Hey Probably most people around here (rightly) believe that Heresiarch was meant to be the Serpent Rider in Hexen, and monster at the end of the game merely his mount. Just like (green) Chaos Serpent was a mount of D'Sparil. Multiple things support this, especially the endgame scene in Heretic where Heresiarch can be seen. Well, today I for the first time in my life I watched intro to Hexen 2 on youtube. I had a pirated version, ripped, without the intro. <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLaqXM6DTz0">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLaqXM6DTz0</a><!-- m --> Korax/Heresiarch debate still fresh in my head, I immediately noticed something strange. Not something you see, but something you don't see. They're showing past two Serpent Riders in Hexen 2 intro. They show Korax, which looks as expected, except less humanoid because he's no longer standing. But they also show D'Sparil, and.... there's just Chaos Serpent, without a rider ! Clearly, no wizard wisible. They're implying (never saying directly) that the wizard never existed, and the monster Ramborc calls a cross between a dragon and a cockroach was the Serpent Rider all along. And because english language has many words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same, they may actually be implying Serpent Raiders, not Serpent Riders. There's no way to tell the two apart when they're not written.

Raider and rider aren't spelled the same (the first is like "hey", the second like "aye"). And the guys at Raven who wrote that stuff had English as their first language.

Of course! The green dragon was D'sparil! That wizard was just a last-ditch lackey he hid up his sleeve as a last little 'present' if things went awry, like Korax's ghosts. It makes perfect sense! <!-- sorcblackeye --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/orcblackeye.gif" alt="orcblackeye" title="orcblackeye" /><!-- sorcblackeye -->

b0rsuk, I think you are mistaken. As far as I know (I heard that somewhere), the change in game design occured somewhere during development of Hexen 1. Basically, they changed the idea. And THAT explains the Hexen 2 intro. That intro was made already AFTER idea of Korax changed. And that does not mean that Korax was not supposed to be different initally.

Is there any information what the devs said about it ? If anything ? Either way, I like Heresiarch more. Korax never impressed me - shoots unguided missiles, can't walk, triggers scripted events. He's a big imp. Death Wyvern is probably my favourite (Yes I know it's limited). Hexen 2 I didn't like much. The most linear, most scripted. Least creative - renamed Egypt, America, generic medieval Europe, and Rome. Heretic was mostly reskinned Doom, but it meant it had good action; and underwater cities are relatively rare in fantasy. Hexen had worse action, but better atmosphere and more medieval feeling. Playing Hexen 2 felt ... lonely ! Looking for switches with no monster respawning. This explains why I'm inclined to treat Hexen 2 story less favourably.

The third game in trilogy should have been Hecatomb in the first place. HeXen 2 was some last minute alternative after team changes when Hecatomb was scrapped. I hope I remember it correctly. So for me HeXen 2 is not part of HeXen/Heretic universe. Its just a generic medieval-like 3D shooter. Hence it have few very well designed things (Necromancer, Skullwizard). And I think the original idea for whole Serpent rider thing is from irish mythology. Once I read a story about Sidhé keep where elves fought weird serpent like beings with one leg riding on lizards. So originaly the Ophidians are the Serpent riders and they could be probably even Serpent raiders. But making serpents riding another serpents probably seemed really stupid so they added DSparill in the end. Whatever, Serpent riders should be mages riding on Chaos serpents. For me Korax just experimented with bioengineering and in the end fused with his steed. Eidolon is fake Serpent Rider and the true Third Serpent rider is still wandering somewhere in the endless void of Chaos leading his armies and conquering worlds.

[quote="NeoWorm":3bgdvaxl]Hence it have few very well designed things (Necromancer, Skullwizard). It has great textures and sounds though <!-- s;) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/orc9.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink" /><!-- s;) -->

Now this is interesting. This explains a lot of my feelings towards Hexen 2. Hecatomb cancelled right after acquisition of Raven by Activision. Serries split into Hexen 2 and Heretic 2 to milk it dry. What's so very well designed about Necromancer ? Is it because it's the only thing being remotely consistent with itself, and other classes look bad by comparison ? Crusader has a staff that looks like a mage's weapon, and a generic rocket launcher Hexen didn't have. Paladin's bouncing axe is contrived, and purifier plain boring. "Paladin works sort of like Warrior" is the only real reference to Hexen in my opinion.

