Professional Heresy

[Music] so you guys ever heard of doom clones that's what they used to call all fps games for a few years back when everybody was worried that violent video games caused violence because pushing against the bud and game industry was easier than addressing mental health issues and also taking on the current billion dollar game industry really anything is easier than dealing with real stuff i find this segment deeply offensive and believe that it simply should be taken off the market hello my dispatcher says there's something wrong with dyna carver so anyway let's get to a literal doom clone heretic the first raven game i ever played made on the doom engine with some modifications produced by john romero designed by these people heretic takes all the sci-fi stuff and replaces it with fantasy but i feel weird calling it a one-to-one copy of doom for one thing you can look up and down and fly and use inventory items there's a little more depth to it in heretic you are corvus and elf oh yeah i forgot i already did heretic too well he wasn't named until heretic 2 but honestly heretic 2 has nothing to do with this heretic was the first game in the serpent riders trilogy comprised of heretic hexane and hexane too despairl the first serpent rider invaded corvus dimension and brought thousands of his bloodthirsty minions the kingdoms of parthaurus bowed down when despairal came worshiping him but not the elves which is why our hero was branded a heretic they defied this religious order known as the order of the sign or the order of the triad represented by this symbol that appears everywhere in the game order of the triad you say what if i told you that this game and heretic 2 and by extension the hexan games were all prequels to rise of the triad because john romero says so that's right the game that was supposed to be a sequel to wolfenstein 3d was in fact a sequel to heretic but since commander keen is canonically the grandson of b.j blaskowitz and the doomguy is another descendant of him and so that leads me to infer that this game would have been cooler with a dog mode anyway corvus wasn't having any of that extinction [ __ ] so armed with a wooden staff and an elven wand he started yield rippeth and tarith so for this video i thought yeah heretic i've played this game plenty not as much as doom but i've beaten it before on the fourth skill the equivalent to ultra violence called thou art a smite meister most of the skills are butchered old english like thou needeth a wet nurse yellow bellies are us bring us them on it but since the final skill black plague possesses the doesn't respawn monsters i decided to do that one we're already different from doom it doesn't respawn monsters it just makes enemies move and attack three times faster and their projectiles are three times faster but you get fifty percent more from ammo pickups but there are no hit scanning enemies in heretic which is nice though compared to doom there are lots more enemies in general to deal with okay episode one city of the damned which would be named silver spring and heretic 2. you started the docks in this game too now that i think about it first room you're hit with the gargoyles they're the melee variety as opposed to the other ones that have more health and throw fireballs at you on black plague those get really annoying because of the faster attacks and the projectile speed a lot of this is still analogous to doom the wand is like a faster pistol a weak hitscan weapon blue health files give you 10 hp and for a while the environment is littered with them there are some subtle environmental effects water mimics depth you can hear yourself land in it there are ambient noises you're still getting keys to open doors except every level in heretic every single one follows the same key pattern yellow green blue every time next up you'll see the golems the melee variety as opposed to the other ones that have more health and throw [ __ ] homing fireballs at you and are sometimes transparent we'll talk about the ghost enemies it's more important than you think this is the staff it's the last time you're gonna see it because you get the gauntlets of the necromancer in about 30 seconds the gauntlets are like doom's chainsaw maybe a little faster opening this door also opens a secret downstairs where you can find a bunch of ammo for the crossbow you don't have yet and undead warriors the regular kind not the ghost kind that is tougher and are you guys sensing a pattern here there are a few monsters that have nasty powered up versions and the least dangerous is the golem ghost the transparent enemies can be hard to see but otherwise they're simple enough the nitro golem however now in the first level you pick up a bunch of important stuff in the secrets like the tomah power and the crossbow the crossbow is your shotgun the game's workhorse weapon for a while and on average playthroughs it would be that for the whole game it's reliable ammo forward is everywhere especially on black plague because each pickup gives you seven instead of five a quiver of arrows gives you 30 instead of 20. i don't think i ever run out of ammo for it during the entire playthrough so i run back out here to deal with the undead warriors it's a slog before you get the crossbow the undead warriors throw green axes and occasionally they throw red axes that do [ __ ] high random doom engine damage one of the attacks to avoid at all costs and that's it you're through the first level with some decent weapons now things get tricky because we're going to the dungeons oh no these aren't that bad right about now you'll see that heretics monster count is a bit higher than dooms and the monsters take a bit more damage jesus these monster closets are stuffed there are 153 monsters just in this the second level that's right we got an accurate count not just percentages suck it doom from producer john romero heretic maps have a weird habit of triggering events in other parts of the level like this part at the beginning that opens up later to give you the dragon claw