Oh boy, I'm ready kids. We are so close to Doom Eternal I could taste blood, which might be an unrelated condition. CV-11, your hype levels have become dangerously high. That seems accurate but I don't know why it has to look like that. Continued happiness is a detriment to the output of profitable videos. Well, I don't know if that's true. What is this here? That's-- Oh. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no! Witchaven is a medieval themed first-person shooter from... Capstone. Capstone was "the pinnacle of entertainment software" with such classics as Corridor 7, Operation Bodycount and... I'm sorry. Just hold on. TekWar. Of those games Corridor 7 was the best and Corridor 7 was kind of trash, Operation Bodycount was also trash and... Tek... Te-- that William Shatner game was one of the most painful video game experiences of my life. But I hear Witchaven is better 'cause law of probability states that it would have to be better. And I get to use a source port this time instead of DOS because BuildGDX supports Witchaven so we get crisp 1080p recording. The only difference from the DOS version seems to be that the jumping in GDX is weird and while jumping you can open the menu; a thing you can't do in the DOS version. Hey, you know what? Fine, if I can play comfortably with mouse look instead of having a keyboard aim, I'm good. It's still gonna be shit. An evil witch named Illwhyrin- Illerin- Ill- An evil witch named Illwhyrin- This has got to be good writing, look at all these adverbs! Then came Illwhyrin. So she made a dude thirst. "Hey Civvie, you didn't read the manual for Operation Bodycount and so you didn't know there was a wipe screen key so you better read the Witchaven manual to prevent that kind of embarrassing mistake!" It's time to storm Witchaven...I guess. I'd rather not honestly, I'd rather be playing Hexen. Witchaven actually has a leg up on Hexen because it has a basic RPG system and Hexen wouldn't have a better RPG system until Hexen 2! When you kill monsters and collect items you get XP, you can level up, easier said than done because this is a game still made by Capstone and you'll know that when you get to the menu screen. Oh for fuck's sake, what are you doing? Why? Okay, where are we now hype-wise? We're at a new Half-Life game that isn't VR-exclusive, that doesn't star Gordon's weird friend who gets a lady boner whenever he kills stuff. You start with the shitty knife stabbing goblins and hey, all these enemies look and are animated better than I expect from Capstone, and they infight as soon as the game starts. This isn't a bug, this is in the manual, there are different goblin tribes that hate each other. In the DOS version. I get XP when they do that. "The pinnacle of role-playing games". Their attacks don't match up with their attack animations all the time and since 95% of the combat in this game is melee, that's pretty frustrating. Why am I losing so much health? Oh lava cracks, that's one way to teach the player that lava is dangerous. ...other than it being lava. Let's do a crash course in Witchaven kids. This is on the Build engine. Yeah, believe it or not, another Build engine game that predates Duke Nukem 3D. But you really can't tell at all. There are actual hints of game design here and a lot of them are almost competent. Combat is mostly melee with an array of weapons: a dagger, a short sword, a morningstar, a broadsword, a bow and arrow, an axe, a throwing axe, a polearm, And they decided to put a weapon durability system in so after a while you got a message saying that your weapon is damaged before... Hey, that's not true. Only the fucking morningstar is useless. Melee combat probably could be done well in a Build game but most of the weapons here are kind of garbage. The swords are your best option because they actually hit things predictably. The morningstar can fuck right off. It's one of the first weapons you'll get, too. It attacks slowly, hits awkwardly and the game does two kind of attacks with it: one that takes significantly longer than the other and it seems to choose between these attacks randomly, so you don't really know how long your attack wind-up is gonna take. You get some spells too, offensive ones like magic arrow and fireball, a scare spell, a nuke spell that rarely shows up, a janky-ass flight spell and my favorite: an open door spell which can open locked doors when you don't feel like going through these obtuse shitty maps to find a key. That already puts it a cut above other Capstone games. Oh, and Witchaven wasn't designed for modern aspect ratios so you're gonna see cut off on the weapons here. Venturing into the first level you'll see maps that remind me of a 1995 fan-made doom map except on a jankier engine with fake room over room stuff. Hey, at least they put lighting in this game. Fun fact: Witchaven was released in September of 1995 and TekWar was released in October of 1995. This could explain why Capstone games are so fucking bad. Witchaven has its own fun and unique little quirks. Its armor system... Okay. What is this? Is this fucking Chexquest? Are you kidding? Different armor has different stats. My god you actually need to read the manual for this game because the number of items and different stats is kind of ambitious. Like when you level up you can use two weapons at once. You can't choose which weapons, the game does and the feel of the combat is still dogshit