a contest with the pavement, so wish him well.

Lastly, I (RefomedJoe, the dude writing this) also have a shitty youtube channel here where I very occasionally post stuff I'm working on. Most recently I was engaged as a level designer for Selaco.

 

[Sjukob]

So, there's a new Ashes episode, which I suppose, is coming out next year. Then there's another episode of AMC TC, that, supposedly, is also coming out next year. And then there's the next episode of Alien Armageddon for Duke, which might even come out towards the end of this year.

There's some big stuff for Quake, that was released recently, that I haven't even touched yet, like Mjolnir or Remobolize, and I don't even know if there's more in production.

I say, things are looking great for the FPS.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

This popped up on my tube views:

I found a few other places besides IA.
Mediafire
IA moon
Gitgud

Can’t find this mod: Trump Brutal Doom Freedoom GoldenEye MoonMan ZBloody - Trump-Brutal-Doom-Freedoom-GoldenEye-MoonMan-ZBloody.4.zip

It was removed. Well, go fucking figure.


If someone has a link to that trump-moon-etc mod lemme know.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

This is a doom mod?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Just finished playing through 'Doom 2 Reloaded' (2009), a megawad that condenses the story/setting of both Doom 1 & 2 into a set of 32 maps, so there will be times when you see something you've seen in the originals. Not the best Wads I've played, but it has a few interesting qualities which will determine whether players want to try it out or not.

# The Super Secret Level. MAP32 has 32 devious little secrets. Find them all, and the room full of ammo at the end opens up for you. Fail, and you can use one of the numerous exits throughout the level. You see, this map is a puzzle map, you have to figure out each 'part' of the puzzle to reach the end. Keep in mind that the third part is a timed event (you have 30 seconds to get through, or you're screwed) and the seventh part involves keeping baddies alive to do your work for you. But mostly it's just hidden buttons and backtracking. Trial and Error is your friend, like it or not.

# The stealth level. MAP18 has 96 'sentinels' (read: Arch-Viles) on standby, ready to teleport to the player's position if he fires a single shot. Which means sneaking through the place is the only way to go. The very first monster encountered spots you though, so it quickly devolves into a race to get through the level to the end without killing the monsters, because no Berzerk-pack available, for once. It quickly becomes apparent that the level is designed to be as complex and confusing as possible, leading to lots of reloads as Trial and Error is really the only way forward. Once the player reaches the security room, however, he can dispatch of the sentinels and resume regular Doom gameplay.

# At least 33% of all the baddies in this WAD are chaingunners.

Alongside this WAD I also tried out 'Brutal Doom v21 Expansion v14', which aims to fix all the little quirks of regular Brutal Doom, and then add a few things of its own. Among the things fixed are all the ammo counters finally being visible, friendly marines staying dead once they die, etc.

Among the things added is alternate ammo. Shotguns can use the regular 12 gauge, or the green-colored slugs. Alternate ammo is gained by the mod checking regular ammo items, and then rolling a percentage-roll to see if that item is special or not, meaning that while it is generally available, it is always in short supply. Slugs tend to kill most things rather quickly, I was one-shotting revenants with them at close quarters. All three shotguns can carry slugs BTW, so you can tailor-fit your killing machines as you see fit. The revolver can also choose to use its custom-tailored magnum rounds, or 12 gauge-rounds, meaning it rarely runs out of bullets... but most of the rarer weapons follow the percentage-roll to check if they're in-game. You can try them out using ID(K)FA, but keep in mind that all the various ammo-counters will take up the entire right-hand side of the screen!

Another new weapon is the Nuclear Launcher. This is not some Fallout-esque catapult with a range of 20 feet - no, this thing can only carry two shots, but it kills everything in a large radius, yourself included. Brutally dispatching enemies drops extra health and armor, Doom 2016-style, but players will quickly be put off by the cap of 300 on health and armor.

Finally new enemies are introduced via percentage rolls. Arachnotrons can sometime be a more souped-up version, using the Doom 64-sprite. Likewise with Lost Souls, Mancubi and Barons of Hell (that I noticed) though the BoH gets the Belphegor mini-boss introduced in the Extermination Day-campaign, which is a nasty thing to deal with.

One minor nuisance I spotted is that chaingunners now have a 'spray-bullets-while-dying' death animation, which tends to activate 90% of the time.

