Why is Doom more fun than Heretic?

[Solmyr]

It's weird because Heretic is more refined in some aspects than Doom. 

• More interesting enemy roster.
• Powered up weapons.
• Inventory system, and the efects of items.
• Turning monsters and the player into chickens. 
• No monster hitscan attacks.
• No infinte height. ("Doom wasn't 3D" meme doesn't apply here)
• The player could look slightly up and down.

All of these were a step up in the engine, yet most people preffer the technically lesser game.

I guess it's mostly because of

aesthetic appeal; Doom's sci-fi aesthetic feels better than Heretic's medieval fantasy. Weapons are also an issue, as has been brought up in this thread, the feel is different, Heretic unpowered weapons feel weaker than Doom's, there's also no BFG analogue, and the looks also count, Heretic weapons feel like activating a bunch of staves, gaunlets and a lame staff that looks like a masturbation joke, it's not as satisfying as firing a shotgun, chaingun and rocket launcher, weapons that are mostly something that can be seen in real life, the chaingun could be an SMG analogue, and the plasma based ones are more sci-fi, but still more satisfying.

[roadworx]

3 hours ago, SilentD00mer said:

Probably the weapons are one reason, they feel "weak" comparing to Doom ones(the "BFG equivalent" for example). Maybe the sound effects are another reason. In Heretic the sounds feel like "everything is so far from me that I can't hear", and this changes how the player look at the fights of the game.

yeah, the sound effects really make it all feel kinda blah for me. doom's weapon sounds are chunky af and feel powerful, while heretic's feel a lot softer. not to mention the actual effectiveness and visuals of the weapons doing absolutely no favors for it; it ends up feeling very watered-down

 

then again, heretic may be trying to go for a softer feel. if that is the case tho then i still think it could've been done much better

[Noiser]

I don't see anything wrong with Heretic. It's a different game, with different mechanics and concepts.

But if we are going to compare the two: Most weapons are better in Heretic than Doom imo (elven wand, dragon claw and gauntlet in particular), enemies are creative with unique abilities, the visuals are more consistent and the level design is definitely more polished as well. Actually, I would say that the level design is the strongest part of the game, but I also noticed that the main campaign flows better on continuous than on wand starts. So that's a thing for me.

In fact, the only thing I really miss in Heretic is an equivalent to the SSG or the BFG. But you have the artifacts (time bombs, morph ovum, tome of power) to fill that niche - in a way that is somewhat more balanced than Doom as well. As long as you use these items tactically, they can be just as effective to wipe out enemies from the screen.
 

Spoiler

Also, the music. Yeah. It's kick ass.

Edited January 31, 2022 by Noiser

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Heretic looks a lot better when you compare it with Doom 1 instead of Doom 2.

 

Edit: I think the hell staff / firemace / dragon claw would be better liked if they had slightly faster firing rates similar to the plasma rifle in doom. The damage is comparable overall except the weapons shoot slower which might feels off for some players. Could just go full ion fury and make them shred through your ammo and it would still be fine.. game has a ton of enemies compared to doom 1 after all.

 

I wonder how players would look back at the game if the tome of power was either altfire attacks or was a quad damage style upgrade instead of replacing some of your weapons with very annoying weapons like the powered up mace, most annoying flamethrower in the universe rod and whatever the hell the dragon claw turns into. Bow is also way more RNG influenced than shotgun which is infuriating at times vs disciples who can completely phase through 2/3 the projectiles randomly or ophidians who can randomly tank it forever.

Edited January 30, 2022 by Pegg
Extra

[Marscaleb]

3 hours ago, rzh said:

I also liked Heretic's textures and palette better.

I'm glad someone else noticed the palette.  The palette in Doom is honestly not good.  All of Id's games seem to have problems with their palettes, really, except maybe for the first Quake.

3 hours ago, Luleta said:

that being said, again, i really like heretic and wish there were more wads.

Ditto.