most of the time, but for the sake of providing a decent example at level 6 you have a sword in your right hand and the morningstar in your left, and that should be way cooler than it actually is. The weapon that really surprised me was the bow. Not because it's... good or anything, it does trash damage, but it's one of the two ranged weapons and they made it a hitscan. They made the bow and arrow, a hitscan! Not the bow and arrow traps in the game, just yours because it's magic! Yeah, those arrow traps aren't hitscans, but they don't seem to do any damage, so... What? I didn't feel like playing a shitload of Witchaven in DOS to find out if this is a GDX thing and I found some gameplay videos in DOS where the arrows don't hurt you. Please leave a comment if you get those arrows to hurt you. Some of the arrows are poisoned too and some of the enemies can poison you, like this giant spider that looks like a 3d render they didn't texture, like this giant spider that looks like a 3d render they didn't texture, (you need giant spiders in fantasy games) but you have a potion to cure poison. The potion system isn't bad. You get potions for health, resisting fire, strength, curing poison, and invisibility. You're gonna want that fire resistance potion because the game makes you walk on lava a lot from the first level. 30 seconds of complete fire resistance which helps with the enemies who toss fireballs and the Dragons, oh yes, here there be dragons who are a complete joke because you can just use fire resistance potion whale on them for a bit. They can't kill you. The beginning of Witchaven is easily the hardest part. Unless you start on the easy skill all you've got is this dagger, and the next weapon you'll find is either a short sword that the goblins might drop which has the durability of "Oh, look, it's useless!" or the morningstar. In the first level you'll be hurting for health. The game tries to teach you the whole "take a fire resistance potion to get past lava" thing because it gives you one here and opens the lava area, right? Game design? But then it opens another door behind you with a Minodrake. Described in the manual as part man, part bull and part fire drake, a fire drake being a mythical creature that breathes fire which this thing...doesn't do. It has an axe that takes an unreasonable amount of health off of you and it attacks way faster than it should. It's part bull, alright! You guys like instant kill spike traps? They really add some difficulty to a game especially when you can't see them because they're hidden under a fake floor, you know unless your game has a system that lets you save anywhere, and if it doesn't then it's just frustrating. Also frustrating: trying to do most things in this game. Opening chests which have items in them and sometimes explode and sometimes miraculously poison you, how!? Talking about individual levels in witchaven is almost as useless is talking about individual levels in Wolfenstein 3D because so much of it is a formless mess. "Mindless and formless!" To get from one to another you need to collect a pentagram to activate an exit gate. Sometimes you need keys like the brass key, the black key, the ivory key or the glass key...? Glass key. What the fuck? Sometimes I use the open door spell because fuck it. You have an auto map which you're gonna need because otherwise you'll have no idea where to go because important rooms are hidden behind fake walls or unmarked secret doors. This wall takes a brass key! Now it's just amateurs using a jank engine like try to imagine Capstone on the phone with Ken Silverman like, "Oh we want to make an action RPG like no one's ever done! But also we made Operation Bodycount!" "Uh, yeah, you know what? Hold on. I have another call." "I've got balls of steel!" "Oh and by the way, how's that William Shatner game going--" Traveling around the levels is fun, too, because anytime you're in water or lava you slow down so much that you have to bunnyhop to get anywhere fast, which is just great on those levels that require you to get through huge sections of lava. No, it's fine! This is all just fine! It's not as bad as TekWar, though I would welcome William Shatner coming back and voicing his frustration about how I killed too many goblins or something. There are walls that shoot fire at you but not like a wall that fires in a single direction, it aims at you wherever you are in a room, across the map sometimes. And you can't do a fucking thing about it except maybe waste a fire resistance potion. Aside from the stupid shit like that, once you get your footing in this game, it's not very hard. I was able to blast through it in about four hours. Probably because later in the game you get a magic sword that has such good durability you can use it through one or two entire maps and there's usually at least one in each ma-- hey, wait what? What the fuck? Somebody had to place that there, why would you do that? Anyway, it does good damage, hits reliably, best weapon. Forget about the fucking halberd that takes up the last slot, forget all these weapons. Honestly stick to the swords and the bow and you're good. A lot of the more common enemies go down with one or two hits from the magic sword. Some don't: guardians are floating heads that take entirely too much damage and sorta, kinda float when they're not being hit with an... arrow, uh... Oh, how could I forget the Capstone staple: monster