i'm gonna apologize in advance for that sound you're gonna hear it fairly often the dragon claws your second and most powerful head scan weapon and now that i've got all the weapons you can get in episode 1 i want to talk about the tome of power the thing that turns these doom weapon reskins into something interesting the tome of power is everywhere and you bet your ass were getting tome rampages the gauntlets leech health off of monsters like a lot the wand becomes like an auto shotgun with extra projectiles added the crossbow turns into a super bow and the dragon claw does this this is awesome the inventory system starts coming into play here obviously you've got the tone of power the quartz flasks for 25 hp the shadows fear to turn you invisible you got a torch to light up everything the time bomb of the engine is to be a perpetual disappointment because you drop it right in front of you and maybe kill something small with the splash damage the ring of invincibility for you guessed it invincibility the morpho of them which turns monsters into chickens the mystic earned for 100 hp and you can't overcharge past 100 in heretic so that's only for the most dire circumstances it'll auto activate if you're playing on wet nurse i assume i've never played on that skill it looks embarrassing the chaos device which sounds cool but all it does is teleport you back to the map start i used it exactly once during this whole playthrough and the wings of wrath which let you fly for a short time now you can pick up as many of these things as you want i guess the hard limit is 25 but when you go to the next level you only get to keep one of each item unless it's the wings of wrath because the game will straight up take it away from you between levels so you can't sequence break lame now heretics maps don't really require a ton of discussion the first episode especially has a lot of samey castles until the game starts really hammering you around level 5 and introduces my arch nemesis for this game the disciples of the sparrow no not to sparrow himself his disciples they're not the toughest enemies they don't have the strongest attacks but they can be hard to see because they fade in and out the game likes to group them together and since they reliably take three or four hits from the crossbow to kill and they're fast goddamn purple [ __ ] [ __ ] and they fly and you've got exactly nothing and one hit them until episode two at least they sometimes drop a tone of power for you that's right enemies can drop rare inventory items you like all these projectiles this is heretic on black plague it's bullet hell but at least it's not hit scanners [Music] ah listen to that sound that's so good i promise you we'll get to the shadow sphere soon but the cathedral comes first i swear heretic tries so much harder to imitate realish places than doom ever did it's not successful because it's the tomb engine and those pews don't look good ever i don't think heretic's level design is the best that raven would ever produce but i think it's still fine most of the time it's not confusing it relies on monster closets a few too many times and monsters hiding behind fake walls that launch devastating projectiles at you and you have to rely on auto aim to save you and if there's more than one the auto aim for projectiles on the crossbow hits different things with different project why why i enjoy this game i understand why some people don't the high enemy count tends to make it kind of sloggy oh man all these monsters and i'm low on health what can i do [Music] tucked away behind a line you walk over here is the trigger to open the door to the secret exit guarded by disciples of the sparrow i had to look at this in the editor to be sure one of the issues i have with heretic is the cryptic nature of triggers and secrets sometimes a thing they definitely fix for hexen secret level the graveyard there's a few undead warrior ghosts here i don't uh a ghost an undead ghost it doesn't matter because they always always throw the red axes at you and the graveyard is full of them it is a giant shooting gallery right at the start of the map and you're the target so let's talk about the shadow sphere that power-up that turns you invisible and makes physical attacks pass right through you yeah here's a very non-doom thing heretics attacks have different classifications physical attacks and magical attacks all these ghost enemies aren't just transparent physical attacks go right through them another reason i hate the disciples of the sparrow because they phase in and out while the shadow sphere doesn't help you all the time because most weapons and attacks are magical it makes this area a complete joke so save one from the previous map and forget this horrible place exists you go from the graveyard to the crypts the most monster stuffed level in episode one there's not really much to talk about until we get to the boss map hell's maw not to be confused with episode 2 hell's maw since you're at the end of the episode it's good time to use all those power-ups the shadows fear to take out this whole group of undead warriors ready to toss projectiles at you across the map from the very start before tossing on the ring of invincibility and atom power to deal with all these nitrogolums here along with the game's replacement for explosive barrels which are pushable and can respawn that's not what we're here for we're here for the three iron liches iron liches are a giant pain in the ass on black plague and only slightly less than one on lower difficulties they have three attacks a devastating fireball volley an ice blast that hits and then spreads out in the star pattern to hit again and the tornado attack that's the worst one it doesn't do the most damage it just picks you up slowly drains your health makes it impossible to hit anything and the iron glitches can randomly open up on you with any of these attacks the tornado follows you unless you've got a shadow sphere activated but it can get stuck on walls sometimes oh and once you kill the iron which is a wall opens