 

Because the two games are so compatible, I kind of want to be scientific about this.  I want to try some wads that swap content between the games.

People keep bringing up the weapons.  If you played Heretic with Doom's weapons, how would it feel?

People mention the aesthetic.  Well, how would the maps look if you kept the layouts the same, but re-textured them with Doom's textures?  (Can't just do a simple swap, you need to replace them intentionally.)
Or perhaps take it the other way; start with some classic Doom maps, re-texture them with Heretic/Hexen art, and replace the monsters/weapons with Heretic ones.  Is it still a fun map design?  And then start swapping things back and forth.  How does it play with Heretic monsters and Doom weapons, or with Doom monsters and Heretic weapons?

 

Also, I will definitely admit that the sound design in Heretic is lacking.  It demonstrates clearly how much sound design plays into a satisfying experience.  The crossbow shouldn't sound like a shotgun, but it just isn't as satisfying to hear that soft "whipp-peh!" compared to that deep guttural "K-CHOOM!"  (The same comparison can also be made to Doom 3's plasma rifle.  Pitiful.)  And the dragon claw, wow, that's a horrible sound.

That said, the sounds in Hexen are some of the best I've heard in any video game.  I don't know what happened to Raven between those two games.

[Doomkid]

This is only partially related, but I'm so glad the Dwango wads re-used pretty much the whole Heretic (and Descent) soundtracks. They were both games I generally like the look of, and that I wanted to have fun with, but just.. didn't. Heretic's E1M1 midi is killer though, as are a bunch of them!

 

Those Heretic textures are also pretty sweet, imo. Coupled with the Hexen assets there's a lot of cool medieval textures, stained glass, etc to choose from! The first time I ever saw this theme was wandering the empty halls of Eternal Deathmatch as a youngn and it looked so badass to me at the time, and still does.

 

A lot of these old Doom-adjacent DOS era games are, to me, best used as resource packs for Doom wads.. Funny as that may sound. That fact alone makes them great games imo, even if the actual gameplay doesn't do a lot for me. There's still a lot to appreciate there.

[Gez]

Doom's main advantage over Heretic, IMO, is Doom II. Because if you compare Heretic to plain old Doom, without the SSG, arch-vile, revenant, manc, tron, etc. well IMO Heretic is a clear winner.

 

Imagine if Hexen had been to Heretic was Doom II was to Doom. The same game, but with more monsters to fill up the higher tier niches, new and more powerful weapons to deal with said higher tier monsters, and new environments to diversify the themes of the levels.

[Marisa the Magician]

I think it's been brought up already but, Wayfarer's Tome really has helped me appreciate Heretic more. Also yeah, as Gez says, if it had its own Doom 2 treatment it could have definitely stood against it.

[ApprihensivSoul]

Weirdly, I think Doom 2 and the followups were held back by not including some of Heretic's improvements, such as inventory and looking. I think that a couple people have mentioned it most consistently, the lack weapon damage output and the repetition of monster types. In general I far prefer the map design of the raven games to Doom's mainline entries, and there are a couple things I certainly wish Doom evened out (the weapons besides the SSG and Plasma Rifle are a little underpowered,) but Heretic is far more severe in this regard. 

That said, I find the monsters that do exist far more fun to fight than the ones in Doom, it's just that it doesn't really hold up over a full campaign (imo.)

[Nikku4211]

I prefer guns instead of magical artefacts. That goes for both Heretic and Hexen. It's more satisfying to hear bullets, punches, and even a chainsaw than it is to hear vague 'MAGIC!' sounds.

 

Also, they introduced this weird inventory. Like, just give me the 25% health right away, I don't want to have to navigate an inventory at the heat of battle.

 

And they made it possible to look up and down using the keyboard, but they didn't bother to make it possible to use the mouse to do it, which is a weird decision considering you could already use the mouse to look left or right. Then again, it was 1994, so I can't fault the devs too much.