Activision has a long track record of ruining companies they buy up out of greed. The companies make great products, Activision starts drooling, buy the company and then ruin it with their mindless greed for the green. I still hope Blizzard will be able to resist the Activision shit for years to come, unlike e.g. Raven that went from exceptional to mediocre thanks to Activision's ownership.

We're getting off-topic, but I wouldn't count on that, Ramborc. - They've already succeeded in convincing Blizzard to make SC2 a trilogy. A trilogy with identical engine and game mechanics ! To me it's as creative as Final DooM, Plutonia Experiment, Hexen: DD, and so on. - Diablo3. Ask yourself: is there anything vaguely demonic about screenshots and released footage ? Could the game be easily renamed to something else ? Does the old name (Diablo) fit anymore ? I don't think the name fits. It may not be a bad game, strictly speaking, but it's something very different in atmosphere than Diablo1. It's not any more diabolic than Titan Quest or Sacred. You could use google font for Diablo3 logo and get away with that. - What was the last inventive game from Blizzard ? Not World of Warcraft - they polished old formula. Not Warcraft2, Warcraft3, not Starcraft2. Remember, Blizzard is the company that made Warcraft, Diablo1, Blackthorne, Lost Vikings. All very different yet succesful games within relatively short time. Perhaps Blackthorne is a bit obscure. For me Blizzard is already on its way out. Fortunately for me, I had a love/hate relationship with their design. But I do admire their polish, support, patches, and the fact they're never afraid to throw a feature away. ---------- Earlier I noted that I like Heretic for relatively unused idea of underwater worlds. Perhaps not that uncommon, but rare in games I think. I liked UFO: Terror From The Deep for atmosphere, but it was poorly executed idea. They didn't take advantage of underwater setting and just reskinned UFO/X-COM. I can't help but wonder how would Hecatomb look like, design wise. It would most likely still use Quake engine. We know about a big world split into hubs due to technical limitations. A big old castle, a dragon, and ridiculous number of 9 classes. It would probably be more like 3 classes with variations, but still. Hexen 1 got criticized for low weapon variety within any single class, and they wanted to make it worse ? Tome of Power would probably be out of question. It would probably be still rather linear - I mean, puzzle or script based. But what monsters, how would combat look like ? Hexen is much more medieval, melee, short ranged spells and weapons. What would be the next step ?

Blizzard is not going down - since W3 they are stagnating in genre that is absolutely out of my interest. They made they money formula and now they are pushing it everywhere which effectively destroys any universe they made and that I liked. Warcraft is synonymous to overhyped boring pseudo RPG now and Diablo will probably become the same. PS Blackthorne is superb - I would like to make a Blackthorne DooM TC sometime. Back to topic: I found the original source of what I said earlier on RomeroWiki: [url:2r613c6i]http://www.johnromero.com/wiki/index.php/Hecatomb. And after reading it again I got very unpleasant feeling that it doesnt talk about Serpent Riders at all. Its third game in the series but from the game description it looks more like a random medieval fantasy than a climax of epic trilogy (seeking trasures, fighting dragon and a mysterious relic). Whatever... It would probably look a lot like HeXen 2. At least 3 of the classes mentioned in Hecatomb are in HeXen 2 - Paladin, Necromancer and Assasin. For weapons I quite like the idea of sharing the weapons between classes while each class would have a little different behaviour of said weapon. For example I wanted to make Cleric use Fighters Hammer, but he would use it by both hands, it would be slower but while thrown it would cause more damage since Cleric can use the magic better. But that would work only if they keep the system of weapons as it was in HeXen. They also could have used something more RPG-like - a lot of weapons and spells with level/stat/class/skill/alignment restrictions. Maybe you could write a letter to Romero and ask him directly.