up to a horde of monsters guarding the exit [Applause] doom was just too easy silver spring is saved those creatures had to come from somewhere and you have a sneaky suspicion that the fiery portal of hell's maw opens under their home dimension to make sure that more undead or even worse things don't come through you'll have to seal hell some off from the other side of course that means you may get stuck in a very unfriendly world but no one ever said being a heretic was easy well wasn't so bad in the first episode hell's more is a wonderful infernal place lots of fire brimstone even more monsters than before and we're dragons uh i'm torn deciding whether the were dragons are the worst thing to appear in this game on black plague their fireballs do a stupid amount of damage and having them travel three times as fast is awful and this episode is full of them right from the start from here on out the first level of every episode is going to be progressively more brutal and sadistic you don't have powerful weapons and the game doesn't care here's 100 monsters for you to deal with you asked for this first level of episode 2 just like in doom has a secret plasma gun oh i mean hell staff i like it less than the plasma gun though but its attack is basically the plasma gun except the sprite for the projectile is bigger so when you're spamming something with it you're seeing so much red magic [ __ ] that it makes it a little hard to tell what you're doing but that's fine because on black play you get so much ammo for it that i ended up basically maining the thing throughout unless i needed a rapid-fire hitscan weapon that made my ears bleed the tomah power attack is a storm a magic rain that kills things good if your target stays very still and doesn't have a magic umbrella you guys don't know how many times i've tried to kill that [ __ ] it's great for the iron liches that can't move anywhere otherwise it's a bit of an issue when you're doing a rampage and you're like i need to spam something and you're forced to go with the wand because the dragon claw eats through your ammo shooting it's whatever you would call that and the hell staff is doing this and the phoenix rod your rocket launcher is a short range but very effective flamethrower that eats almost no ammo when powered up the next two maps the lava pits in the river of fire introducing you to the saber claws one of the least threatening enemies in the game they only do melee attacks and don't have a lot of health i'm gonna mostly ignore them they are a joke around here is where the game starts placing enemies with high damage output above you behind bars it's gonna do that more and more from now on honestly even on smitemeister this gets kind of repetitive most of the monsters in doom and morso and doom 2 can be dealt with quicker whereas even the weakest enemy in heretic can take two hits from the crossbow iron lich is like barons of hell become common enemies starting in episode two and sometimes you get lucky and they only fire really janky tornadoes at you that don't go anywhere cool thanks this one fires three tornadoes in as many seconds i hate them i hate you know what was really missing from the doom engine ice physics yeah one of raven's improvements to the doom engine was adding slippery ice and also wind and running water that can carry the player around but the running water texture only points one way so you never know which direction that is by looking at it the ice is the worst though heavily featured in the level the ice grotto don't worry only half the level is covered in ice see the ice it's right next to the lava in hell's maw and you got these things to shooting projectiles at you from high places what's that there's only 35 more maps no but the other half of the map is castle it's castles and caves and a fight with an iron lich you guys oh you're gonna miss when you're only fighting one iron leche at a time i can show you how fast the powered up phoenix rod kills him if i could just god damn tornado there oh you want some of that that's not the exit though there's a secret exit that i opened by a line you cross somewhere here while you're heading towards regular exit and there's really no way you know that the secret level the glacier is the next few levels are pretty similar lava ice monsters nothing much to talk about but i should mention the fact sometimes in lava there are these things that launch explosive lava balls around and those suck and are terrible i did get the fire mace the last weapon you'll pick up in heretic and you might think it's the game's bfg and it is if you power it up the powered attack is a single bouncy ball that does 10 000 damage to anything it hits except bosses because that would make it useful when it's not powered up it shoots somewhat randomized little exploding balls that have garbage range and i use it to clear low level melee enemies it's not good i don't know why they made it like this the game's real bfg is the phoenix rod this thing is just a disappointment when you pick it up and worst of all it counts as a physical attack so it goes right through ghost enemies so its primary is outclassed by the hell staff which has more plentiful ammo and its secondary is awkward and impractical and slow so so slow the final level of episode two is the portals of chaos fight your way through all the smaller enemies before facing the molotors easier skills have only one medium has two and hard skills have three these things are dangerous before you put fast monsters on in black plague they are much worse afterwards like the iron liches they also have three attacks charging at you throwing a volley of fireballs and best of all their fire trail attack which can be an instant kill if you touch it and it isn't stopped by water or cliffs or walls or anything really it just goes forever it's awful this one gets distracted by infighting so i flame him if you have enough space to maneuver around them it's not too bad it's health is apparently less than the cyber demon but god do they not go down as fast also by comparison