 

And regardless of how you look up and down, (vanilla) Heretic uses Y-shearing, which can completely disorient some people due to the lack of 3-point perspective. This would have been the only way to look up and down in a column-based renderer, especially back in 1994, but it does bring into question why the devs added the ability to look up and down in the 1st place.

[Marisa the Magician]

2 minutes ago, Nikku4211 said:

Also, they introduced this weird inventory. Like, just give me the 25% health right away, I don't want to have to navigate an inventory at the heat of battle.

To be honest, stuff not being used right away on pickup does have its advantages, especially if you want to reserve powerups for just the right moment rather than having them fire up as soon as you grab them. That's one thing that's always bothered me about Doom.

[Marscaleb]

21 minutes ago, Marisa Kirisame said:

To be honest, stuff not being used right away on pickup does have its advantages, especially if you want to reserve powerups for just the right moment rather than having them fire up as soon as you grab them. That's one thing that's always bothered me about Doom.

Yeah but it becomes a problem when you are trying to navigate that stuff in the heat of battle.  Sure, selecting a tome of power right before a tough section is good, but I rarely selected anything other than a quartz flask just so that I could hit that in the heat of the moment.

Vanilla Heretic didn't let you bind artifacts to specific keys, and that was a HUGE problem.  I would have used the inventory a lot more if I didn't have to always keep the health queued up to use in an emergency.

Compare that to Duke 3D, which did a similar inventory system, but also had hot keys for all the items.  When I needed that portable med kit, it was always one button away.  (Not to mention, I could actually turn off the jetpack and save it for later.)

In my opinion, the inventory in Heretic was basically useless because I couldn't *really* use stuff whenever I wanted it.

[Not Jabba]

58 minutes ago, Gez said:

Doom's main advantage over Heretic, IMO, is Doom II. Because if you compare Heretic to plain old Doom, without the SSG, arch-vile, revenant, manc, tron, etc. well IMO Heretic is a clear winner.

 

Imagine if Hexen had been to Heretic was Doom II was to Doom. The same game, but with more monsters to fill up the higher tier niches, new and more powerful weapons to deal with said higher tier monsters, and new environments to diversify the themes of the levels.

 

The whole thread has summed up the differences between the games pretty well, but I think this is especially on point. Heretic has massive potential, but its set of resources is limited and feels like a pretty solid but rough draft of what could be a game as good as Doom. Hexen is more a reboot than a sequel, and as such, it's also a game that feels good but with a lot of room for improvement. Both games feel like they don't have quite enough versatility with the stock resources, which makes it difficult to mod them as much as Doom 2 -- which can be said of Doom 1 as well. Doom 2 fleshed out the game to make it flexible enough for modders to build a whole universe. More textures, more monsters, more items, and arguably some weapon/monster balance changes are all Heretic actually needs to be that good of a game. Even the vanilla weapons have turned out to be pretty well balanced with mapset that has really good level design and expands the other resources, like Faithless Trilogy or Sold Soul.

 

Creating a Doom 2-esque expansion of Heretic is my main goal as a mapper, so hopefully it will make a few Heretic fans happy that someone is working on it, but I think people have already started exploring a lot of interesting directions that the game can be taken in.

[rzh]

23 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

Yeah but it becomes a problem when you are trying to navigate that stuff in the heat of battle.  Sure, selecting a tome of power right before a tough section is good, but I rarely selected anything other than a quartz flask just so that I could hit that in the heat of the moment.

Vanilla Heretic didn't let you bind artifacts to specific keys, and that was a HUGE problem.  I would have used the inventory a lot more if I didn't have to always keep the health queued up to use in an emergency.

Compare that to Duke 3D, which did a similar inventory system, but also had hot keys for all the items.  When I needed that portable med kit, it was always one button away.  (Not to mention, I could actually turn off the jetpack and save it for later.)

In my opinion, the inventory in Heretic was basically useless because I couldn't *really* use stuff whenever I wanted it.