How was Warcraft I more innovative than later Warcraft games? The RTS genre itself was in its infancy, so nearly everything you did was "done for the first time". But later games had just as many innovative new features per title than the first one. If you put Warcraft I, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Warcraft III, Diablo II, Warcraft III's expansion pack, Diablo II's expansion pack, World of Warcraft and the first World of Warcraft expansion in a row, you will see a steady evolution without major jumps. None of them did reinvent their genre in any major way, but they are all very enjoyable, polished games that got updates long after they were released. Compared to a lot of games that came out unplayably buggy and ever never got fixed or the patches came out months later, you can buy a Blizzard game on release day and know that you will be able to play it (heck I remember an innovative 3D game, I think it was called Outcast or similar, that needed 3 patches before it could even be installed) and at the same time you will get updates even a year or two later to make it even better. I remember when about a year after Warcraft III's release they upped the health of orc grunts for multiplayer balance, and it made one certain map in the third campaign slightly stupid, since once you upgraded to the supposedly stronger fel orcs, your grunts actually lost base health. It's the kind of mistake one company in a 100 would fix at such a late date, affecting so little (they could've said that a year after the release nobody plays the single player campaign any more). I can't say anything about Diablo since I already disliked D2, as it broke with the most important feature with the original game: extreme simplicity. I loved Diablo I as it was a "turn off your brain and just mindlessly click your way to gore and carnage", but D2 made stuff overcomplicated. Thus I am not really psyched about D3 and can't say how it looks like. On Starcraft II, I am kinda thinking what you think, but I'll wait to see for myself whether they really made a human campaign that's more than the original Starcraft's 3 campaigns put together. Back on topic of Raven, Heretic was in a way absolutely uninnovative. It was more or less a straight copy of DOOM. *BUT* in my eyes, they left in everything that made DOOM great, didn't bother to reinvent the wheel, but instead threw out the crappy stuff of DOOM (e.g. miserable artwork) and replaced it with something much better. Heretic is IMO exceptional in its relative simplicity, in not trying to reinvent DOOM's strengths, but to build upon them. It made it one of the greatest games of all time. Hexen had a number of interesting innovations and thus in some ways was better than Heretic, but due to being experimental in some ways it fell short of Heretic. At any rate, it was different, and good in its difference.

Warcraft series deviated from cool Humans vs Orks slaughter into neon diarrhoea crossed with blitz chess. Thats what I hate about it the most. I played W3 and I quite liked it. Or to be exact I liked Human and Ork campaingns, once the "Most ugly elven race ever made" showed up the game went down. And since Warcraft as a singleplayer game was completely abbandoned in favour of MMO gaming I cant enjoy it anymore (even W3 was primary made as a Multiplayer game). Gameplay wise are most of Blizzard games polished to be almost flawless but they are just not my cup of tea. And Blizzard is not going to change their money making formula. They are not going to experiment in any new area and we cant expect from them anything too deviating from what they done untill now. Diablo 3 can only be as good as Diablo 2. It wont be anything better or more interesting, it cant be. Probably it will be much worse.

[quote="borsuk":22tjau9m]We're getting off-topic, but I wouldn't count on that, Ramborc. Exactly...look at how World of Warcraft was dumbed down between it's two expansion packs. Parts of the game went from very hard to very easy, and the 2nd expansion pack was full of recycled content and easy enough for a 10-year-old to play.

[quote="RambOrc":29t2lk9p]How was Warcraft I more innovative than later Warcraft games? The RTS genre itself was in its infancy, so nearly everything you did was "done for the first time". Before big studios and publishers took interest in it, it was very common to try a new idea in a game. Speaking of RTS games, I don't consider Warcraft particularly inventive. Engine-wise, it was like a more limited version of C&C: no aircraft, no transporting units, no rotating units (Warcraft used sprites - C&C used voxels !!), no shooting while moving, no missile speed and so on. The problem with Westwood is they stopped innovating even before acquisition by EA. But you do have to credit them for the first assymetric RTS: Red Alert.

But later games had just as many innovative new features per title than the first one.

I don't agree. Wacraft2 was famously symmetric, with almost no differences between sides. It was more like difference between Heroes of Might and Magic part 2 and part 3. Homm2 was the real improvement, Homm3 was a minor addition with new graphics. Warcraft 3 was deffinitely more influential. People started to copy hero-centric RTS. You can't point at a game and say it was a "warcraft 2" clone.