ass is flat as a pancake the mighty molotors have proved to be no match for you and as their steaming corpses slide to the ground you feel a sense of grim satisfaction that they have been destroyed the gateways which they guarded have opened revealing what you hope is the way home but as you step through mocking laughter rings in your ears oh yeah despair will got you good cause now you're in his underwater dome okay oh yeah here we go with the first map [ __ ] again you lose all your weapons the game instantly puts wizards on your ass tossing projectiles from up above and you're not taking them out with the wand you can get a dragon claw almost right away black play gives you more ammo because these orb pickups give you like 10 ammo each normally which makes this whole experience worse this is really turning into a slog now dodging were dragons that shoot a projectile almost twice every second fighting an iron lich in the very first map without a phoenix rod which can kill one easily in about four shots now i gotta use the claw the easy parts are over the traps are meaner this is the layer of the serpent rider and if you were coming off a doom 1 this was a little harder than you were used to even most of doom 2 wasn't this hard i don't think the ophidians make their first appearance here too the new monster for episode 3. they shoot projectiles sometimes they shoot a fourth one that does more damage they're unnecessarily tanky like most enemies in this game there's another iron glitch guarding the exit in this tiny hallway if you can get to it there's a health staff and a secret here i didn't remember that and the powered up health staff attack would have really been good for this don't play on black play kids the game didn't even give you a crossbow until the second map of episode three that's [ __ ] mean huh the cesspool [Music] it's really starting to get in on its evil [ __ ] now yeah [ __ ] you i know they're called disciples of disparal and you're supposed to find them in this underwater super villain dome but come on you used to see those disciples garden the exits for like every level but that doesn't happen much anymore no they have iron glitches for that now next up the confluence welcome to ye olde contra projectile hell i'm gonna lose this tome anyway when i exit so i might as well use it that still sucks and an iron which guards the exit of course next the azure fortress nothing's really happening to differentiate it from anything else it's just more there's a secret exit that's slightly less obtuse than the others have been door opens and then there's a switch that opens another door to the secret after you've dealt with all of this [ __ ] [Music] here okay secret level the aquifer [Music] this isn't really hard just tedious maybe this is why it never made their games hard until like doom eternal this isn't really any different from any other level it's not like in doom where the secret levels are gimmick levels or in duke 3d where they're mostly gimmick levels they're a little harder i guess but you don't get anything useful from them and even if you do you can't keep it across levels next up the ophidian layer oh yeah now we're talking this is primo heretic shitty where you drop into a room into a crossfire of ophidians and iron witch and a molotor yeah come here [ __ ] come and get it oh what you can't charge for that little gate is that a blocking line death [ __ ] well that was fun almost every level from now on has a molotor in it the halls of fear these long slogs with hundreds of monsters make me feel bad about [ __ ] on sandy peterson so much oh [ __ ] no don't worry we can make this worse his rare drop is a mystic earned which is cool because i need that health back say what you will about the molotor it was at least interesting and the rest of the level isn't i'll give you a [ __ ] break the chasm oh god no just stop already cool thanks by this point i've had enough this is the penultimate level and they're not gonna go easy nor should they but bridge with wind over harmful ghoul being shot at by iron liches and you know like everything else i'm tired the sparrow's keep okay this map doesn't have a molotow in it because it has the final boss after a bunch of teleporters and iron which is not important to sparrow an obnoxious final boss he comes out riding a serpent and spoilers for the other two games in the series the other ones they don't ride serpents korax would probably impale it on his weird giger body and eidolon is he'd need a big serpent after you kill his serpent despairo summons his disciples my favorite to help him once his health gets low enough he starts teleporting around a lot especially with heavier attacks like the hell staff or the phoenix rod but for some reason the power up attacks from the dragon claw do not count as powerful and he'll just sit there and take it [Applause] the death of despairal has loosed the magical buns holding the creatures on this plane their dying screams overwhelming his own cries of agony your oath of vengeance fulfilled you enter the portal to your own world but wait there's more that portal doesn't take you back to parthaurus oh no do sparrow cursed your dumbass and set you off some world he'd previously conquered get ready for heretic's overlong expansion two episodes the shadow of the serpent rider but these aren't just any old episodes they're brutally brutally hard like plutonia hard like slaughter maps like on the first map of episode 4 i don't bother killing all the monsters because i don't want to waste ammo in the mode where the game gives you 50 more ammo to pick up come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination there's a molotov here on the first map he'll take care of those saber claws for you also you're getting shot at from up there by affiliations and you can't kill that molotor yet unless you want to try to use the staff which you don't you're going to want to ever you want to go over to this teleporter to keep going through the level and the ophidians they teleport over here but [ __ ] them they're