face interrupting gameplay to jump-scare the player. Yes, just like in Corridor 7 and I realized something when I had to go back and capture footage of that game for this video: they stole the death sound from Alien. I still haven't seen any traced over doom sprites in Witchaven though. Will-o'-wisps are upon on will-o-wisps and... W H A T T H E F U C K !? These things are fucking garbage! You know what, fine I'll just use one of those spells that doesn't seem to be able to kill even low-level enemies. The spells... uh... T-The flying one is useful The manual says they're better after you level up. The fire spell and the magic arrow spell never really did much for me, I'm sure there's some trick to them that I don't understand or care about because you just... Hit it with sword, it's dead. You pick up magic scrolls like ammo. Yeah, this game doesn't use mana or anything, you get single-use Scrolls for magic. There's parts of this game that can fuck right off. There's one that requires you to know that there's a pit of spikes here and you'll die the first time to it This is in map 19. That's what the levels are called, there's no titles or anything, I... Look at that hype, kids, they've taken it from me. It's all I had! 200k Daikatana special huh-huh? I think I've lost all hope for everything. Again. So I'm flying over this pit of spikes through these arrows that do nothing so I can get to the pentagram to end the level, and the entrance closes on me while I'm killing monsters, and I gotta reload a save and do that again 'cause there's no way out besides that. You see this halberd? Look how fucking big it is! Look at that! It's twice the size you are! Maybe you can't tell cuz I'm flying which is not like flying in Duke 3D where it doesn't suck, it's not even like flying in Rise of the Triad or Heretic. It's just awkward and weird, didn't they know? Didn't they know? You know what this game is like? It's like a fine gruel, it's runny, you know, it's not bad enough to be as interesting as other Capstone games but it's still bad and it all kind of runs together after the first few levels. Oh no... you guys, are you seeing this? It's called a grey witch in the manual and it has some big old titties and I guess it's poisonous but like... uh... And you'd think that'd be the only horrible monster in this game with titties. You would be wrong! Capstone, the pinnacle of monster titties. Fuck this level, I'm not looking for a key. I'm casting a spell on the door. We're done. Oh, right and to cast spells you have to lower your current weapon, wait for the jazz hands and then it happens which is practical and totally worth the no enemies that get killed from the weak-ass spells. I still want to try the spells out at max level which is 9 and when you hit level 9 the game tells you The nuke spell works. I guess magic arrow works better than it used to. Fireball still sucks. No, wait, the splash damage is lasting longer than the fire animation. See, it's always fucking something, isn't it? Capstone, The pinnacle of IT'S ALWAYS F U C K I N G S O M E T H I N G ! ! ! Map 21 is the closest thing I think to a good level, where there's some nice detail-- oh what's that? It's hero time? This is made by Americans, but it feels like a bad translation Hero time! Where you pick up this helmet, it gives you some armor points, speeds up your attack, gives you double damage, so you don't even have to take a strength potion to plow through the monsters It's called a helmet in the manual, but every time you get it in game, it just says "Hero time!" Hey, holy shit, it's Illwhyrin. Oh, no, it's time to pay for...being a witch. Nah, never mind, she's gone...somehow. That's a shame. I got a better look at her in map 25, the last level. Are you fucking kidding me Capstone? You got bosses kind of right in corridor seven and then never again? Yeah, I have a strength potion going but come on. That's the fearsome witch that took over the world! I understand the part where she seduced a guy but I mean she's weaker than half the enemies in this game and I don't care if the manual says she's getting weaker or whatever, this is bullshit! It's another one of those what in the fuck things in a Capstone game like you wouldn't immediately set the health of the boss to something higher, anything? No? We don't do that here? What is this, wha-- "adventures eventually led", who wrote this!? That's it. That's all I have. They made a sequel. For once Capstone released a sequel to one of their games. It's called Witchaven 2: Blood Vengeance. Blood Vengeance! Nope! I was all ready man, I was pumped. I even got some updates for the old PC here just for Doom Eternal. 32 gig of ram, a GTX 10k RTX with 320 gig of VRAM, with all the teraflops, a top-secret liquid cooling system that's usually meant for fission reactors, a runic stone from the ruins of [REDACTED], a processor tied to the power supply with strands of John Romero's hair! I don't know why it's bleeding, that uh... I don't know the deal with that, but I'm ready. Oh shit, Doom 64 is getting new levels. Oh, oh my! (Can you EC P help to make CV-11 video sub?)
Witchhaven was fucking awesome at the time. First game I remember having 640x480 resolution. It looked SO good!
As someone who dabbled in Doom modding at the time those weapon attack sprites looked really cool to me. Unfortunately when I tried the game I realized it was absolute garbage after about 5 minutes.