None of them did reinvent their genre in any major way, but they are all very enjoyable, polished games that got updates long after they were released. Compared to a lot of games that came out unplayably buggy and ever never got fixed or the patches came out months later, you can buy a Blizzard game on release day and know that you will be able to play it

I just think Blizzard was more inventive in the past. This applies to many game developers. Bullfrog was famous for creating original, different games, and all of them succesful: Magic Carpet 1 and 2, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Populous. Now look at Master of Magic. The game is ridiculously buggy. A few spells don't work at all, but it gets better. Resurrect can permanently damage your savegames. Subversion does the opposite of intention, and casting it is strictly bad for the player. Opponents may be permanently stuck in limbo if you cancel their Spell of Return. The two patches they released had multiple pages of bugifxes each, and a lot of bugs remained. The game continues to inspire people to this day. Will Elemental:War on Magic approach sheer fun of Master of Magic ?

I can't say anything about Diablo since I already disliked D2, as it broke with the most important feature with the original game: extreme simplicity. I loved Diablo I as it was a "turn off your brain and just mindlessly click your way to gore and carnage", but D2 made stuff overcomplicated.

Actually Diablo2 is more like a minefield for newbies. There are well known, easy to play combinations, and you can just learn them from the internet. The game requires more thought before you play than when you play. My favourite diablo-like game is, by far, Nox. It's complicated - yes, but remains elegant and has many wonderful ideas, including lack of xp for kills, lack of elemental resistances. -----------------

Back on topic of Raven, Heretic was in a way absolutely uninnovative. It was more or less a straight copy of DOOM. *BUT* in my eyes, they left in everything that made DOOM great, didn't bother to reinvent the wheel, but instead threw out the crappy stuff of DOOM (e.g. miserable artwork) and replaced it with something much better. Heretic is IMO exceptional in its relative simplicity, in not trying to reinvent DOOM's strengths, but to build upon them. It made it one of the greatest games of all time.

Perhaps surprisingly (I used to be a Hexen fan), I agree. Complicated level design, unavoidable "haha you're dead!" style traps, occasionally obnoxious enemies (stalker and especially centaur), very linear scripted gameplay. I still like Hexen for its combat and atmosphere is unforgettable. But Heretic is much more replayable, and much better in coop. I'm going to post a separate topic because I have something on my mind. ------------------- Speaking of Hecatomb... yes, perhaps Romero can be bothered to answer my questions. Until yesterday I was unaware he was the main force between design of Heretic and Hexen, and though he was just a whiner that left id Software during Quake development. My respect for him just increased a lot. The mere title of the game suggests a lot of killing - perhaps more than in Hexen 2 ? Hexen 2 didn't have that many enemies, it was more quality than quantity. One thing for sure: Eidolon was anything but serpent-looking. Hooves ? Horns ? Oh please !

Neoworm, you might want to load up Warcraft II and play a couple of missions to see how it was the first Warcraft game with the neon stuff, more than half a decade before Warcraft III and World of Warcraft. Warcraft II already had most of the garish and outlandish stuff people have been trying to blame the first and then the second expansion of World of Warcraft for. Same goes for "high tech" that doesn't suit a fantasy game: Warcraft II had not only muskets and cannons (Middle Ages), but also high power explosives (19th century), airplanes and submarines that fire torpedoes (20th century). It's "trendy" these days to talk down World of Warcraft and say it's dumbed down or whatever, but I've been playing it since early 2006 and in my opinion it is better than it was back then. Surely not everything, but a lot of it has been improved in the right direction. Similarly with the RTS games, I like the gloomy dark fantasy world of the original Warcraft a lot more than later Warcraft titles, but I have no illusions that later titles offer superior gameplay. Similarly, while I am definitely not a Hexen II fun, to be fair some of its worst mistakes were actually mistakes introduced in Hexen that we all like so much. Hexen's puzzles were complicated and frustrating until you knew them by heart, and its jump'n'run sequences have remained annoying even afterwards. Borsuk: It seems you don't know the story of John Romero. Back in the 1990s he was an icon, in the eyes of most gamers he was The Man behind DOOM (and also Heretic and Hexen). While Daikatana suggests that he wasn't all that, on the other hand DOOM III shows clearly that the rest of id put together couldn't create anything even remotely as fun. p.s. In case it wasn't obvious, the visuals of Eidolon are simply the Christian version of the devil. Although as far as the horns go, you know the Chaos Serpents in Heretic and Hexen have horns too, right? I used to call them "bulls" because of that.