getting turned into chickens hey there that's an obvious secret let me oh [ __ ] you i like how it teleports you into a completely dark room full of ophidians cool awesome i'm down to sucking health off of them with the gauntlets which works on the molotov outside too this isn't even the hard part no that would be the last room where you're surrounded by a dozen ophidians but you can teleport into those rooms and kill them but to do that you will need the ring of invincibility but also you have to go into the teleporter to pick it up and immediately activate it or else you will die now to exit this level you have to walk into the pit and open the doors on the sides of this room and hit switches inside of those but don't worry because there's only four iron liches in the pit and you have to raise it and hit several switches and get to the exit but i'm not wasting ammo on the iron liches i'm out i can definitively say that most of the other levels aren't this difficult now but the next one's pretty hard too if there's a general rule to follow with these expansion episodes it's that if a monster can be replaced with its more powerful and deadly alternative it will be every time there's only one molotow in this one it's just that he's in the same room as two iron liches did i say one molotor i lied there's two yep [ __ ] you go for a swim i'm gonna just exit and save ammo next map has some fun crushers you have to avoid but the light is flashing here so that's obviously a secret yep and this is the good way to approach those because this is a trap for later the game is doing you a favor by letting you at them now they should have just called these two episodes to sparrow's curse because that's what they are there are rooms in these episodes that are like sawtraps so [Music] i'm only in the fourth level and the secret exit is in here [ __ ] the secret level is bad it's just bad not because it's hard but because navigating it and actually completing it requires you to be almost psychic see these things on the wall that look like secret doors they don't open except for one one of them opens and that one leads to a place that'll open another one and so on and that's if you haven't already given up because the map starts off throwing everything at you this map gets so desperate i use a chaos device honestly i could end the video here this is practically everything this episode has up its sleeve there's not a new boss no this level is a bridge and it has the wind blowing you around and nitro golem ghosts but only like 24 of them in the first area and a trap that opens up to force you out into the main area where most of them are the boss of this episode is iron liches again nine of them i have an invincibility ring and enough phoenix ammo for it kind of disappointing i was really hoping it would be impossible thankfully episode 5 the stagnant domain is almost impossible as much as i enjoy maps where you need to get the monsters to infight no wait that's not me that's not me at all that's the sick [ __ ] who designed this when you start there's only like 20 enemies on screen but there's going to be more because if you want a better weapon like the crossbow this is what you all wanted to see right you'll give a [ __ ] about heretic you just want to see me stuff her i thought i placated you with the perching incident but no well good because we've got the most evil trap in all of this nightmarish journey a trap that even if i was fully equipped with every item and weapon in the game would be a problem there's the exit right across this bridge that keeps getting hit with little explosive lava balls to your left and to your right much needed items so you strafe run over to the right fine so you stray front to the left so you leave you say [ __ ] this [ __ ] i'm out right wrong because there are teleporters there that they go right through and block your path out and if you're like civi forget the items keep your dignity leave the level you'll have your sanity no one will think less of you i mean they will but it's not about the items the exit teleporter inside the door that already needs a blue key to open and access needs a switch this switch i give up i fly in hit the switch and run i'm so done that's the worst of it i think the next level has water that pushes you around but nothing compares to what i just went through a few maps later there's a courtyard that almost beats it in terms of volume and ear pain most of the latter half of this episode is very screamy and unpleasant and i accidentally recorded it in ultra wide but that's not the issue here what else what else is interesting the final fight field of judgment still no new bosses yet eight molotors again i was a little disappointed because there's so much room to move around that i didn't even die once [Music] as the final molotor bellows his death agony you realize that you've never come so close to your own destruction not even the fight with the sparrow and his disciples had been this desperate ah come on and then the text implies that corvus contemplates suicide which is no game no but wait there's more you can warp to the super secret episode six civvy why is this video 35 [ __ ] minutes it's not as hard and i suspect these were made to be deathmatch levels but don't tell tim willetts the first one looks like one of those levels somebody made to recreate the raven offices or something it's got little doom cute sector bathrooms it isn't that great the second map is a little more involved and the least death matchy map of the three here except it's mostly [ __ ] wizards so that's a zero out of ten the last one doesn't even have an exit it's a death match map it's barely even trying to be anything else i only talk about these last three maps so that people don't go into the comments and say civi you missed the secret episode six oh boy well that's closing the book on heretic but with october coming up we're gonna get into some spooky stuff and next time it is going to get very [Music] bloody [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Civvie 11

