O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Just as it was the case with the original Doom titles, I’ve only played a little of Heretic in the 90s. My proper “formative” FPS experiences, I suppose I can call them that, happened later with Duke Nukem 3D and Half-Life. And for one reason or the other, I never had much desire to revisit the “Doom clones” from Raven Software, even as they became the “reliable mid-budget game developers” during the 2000s and 2010s, before being completely absorbed by Activision and turned into another machine to pump out Call of Duty content. Plus, I’ve heard horror stories about the level design of Hexen, so I wasn’t really keen to experience that either.
But, in what appears to have become a yearly tradition, Nightdive Studios have created yet another remastered release of the classic FPS titles that are running on some version of id Tech – Heretic + Hexen. “As you remember them” collection of both titles, both of their expansions and with two new expansions on top. And I’ve decided that it was finally time to experience what if Doom was fantasy.