Theme-wise, I dislike Warcraft2+ because it's not even proper steampunk. I dislike graphic style too. Alternative history is interesting, but Warcraft is just stuff thrown together with no plan other than to appeal to someone's sense of "cool". It is difficult for me to evaluate how much of Romero is in Doom. Oh, I know about the Doom II boss, but that's it. Doom II seems much more thoughtfully designed. For the most part everything is there for a reason. Monster attacks in DooM were notoriously easy to avoid, except Spider Mastermind which was either pathetic or murderous depending on range. So every single monster in DooM II is an improvement. Almost all attacks hard to avoid, and for different reasons. Hell Knight is actually an improvement over Baron, which was a bullet sponge. A couple of Knights are more dangerous than equivalent number of Barons and less boring. My only gripe is that regular shotgun was nearly useless except when you faced multiple weak enemies coming from diffent directions. As for MMORPG games, I ended my relationship with them in 90's when I stopped playing MUD's. I like games which are fun on their own, not because an achievement requires you to repeat X Y times. MMORPGs don't have interesting game mechanics. Age of Conan tried to make combat genuinely fun, but was an overall failure. An FPS, puzzle, TBS game is fun even if I only have 20 minutes. MUD's and MMORPGs glue you to the monitor. And I can't stand the repetitiveness. Roguelikes rule.

It's "trendy" these days to talk down World of Warcraft and say it's dumbed down or whatever, but I've been playing it since early 2006 and in my opinion it is better than it was back then. Surely not everything, but a lot of it has been improved in the right direction.

I didn't say it for trendiness...I started playing in mid-2006 when you had to learn your class (both alone and in small groups) to level up and compete in the endgame, nowadays you can sleepwalk all the way to the level cap - and when you get there, you have no idea how to play in groups or get the most out of your class while doing so. (I quit a year ago, the game just took it's toll and together with not liking the direction it was going and that my close friends had already gone)

LOL you let yourself influence by the fashion of the day downtalk of WoW, even if you don't admit it. I've leveled several characters back in 2006 as well and the game was full of idiots both leveling and at the level cap, the majority not only didn't learn their class properly by reaching level 60, for many classes/specs there wasn't even anything to learn whatsoever. The term "huntard" was born in the golden days of the original World of Warcraft, not during the expansions. The term was coined because of the huge amount of hunters who didn't know any of their abilities at maximum level. They played like a Hexen Cleric who would have all 4 weapons, full green mana, 10+ kraters of might in his inventory, but whenever he ran out of blue mana, he would stop using the serpent staff and just attack everything with the spiked mace. Once the player learns to play better than that, plus the player learns the flow of the Hexen maps, Hexen suddenly becomes immensely much easier. But since it's the same exact game code, players can't go around claiming loudly that Raven dumbed down their game and took away the excitement of exploring unknown territory. As World of Warcraft is a constantly changing MMO, players can point at any single small change and claim the game has been completely turned upside down, whereas the real change has been the player learning more about the game and sucking less, and thus realising other players suck. Remember watching your buddies play Hexen when it was all new and you all sucked at it? You probably didn't feel like they are idiots. But remember watching someone play Hexen years later, when you were a pro at it and they played the first time? You surely felt like that guy is a clumsy moron. Did it occur to you to claim that the game has been dumbed down? No, because you knew it's the same files on your drive as always.

[quote="RambOrc":1y4k59ov] Borsuk: It seems you don't know the story of John Romero. Back in the 1990s he was an icon, in the eyes of most gamers he was The Man behind DOOM (and also Heretic and Hexen). While Daikatana suggests that he wasn't all that, on the other hand DOOM III shows clearly that the rest of id put together couldn't create anything even remotely as fun.Sure, Romero was smart with level design, but I say Tom Hall was the real man behind ID. He came up with the best ideas and most interesting stories, including an entire, almost somewhat-expansive story behind Doom, then John Carmack in his evil ways decided he wanted to scrap the story and do the entirety of Doom his way and fire Tom Hall. Luckily, Romero was still there to make the game fun. But then he was canned during Quake II and you know how the story goes. Tom is my hero, and Romero I have great respect for to say the most. John Carmack is a greedy nerd sitting behind a keyboard all day in a dark room underground who doesn't even take the time for social interaction, let alone try to understand what people want. He overcompensates by building games that are supposed to be these enormous big city empires when what we really love is the homely little village style close-to-the-heart type of game that he looks at and says "Who in the world would want this? My oompa-loompas can make way more shiny graphics than this."