Views: 859,783

Rating: 4.9607716 out of 5

Keywords: cv11, civvie11, civvie's dungeon, civvie, retro fps, heretic, raven, hexen, serpent rider, pro heretic, pro doom, gameplay, let's play

Id: i5nTl5ySy78

Length: 37min 7sec (2227 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Mortikai45]

I've really become a fan of these videos. He does good research into each game he goes over and the theatric commentary with characters in his 'dungeon' really bring the production together.

[u/ShinCoal]

I don't know what it was with Heretic, I'm a huge fan of Doom, huge fan of old school shooters, but when I played this game about 10 years ago it became a huge chore after 2 episodes (I think the version had like 5 total)

And I mean that in the mind numbing way (back then I also had this annoying attitude where I HAD to complete every game I enjoyed at some point, and I guess I just WANTED to love the game)

[u/beavis250]

This is my favorite youtube gaming channel, are there any others that come close to what civvie is doing?

[u/klaxxxon]

Brutal Heretic mod fixes a lot of Heretic's flaws, in addition to making the game look way better. It has a simple XP based progression system which gradually unlock alt fire modes for all of the weapons, generally offering more burst damage (to deal with the spongy enemies) while dialing up difficulty in other places and making it valuable to actually kill enemies and to play secret levels. It even makes the staff good and fun to use. It is hard to find though, since it is not actively maintained any more (I uploaded it here, confirmed working with GZDoom 4.2.0).