I'm not certain whether it was due to the WAD or the mod, but I was literally drowning in ammo while playing. Far too often I had to leave behind tons of ammo. It was only in the final two maps or so that I started experiencing ammo shortages.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ok, now I want sone video footage of this mod in play.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Small update: I gave another wad a go, using the extended Brutal Doom-mod mentioned above.

It's the mod that dumps all this ammo in my lap. In a typical modder's delight derangement scenario, the decision was taken to mess with the amount of ammo contained in a dropped weapon.

Note that these are Brutal Doom-numbers, not vanilla.

Pistols add 15 ammo (used to add 10).
Shotguns add 4 ammo (used to add 2).
Super Shotguns add 2 ammo (used to add 8).
Assault Rifles add 30 ammo (used to be 10).
Chainguns add 50 ammo (used to add 10).
Ammo boxes add 50 ammo (used to add 100).
Rocket Launchers add 1 ammo (used to add a few more).

Spot the problem.

 

[Lagi]

ive spend previous weekends playing obsidian maps. But I get bored with the RNG feeling of it and today i launch master levels for heretic.

opinion about maps

some maps are mediocre. Most detailed is Icebound, but i guess everyone play it. I like Where Serpents ever Dwell, Mountain King Domain, Desert King, Crypts...i like many maps from this pack

What i love about fan maps is if im stuck on place, i need to think and search the rooms, because there is no online walkthrough for each map. Like when i was a kid without internet.

 

[NecroLord]

Still can't believe I haven't played Ancient Aliens yet. Downloaded it, so I'll play it eventually.
Bros, are you familiar with Flotsam? It's mostly slaughter maps.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

 

[Lemming42]

Oh wow! I didn't know Hands of Necromancy was getting a sequel! The first one was great but didn't really seem to make any kind of impact, despite essentially being a successor to Hexen.

Skimmed through that video and it looks like there's some great stuff ahead.

 

[Kron]

Spoiler

https://www.moddb.com/mods/ashes-2063/news/announcing-ashes-hard-reset

Hard Reset (HR) is the prequel expansion for Afterglow and will be a linear campaign in the style of 2063. Take the role of the veteran scav Walker as he guides a team of elite soldiers into The City. As events spiral out of control Walker finds out that a long forgotten foe has caught up with him... and that not all injuries are of the flesh.

Planned features include:

• 7 new weapons, including the stealthy suppressed Police Pistol and Xbow, the stylish Lever Action Shotgun and the highly versatile Modular Rifle.
• 9 new enemies: trade fire with the Black Water Bandits and their immortal chief, flee in terror from the Cannibal Gladiator, and learn that even your own eyes can't be trusted when encountering the Possessor Worms.
• 12 maps, including entirely new locations and some that might be familiar to you, from the backwater town of Junction, into the irradiated concrete and glass canyons of The City.
• New ammo, new items, new music, new voices, and more.

TDG, our writer, continues to toil away thanklessly in the word mines when he's not ranting about how much Fallout 3 sucks or how garbage modern Star Trek is. He occasionally pens articles for NMA, so if you like complaining about how shit modern games are on a forum that's probably older than you are check them out

Vostyok, the main man himself, can be found here. His time is split between Ashes and his work alongside Zan developing a "Sexy Goblin DLC" for Hedon. Yes it's really truly real and not a joke. He also recently had a bike accident where his face lost a contest with the pavement, so wish him well.

Lastly, I (RefomedJoe, the dude writing this) also have a shitty youtube channel here where I very occasionally post stuff I'm working on. Most recently I was engaged as a level designer for Selaco.

Holy shit, I illustrated this cover art a while ago. Haven't been here in ages, but crazy seeing it loop back to the Codex.
Here's a version I did with some title text:

Btw I also highly recommend Trench Foot, a ww1/ww2/WH40k total conversion mod I'm also doing some artwork for (obligatory self-shilling); it's got to have been mentioned here already. Here's some of the art to set the tone:

Spoiler

And a clip with some Melee combat and the custom HUD:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aFOh-gKZR8swbhb1LRDk4ePuW66LxFOC/view?pli=1

 

[Dayyālu]

I dimly remember trying the first demos of Trench Foot. It seems it went a bit far from the Siege of Vraks influence towards.... more memey lands. There's any up-to-date demos out?

(Also, great work on the Ashes cover, it'a amazing in being old-style as fuck).