I believe you can pause the game and scroll through the inventory though.

[Marscaleb]

10 minutes ago, rzh said:

I believe you can pause the game and scroll through the inventory though.

That made sense in Karnov on the NES.

It doesn't make so much sense in a game that uses a keyboard.

 

(But it is good to know; thank you!)

Edited January 30, 2022 by Marscaleb

[Not Jabba]

It may depend on your source port, but I prefer to manage inventory with my mouse, which usually means I don't even need to pause. I have the mouse wheel bound to scroll through inventory instead of weapons, and one of the side buttons bound to select/use inventory. It's a lot easier to work with that way.

 

Having the ability to bind hotkeys for all items is definitely useful as well, though like you said it's not possible in vanilla. If you're using GZDoom, you can create a minimalist mod using the KEYCONF from Curse of D'Sparil. Wayfarer's Tome also lets you bind the items, but it's a balance mod and doesn't feel the same as vanilla Heretic. 

[rzh]

9 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

It may depend on your source port, but I prefer to manage inventory with my mouse, which usually means I don't even need to pause. I have the mouse wheel bound to scroll through inventory instead of weapons, and one of the side buttons bound to select/use inventory. It's a lot easier to work with that way.

 

Having the ability to bind hotkeys for all items is definitely useful as well, though like you said it's not possible in vanilla. If you're using GZDoom, you can create a minimalist mod using the KEYCONF from Curse of D'Sparil. Wayfarer's Tome also lets you bind the items, but it's a balance mod and doesn't feel the same as vanilla Heretic. 

I also use the mousewheel to scroll, and hotkeys for most commonly used items.

This is pretty much the way it should've been implemented, but I guess Raven couldn't be that ahead of their time.

[Vermil]

Heretic does have one item hotkey; if you press fly up and you have wings in your inventory, they will be auto activated.

 

HeXen added additional hot keys for certain items, bound to the 5-0 keys. Also a 'panic' hotkey bound to backspace, that uses one of every item you have.

Edited January 30, 2022 by Vermil

[Gez]

Backspace in Heretic uses the tome of power.

[Vermil]

4 minutes ago, Gez said:

Backspace in Heretic uses the tome of power.

 

 

Forgot that one.

 

Edited January 30, 2022 by Vermil

[Egregor]

One of the biggest differences between the two games is that D2 has hit scanners while Heretic doesn't.  Because of this there is not many instances in Heretic where you have to prioritize enemies by anything other than proximity. Heretic's weapons are weaker and because of this it feels more grindy. Either your overwhelmed or your not, and if your not it's a slog.

 

Hexen pivots away from Heretic by adding the class system, which IMO is not really helpful for a first gen 2.5 doom clone style shooter.  Ask anyone who has actually built a Hexen level or hub and it's extremely hard to balance for all classes, which discourages casual mapping. I agree w Not Jabba that a better approach would have been to just expand upon Heretic's weapons, enemies, and artifacts! The Wayfarer's Tome is a blessing to us Hereticers who want a little bit more content and balance while still being fundamentally Heretic.

[Egregor]

I'd love to see more disciple variants. Disciples are, to me, the most interesting Heretic enemy. They aren't slow AF, they fly, the look cool. I'd love to see a version that shoots revenant style heat sync green fireballs, maybe two at a time via Ancient Aliens' new enemy. Maybe another that ONLY raises dead but is a tank that slides around so they come across all types of corpses. I want a rainbow of disciples each with its own attack!

[Chezza]

For Doom I think the prominant music, mostly range mechanics, simple puzzles and high speed character supported by satisfying weapons / sounds gives it an edge. The mechanics blend well with tue engine. Overall it's a more accessible game to run and gun, with high familiarity and little interfering with the pacing.

 

I can't talk for Heretic, I really only played Hexen. But if Heretic is anything like Hexen then I'd say the inventory system, the puzzles and even the atmosphere ruins the pacing and momentum, while it's not a problem in Doom. For example, it's not easy to cycle through the items while in heat of battle and may cause the player to run away or misuse something.

