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Heretic vs. Hexen

Which is better or are they both good for what they are?

  • Hexen

    Votes: 37 40.7%
  • Heretic

    Votes: 18 19.8%
  • Both good for what they are

    Votes: 36 39.6%

  • Total voters
    91

Darth Roxor

Royal Dongsmith
Staff Member
Joined
May 29, 2008
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Djibouti
Well, you generally get informed where something has changed, so it's not a blind switch hunt.

You sure do. "A wall has shifted in map x!". HF running through whole map_X looking for said wall.
 

Phelot

Arcane
Joined
Mar 28, 2009
Messages
17,908
It's really not that difficult. Well, OK, maybe Seven Portals can be a chore at times, but if you pay a little attention it shouldn't be that hard. Basically, flick a switch, check message, go to wherever it mentions. The satisfaction of opening more and more of each map is glorious :obviously:

I agree with Draq on Hexen 2. I love it, but it is really empty. I would disagree that the combat is all that great, though. Compared to H1, it is pretty underwhelming. The archer dudes just stand there without ever moving unless their LOS is bad, and the melee enemies are almost always very slow and since the maps are so devoid of enemies (even on hardest) you can easily outrun or simply dodge around them. You couldn't always do that in H1. There are a few fun enemies like the Werejaguars or whatever they are.

I'd say the expansion improves a bit with the combat experience.

Would have been fun to have fleshed out the RPG elements a bit more, maybe add a central hub like town with NPCs, shops, some form of currency. There was a mod years ago that tried to do something like that. Can't even remember the name and pretty sure it was dead.
 

DraQ

Arcane
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I agree with Draq on Hexen 2. I love it, but it is really empty. I would disagree that the combat is all that great, though.
I don't mean combat as a whole, I mean the way it differentiates strengths and weaknesses of each class as well as the way bosses and other tense battles become mechanical puzzles of sort where you try to figure out how to best use your inventory and what tactics to adopt in order to survive and win.

Mechanics itself is pretty meh, but its use is impressive.

And yeah, Werejaguars were impressive enemies for their time - beat the shit out of Q2 and such.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
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Messages
27,792
:necro:

The Heretic/Hexen pack is on sale for $2.50 as a daily on Steam. Given my backlog I'm thinking of just grabbing Hexen 2 for $1.25 as I doubt I'll ever get to them all. However, from reading this thread it seems people might have preferred the first Hexen.
 

Twinkle

Liturgist
Joined
Sep 14, 2009
Messages
1,426
Location
Lands of Entitlement
:necro:

The Heretic/Hexen pack is on sale for $2.50 as a daily on Steam. Given my backlog I'm thinking of just grabbing Hexen 2 for $1.25 as I doubt I'll ever get to them all. However, from reading this thread it seems people might have preferred the first Hexen.

No CD-music and no Portal of Praevus expansion. Seriously, steam versions of mid-nineties raven/id releases are garbage, avoid unless you are desperate to increase your steamcount.
 

DraQ

Arcane
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:necro:

The Heretic/Hexen pack is on sale for $2.50 as a daily on Steam. Given my backlog I'm thinking of just grabbing Hexen 2 for $1.25 as I doubt I'll ever get to them all.
Are you insane? For that price get both if you're getting anything at all.

Hexen 2 >>>>> Hexen > Heretic > Heretic 2
For me 1 and 2 are roughly comparable, one may be better than the other depending on preferences (1 had more interesting and varied environments, 2 had gloomier atmosphere, 1 had dungeon-crawl-esque aesthetics if you're into such things, 2 had more difficult combat, etc. ).

Heretic 1, although good, was vastly inferior to both, being pretty much a Doom TC with all the baggage (like nonsensical locations - it was even worse than Dooms in terms of lack of environmental progression, because Doom at least got progressively more hellish and had memorable levels - I only remember maybe 3 from Heretic), except gayer (although ToP rocked).
Never cared enough about Heretic 2 to actually try it.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
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Messages
27,792
Way too late, you baddies. Sale ended hours ago and I just grabbed 2. Yeah it was cheap to get the others but I doubt I'll ever get around to playing them and I'm sure I'd prefer the Quake engine to the old Doom engine.
 

DraQ

Arcane
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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Way too late, you baddies. Sale ended hours ago and I just grabbed 2. Yeah it was cheap to get the others but I doubt I'll ever get around to playing them and I'm sure I'd prefer the Quake engine to the old Doom engine.
Shame.

