This includes a rapid fire staff, an explosive bow and arrow (rocket launcher), and a storm bow that does damage over time in a small area around where the arrow strikes. On top of that you have some weapons that don't use Green Mana but instead require their own ammo. You start with a weak fireball that is nonetheless effective against early monsters, a shotgun-style spread shot, a flame wall, a fragmentary blast, and a spirit bomb that has to be charged up. Your arsenal of weapons is unique in that about half of them are magic spells that all draw from the same pool of Green Mana. The combat in Heretic 2 fares a lot better than the platforming, owing to Raven Software's long line of experience in the field. There are a lot of platforming challenges in Heretic 2, and a lot of my time was spend missing jumps and clumsily tumbling off of platforms. Both seem to have a pre-set trajectory that you can't really influence, which feels like garbage. If you tap the jump key he does a hop, but if you hold it he does a somersault leap that goes a bit further and higher. Corvus' movement is digital and twitchy with no room for fine, precision navigating. Those don't hold up particularly well in the first place, but that style of rigid physics mixed with WASD-style run and gunning it makes for a sour experience. The platforming is clearly inspired by the old Tomb Raider games. Unfortunately, it doesn't really pull any of these off particularly well. While the original game was more or less a total conversion for Doom, Heretic 2 is a third person platformer/shooter/hack & slash hybrid. You play as Corvus, the same character from the first Heretic (but not any of the Hexen games). Despite some close calls here and there, I managed to make my way through the entire game with little fuss. Saving while Corvus is on a moving platform is not advisable. There were some crashes that happened randomly in-game, and some bugs where the game would get soft-locked into 'cutscene mode' necessitating a restart. I've found that temporarily switching to software rendering would mitigate this issue. Always back up your saves multiple times. However, I had a recurring problem where loading save games would cause a crash. I don't know if it's the fan patch or what, but for some reason my version of the game was initially locked to 30 fps and it sucked.Īs far as bugs go, it's hard to say what is the fault of the game, the fan-patch, or the OS. In there, put the line "cl_maxfps 60" (or 120 or 144 or 165 depending on your desired framerate). From there, the first thing you're going to want to do is go into the game's /base/ directory and create an autoexec.cfg file. The game's HUD does not scale and becomes basically untenable at a certain point. The hi-res hack can go as high def as you want it to, but I don't recommend going any higher than 1080p even if your monitor is better than that. As far as fan-made luxuries, there's a hi-res hack and a patch ( ) that seems to be mostly oriented towards the few psychos who want to play the online deathmatch mode. The game plays surprisingly nice with Windows 10. It's a mainstream, AAA (for 1998) PC game on the Quake 2 engine made by a known and well-regarded studio that somehow became all but forgotten over time. It doesn't have a cult following or a fan-made source port. It's the only game in the Heretic/Hexen series that isn't on any digital storefront. Romero did come back to making games, but none of them became a huge hit, not seeing many super fans of Empire Of Sin, but his maps he released on recent years for Doom have been quite well liked, and his new episode he mostly made by himself(the music obviously done by others) and sold, SIGIL, was quite well received.Īlso, i think part of the problem at the start was laziness or being too much of a gamer, apparently he did less work on Doom II and Quake than ID wanted because Romero wanted to play video games too much, like playing Doom Multiplayer in his office rather than constantly working on Quake, at least that is what i have read, i imagine that didn't exactly endear him or give a good reputation across other game developers and made it harder to get a job for a while, he does seem to be bouncing off and i guess his work ethic got better, but i really doubt he will make anything that becomes popular anytime soon.Heretic 2 is sort of lost to time. Granted, he says he and many on the staff hated the ads and felt it was a dumb idea that were pushed by the marketing team, but that may just be Romero covering his ass, unless the marketing staff has admitted the famous AD was their fault. Click to shrink.Honestly, Daikatana was bad but he could maybe have survived that if it wasn't for the Daikatana ads, telling people the game would make them his bitches was a terrible and mocked move.
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