Edited January 31, 2022 by Chezza

[Egregor]

27 minutes ago, Chezza said:

I can't talk for Heretic, I really only played Hexen. But if Heretic is anything like Hexen then I'd say the inventory system, the puzzles and even the atmosphere ruins the pacing and momentum, while it's not a problem in Doom. For example, it's not easy to cycle through the items while in heat of battle and may cause the player to run away or misuse something. 

...Heretic is something like Hexen, but it's not. It really sits between Doom Original and Hexen. It has an inventory system, but it's  (lack of) puzzles is similar to Doom, and it's linear 3 key level design is like Doom as opposed to Hexen's hub system. Standardizing the mouse wheel for inventory use seems like it is as essential as using WASD had been for Doom controls.

Edited January 31, 2022 by Egregor

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

For me it's the lack of texture variety, monsters are a bit damage spongy and my issue with magical weapons in general.

Think of Doom's shotgun, right? I can imagine how much damage can a shotgun do in other games. You can get down a couple former human dudes with one shot. That makes sense to me. So if it takes a bunch to get down a hell knight, I can see how much tougher the hell knight is compared to a human. If I have Heretic's fantasy crossbow and fantasy set of demons, I have no anchor for damage. I have no idea if all the enemies are tough as all hell or my magic weapons just suck. Or both. Same with Hexen.

[rzh]

9 hours ago, Egregor said:

Hexen pivots away from Heretic by adding the class system, which IMO is not really helpful for a first gen 2.5 doom clone style shooter.  Ask anyone who has actually built a Hexen level or hub and it's extremely hard to balance for all classes, which discourages casual mapping.

Is it that big of a deal? I've never mapped for Hexen, but in the original game you had unique monster placements depending on class (at least in the Winnowing Hall), which at least to me, means that you can balance separately for all classes.

Also, wouldn't it be possible to create a map for one class only, like how some Doom .wads only have one difficulty implemented?

[Egregor]

18 minutes ago, rzh said:

Is it that big of a deal? I've never mapped for Hexen, but in the original game you had unique monster placements depending on class (at least in the Winnowing Hall), which at least to me, means that you can balance separately for all classes.

Also, wouldn't it be possible to create a map for one class only, like how some Doom .wads only have one difficulty implemented? 

Yes, you can balance Hexen specifically for each class, and then add difficulty on top of that. Now your looking at 3 (classes) x 3 (difficulties) for 9 total settings just to get your level up and running. That is the "classic" Hexen format. You could simplify it down and designed only for a single class or difficulty or both, but it might be received as a missed opportunity and not true to the thematic spirit of the game. Though, if done right it could still be entertaining!

[Azuris]

I think because Doom Focus is straighter, you don't have to think about Items.

The Focus is pure on Fight, puzzling out the Way and finding Secrets.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

2 hours ago, Azuris said:

I think because Doom Focus is straighter, you don't have to think about Items.

The Focus is pure on Fight, puzzling out the Way and finding Secrets.

Heretic has little/no focus on puzzles. Some maps are confusing because they are more vertical in general than the other games. Romero's height change rule between sectors must've been in full force during Heretic. If the player walks in a flat path for 10 seconds without intentionally looping YOU ARE FIRED!!

[Wagi]

I'm going to chime in here and say one aspect where Heretic really outshines Doom is the bosses. The bosses in Doom wander around and fire projectiles at you that you just circle strafe to dodge (with the exception of the JOKE BOSS at the end of Episode 3). 

 

In Heretic, the bosses have different attacks. The iron liches can shoot tornadoes that actually follow around and displace you. The maulotaurs can charge at you, giving them mobility, and they can lock you into certain areas with their instakill flame snake, and they have a wide "sweeping" flame attack as well. D'Sparil obviously teleports and spawns disciples.