 

[Kron]

There's a prequel chapter that was released last year that is more horror and atmospheric focused (Countrycide, really recommend it), don't know if you played that already when you speak of the demos; and there's a new full release with multiple maps coming soon, including a re-do of that first initial map released. Can't say when exactly but it's looking pretty good overall.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Updated my Doom Launcher frontend

Spoiler

(which I helped beta-test back in 2017) and I'm ready to play some wads. One of my favorite mods was from 2011 called Particle Fire Enhancer which is kind of a light version of much more intrusive mods like Beautiful Doom. It gives bland, old vanilla Doom levels a nice (but reasonable) update in the visuals of weapon fire, explosion physics and some of the sounds. You can modify it to your liking if you don't like certain things, like the audio of the torches (which sounds like a bowl of Rice Crispies magnified to unnerving levels). However, I stopped using it when I realized it could cause massive slow-down on my system at the time (i5/TI 660). Curious to see what it'll be like on my i9/RTX 3070 when I test it with one of the most outrageous maps of all time - Sandy Petersen's Barrels o' Fun. That will be the benchmark to see if it's still feasible.

Edited: also wanted to mention to be certain to update your source ports. Was playing a bit of a cpu-intensive Hexen user-made wad called Curse of the Lost Gods with many enemies onscreen on an old x64-bit build of GZDoom from 2017 and FPS was below 30 on a system that normally runs all wads at 120 FPS at 4K. Updated to the latest GZDoom (v4.1.0) and wow; everything is pure black coffee silk just burning along at 120 FPS. Just a tip, doombros.

 

[Lemming42]

Interested in what people's favourite reimagining mods are.

I'm playing Brutal Wolfenstein and, while I actually hate the gore aspect of it, the mechanical changes and map redesigns are superb. Spear of Destiny in particular is fantastic. Largely keeps to Wolf3D's maps, but adds so many new weapons, enemies, and abilities, and also redesigns the maps so you get huge outdoor castle courtyards, sewers, and palatial hallways and stuff. Fantastic.

For Doom, I've tried both Knee Deep In ZDoom (a remake of E1) and Extermination Day, both of which I liked. The obvious gameplay reimagining mods are Brutal Doom and Project Brutality, both of which I think do some things right and some things badly wrong.

Hexen and Heretic are interesting. I found a mod called Utter Heresy which is a full-scale redesign of Heretic's first two episodes, mostly very good. Mechanically, I tried both Brutal Heretic RPG and Bitter Heretic, both of which have strengths and weaknesses. I think Bitter Heretic is probably the more interesting experience, though its focus on melee over magic takes away a bit of Heretic's identity.

For Hexen I found HexArcana to be the best gameplay mod, still feels like Hexen but makes massive sweeping changes to weapons and the way combat works.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I need to look up brutal wolf vids.

 

[Lagi]

Interested in what people's favourite reimagining mods are.

I'm playing Brutal Wolfenstein and, while I actually hate the gore aspect of it, the mechanical changes and map redesigns are superb. Spear of Destiny in particular is fantastic. Largely keeps to Wolf3D's maps, but adds so many new weapons, enemies, and abilities, and also redesigns the maps so you get huge outdoor castle courtyards, sewers, and palatial hallways and stuff. Fantastic.

For Doom, I've tried both Knee Deep In ZDoom (a remake of E1) and Extermination Day, both of which I liked. The obvious gameplay reimagining mods are Brutal Doom and Project Brutality, both of which I think do some things right and some things badly wrong.

Hexen and Heretic are interesting. I found a mod called Utter Heresy which is a full-scale redesign of Heretic's first two episodes, mostly very good. Mechanically, I tried both Brutal Heretic RPG and Bitter Heretic, both of which have strengths and weaknesses. I think Bitter Heretic is probably the more interesting experience, though its focus on melee over magic takes away a bit of Heretic's identity.

For Hexen I found HexArcana to be the best gameplay mod, still feels like Hexen but makes massive sweeping changes to weapons and the way combat works.

I played Utter Heresy, excellent maps. Lots of positive suprises. Nicely decorated. They are actually new maps, just with some tribute to iconic landmark from Heretic vanilla maps. There are assets used from other ancient era fps games, f.ex. corpse from Strife are much "cleaner" than style of graphic sprites in heretic.

I wish weapons damage or monster Hp was more adjusted, beacuse biggest issue with Heretic gameplay - sponge enemies is still preserved. No alt fires to weapons. New monsters interesting gameplay wise, but still only recolor of existing one. New sounds are very nice picked, i liked Undead Warrior screams.