Hexen actually did pretty impressive stuff with Doom engine too.

Heretic 2 best in the entire series, anyone who says otherwise is a scrub. :smug:
Joined:
Feb 21, 2011
:smug:
Don't try to outsmug me, sonny.
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

Guest
Heretic was fun mostly because of cockadoodledoo cheat code.
 

octavius

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
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19,185
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Bjørgvin
Just completed HeXen, playing as Mage on second hardest difficulty, using 14 hours and a few seconds.

Overall a very enjoyable game, with a few FFFFFFFUUUU moments, like the endlessly respawning Reivers and some of the insta death traps.
I found myself using the Sapphire Wand most of the time. Unlike the Frost Shards the Centaurs didn't reflect the spell, and since they lined up like horses to the butchers it was a convenient weapon.
I hardly used the Frost Shards at all, but used Arc of Death if I wanted to kill Slaugtaurs and Serpents quickly. Since the Arc too don't get reflected it was also very useful against the Heresiarch.
The first of the "guild leaders" I met was the Cleric. He moved like a tornado and killed me in one shot. Next time I just spammed him with the Bloodscourge and he went down in three hits. The other two leaders didn't even get a chance to act before they were scourged. I guess you could call them "glass canons".
The most diffcult area for me was the Cemetary with the respawning, relentless Reivers.
Korax himself went down surprisingly easy. When the herd of Cenataurs was released, I used some of the Discs of Repulsion to thin the herd somewhat and to provoke some infighting (only time I saw the same monster in-fighting), and then retreated to one of the pens to make a stand. From there I avoided all the lava and traps and then killed Korax with a few rounds of the Bloodscourge.

I really liked the art direction, level design and weapons. Monsters were great too, but some more variety would not have hurt.
Only place I wasted some time on key/switch hunting was in the appropriatly named Wasteland map.
Apart form that the puzzles were mostly logical. Only one I had trouble with was in Zedek's Tomb. I though I needed to get three identical symbols from the "One Eyed Bandit", so I ended up using a Chaos Device to get out.
I read somewhere that you needed a walkthough in order to not waste lots of time, but that was definitly not my experience.

Most annoying thing about the game was that there are no hot keys to the various items you find. If you have a healing potion ready it just takes too much time to ready a Disc of Repulsion if suddenly surrounded, for example. So I rarely used items. I tried the Flechette in the beginning, but found it to be useless.

I will definitely try the other two classes as well.
 

grudgebringer

Guest
octavius try Necrosis mod now.

Also, don't know where I read about it, but I can recall Romero saying that Heretic-Hexen games were all parts of a trilogy and there supposed to be a third part of it - Hecatomb - but in a turmoil of circumstances it has been abandoned. He also said that some design decisions of it were inherited by Hexen 2, though only minor and not significant ones, and he regrets that Raven went an easy way.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Joined
Aug 10, 2012
Messages
5,871
Replaying Hexen 2 with Hammer of Thyrion and man, I had forgotten what a great game this is. Bought it at release and haven't played it in close to 20 years...
 

BelisariuS.F

Augur
Joined
Mar 23, 2010
Messages
388
I prefer Heretic. Hexen felt both open and costrained in ways that created, for me, less enjoyable gameplay. Levels as a whole were open and forced backtracking and roaming around. Specific locations often felt small and constrained.
 

DraQ

Arcane
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Oct 24, 2007
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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
I prefer Heretic. Hexen felt both open and costrained in ways that created, for me, less enjoyable gameplay. Levels as a whole were open and forced backtracking and roaming around. Specific locations often felt small and constrained.
Meh. Doom TC with mace spewing iron bubbles.
In Hexen, when you had mace, you could at least use it to do someone in the face.
 

tormund

Arcane
Joined
Aug 15, 2015
Messages
2,282
Location
Penetrating the underrail
Hexen 1 is far superior to the sequel. That said, expansion is p good and IMO better than the base game (although much shorter too). I liked the locations and atmosphere more (opening hub from base Hexen 2 is the only part that stuck with me as far as mood goes), "puzzles" weren't as annoying, and new playable character was... likable.
 

pippin

Guest
What's particularly wrong with Heretic 2? Other than having somewhat linear levels. It was one of my favorite games back then.
 

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