Any wish or feedback for Bitter? Its low magic, that was the intention from start, together with being first person puncher.

 

[Lemming42]

Any wish or feedback for Bitter? Its low magic, that was the intention from start, together with being first person puncher.

I absolutely loved it, for the most part - I can definitely appreciate that the mod's focus is on melee, which was done excellently. My only real criticsm is that the Tome of Entropy was a bit weak (or I was just bad at using it ), and there were a couple points where I felt like the lack of ranged weapons put me at a bit of a disadvantage in the original Heretic maps, though the Ethereal Double Crossbow made up for it.

Have you thought about doing a similar mod for Hexen? The Hexen weapons in Bitter Heretic like the warhammer and mace felt amazing to use, the way I always wished they'd felt in Hexen.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Watched some of John Romero's YT playthrough of MyHouse today. Would have watched it all but it didn't bode well that he spent 10 minutes fiddling with his low-volume mic levels, then more minutes trying to find Mouselook On in the GZDoom menu, and after that- well, you get the picture. Aren't content producers suppose to edit that shit out? It was comforting to know, however, that he's as doddering as I am playing Doom these days.

 

[Lagi]

Any wish or feedback for Bitter? Its low magic, that was the intention from start, together with being first person puncher.

I absolutely loved it, for the most part - I can definitely appreciate that the mod's focus is on melee, which was done excellently. My only real criticsm is that the Tome of Entropy was a bit weak (or I was just bad at using it ), and there were a couple points where I felt like the lack of ranged weapons put me at a bit of a disadvantage in the original Heretic maps, though the Ethereal Double Crossbow made up for it.

Tome of Entropy is mid-early, range weapon with rather plenty of ammo (plus disciples drop often some pages). Its has a chance to freeze immedially large group of monsters, that you then can kick for insta kill. Plus ice wall is great way to deny swarm of monsters access to you. Low damage is the only balancing factor that is not making it OP (ok, and the risk of becoming a chicken - that could be a benefit though... because you can use it to get back to full health after transforming back).

tome of entropy use 0:43

Original Heretic maps, have way too much items on them. There is never a shortage of anything. I suggest playing random Obsidian maps with Heathen_maze add on. Random maps... are random, but the combat feel more fair.

activate add on by 2x ticks in obsidian

Crossbows shouldnt have enough ammo to keep using them as main weapon.

Have you thought about doing a similar mod for Hexen? The Hexen weapons in Bitter Heretic like the warhammer and mace felt amazing to use, the way I always wished they'd felt in Hexen.

Hexen is a worse game.
Level are "puzzle" - walk there and back and pull switches in identical looking locations.
Classes make limited number of 4 weapons (1st is useless immediatly, last one you need to collect pieces 70% of the game).
Because of classess, ammo system of collecting generic mana's is worse. Picking wand crystal is cool (i always imagine you replace them like magazin clip), while green mana is boring.
Monster are still spongy. There is less of them. And i find them more annoying to fight.

plus... there is HexArcana (if you swing mace in a "rhytm" it deal more damage) and Walpurgis that are the best weapon mods... using this inferior concept of Hexen.

I wanted to add Hexen monster to Bitter though... but the amount of work to draw them smooth animations, and extra death ... im just burn out, and dont want to do it.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I remember Hexen, playing it so long ago in MS-DOS, having the largest hordes of monsters in the last few levels of any Doom engine game I played with those man-sized insect-looking things. They just kept coming. Once you got out of that fucking starting hub the game opened up and got better. I also remember the vivid thickness of the fog in certain parts and wondered why I never saw something like that in a wad for GZDoom since it's so atmospheric. Turns out GZDoom with the hardware renderer can't emulate that thick fog and still be able to see nearby monsters/objects. I guess it's doable with the software renderer supposedly but I still hardly ever see it.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I don’t recall if any of the doom engines allowed underwater swimming or flying. That is the one thing I really enjoyed about Duke Nukem 3D. Hell, now I’m not sure about Blood or Rise of the Triad. Strife often gets talked about little.

And there’s the whole Apogee Blakestone games and capstone software games like Corridor 7 and Witchaven series. Maybe there are a few others like Shatner’s Tekwars. Have there been attempts to convert these into the brutal engine? Is there reason to bother? I don’t recall them holding my interest too long esp the Frustrating Tekwars.

Hmmm…. Brutal Duke.