I've played some damn cool doom mods over the last few months. Complex Doom (which you should all be aware of), Brutal wolf (not brutal wolfenstein - brutal wolf is a realistic brutal doom addon with tons of new enemies and highly realistic guns), and last but not least the latest mod I have tried... HXRTC project!
Plenty of mods have tried to do random spawning: The act of randomly replacing existing doom enemies/guns from the original game with new custom varients. A lot do it well.. A few don't. Some don't have enough new enemies or guns to make it interesting (like Project Brutality/etc). Some have way too much (Aeod) and some have a lot but there isn't anything really new about what they do (aka they only use beastiary enemies and guns - like Scalliano's 667 shuffle). I was a huge fan of the that 667 shuffle mod for years and I saw people trashing it on idgames a lot for stupid reasons. Anyway none of the above mentioned mods blend random spawning in with RPG elements. A few blend it in with realism (Complex Doom/Brutal Wolf). Some of those make it so hard it's unplayable by default. But none add RPG elements on top of that. Some mods have rpg elements but tend to have totally new levels to make that work... Well... I finally found a mod that does add new enemies and guns into any doom level and brings in fairly good rpg elements.
HXRTC mod is a doom mod for gzdoom only made by HexereticDoomer... It is a doom rpg mod. Yes... A doom rpg mod. But not just any Doom Rpg Mod, no. It's a doom rpg mod with TONS of new enemies and weapons and more! Some of these new enemies and guns are from the beastiary, others are not. Most of the guns are totally new. And all are well designed. They are overpowered as hell to make up for the difficulty curve early on as a low level character. They have secondary fires that can overpower many enemies, even strong ones. But the strong enemies can overpower you quite nastily in this, hell even weaker ones will at lower levels. All enemies do increased damage. Sometimes it's dramatic. I saw a guy doing epic 2 in this and he got 100 damage done to him by one revenant fireball. That's a bit extreme but it shows you how tough this mod can be... At first.
Good news is that only the beginning of levels are challenging in this mod (unless you play an insane wad that has a brutally hard start like sunder or something like that). As you level up your health increases per level. You also get bonuses to two stats, attack and defense. I have no clue what they do but they must help you somehow in attacking enemies (damage related and such) and taking less damage overall, respectively. The max health increases really show. Thanks to the new stackable health system the mod has. In normal doom your max health is 200. In this there is no max health! It can go as high as 3000-4000 and even higher! Thanks to the various classes of items (such as low level, medium, high, etc) you can get huge 200-500 boosts to your health with a single soul sphere. I got a soul sphere that boosted my health from 200 to 700 in an instant and all of the sudden became a doom god overnight...
There is a buying system in the mod. Random enemies drop gold coins and gems which give you money. At first you get small amounts but eventually you will be filthy rich no matter what. Random enemies also drop "trade droids" that sell a random item for a big price from 4000-20000 gold. If you are rich enough you can buy it. It allows yo to acquire anything in the game easily if you get lucky enough.. Vety rpg like...
Other cool bonuses you can get are the one that kicks in when you get damaged too much. It makes your guns do more damage then. It doesn't last forever but for a while you can pwn your enemies quickly. Factor in the insane max health and overpowered guns and you become an insanely overpowered space marine that can rip through an archvile horde in 10 seconds. It sounds ridiculously easy, and it is.... If you play easy maps....
The challenge comes in playing harder mapsets with this. This mod is perfect for slaughtermaps people!
I tried hell revealed map13 in this. I kicked ass in it. It was on easy. But it was very very easy. If you want to play harder megawads that have gigantic hordes of harder enemies and don't want to spend 30 minutes per level hiding from revenants while slowly killing a huge horde of them with rockets while dodging the 1 or 2 archviles that are mixed in over and over again for 10 minutes.... Then play them with this.Your overpowered guns and max health allow you to rip through them without taking cover. You become a doom god. It's a blast.
It's even a bigger blast with my 2 monster packs people!
I loved the mod so much that It eclipsed complex doom for me. So I decided to do something about the limited enemy types in the mod. By default there are lots of enemies that are new but a lot are missing that are on the beastiary. A few beastiary enemies are present but it seems the rest are freedoom rips and recolors... It desperately needs better new monsters. This is where I come to the rescue people. I made not just one monster pack for the mod. I made 2!
Monster pack 1 contains a lot of new enemies taken from various wads I made. Some of those are based on enemies from Doom Megawads that had dehacked enemies but they were converted to decorate by me.Also in the monster pack are doom 3 enemies recreated in doom 2 and doom 64 enemies as well...
Monster Pack 2 contains beastiary enemies not found in the original mod. A lot of them (around 25+) added into the game. Some ones from the beastiary that were really cool but not uses were the time imp, bruiser demon, azazel, rocket imp, uac bot, weakener, supreme fiend and others.. I brought all of these into HXRTC in monster pack 2.
Another addon I did for HXRTC is the enemy multiplier mod. Based on 10x.wad, the wad that multiplies the enemy count of doom levels by 10 using scripting tricks, this does the same but multiplies the enemy count of weak enemies by spawning multiple spawners of enemy classes by 10 and others by 5 or 3, depending on enemy difficulty. This 10x based mod requires both monster packs.
Other addons I like for the mod are JP hud (which displays an enemy health bar as you aim at enemies), beam flashlight (which gives you a half life styled flashlight, without it turning off when it runs out of power, footsteps mod and others. I made a pack of addons for this mod, and I am releasing them now... To kickstart this release campaign for releases for mods and wads I am making for doom and wolf3d.
Download the mod + my mosterpacks and other addons for the mod (which I didn't make) here!
Unzip to the folder you installed the original mod. Run loadhx.bat <name of wad> in a dos prompt or by typing "C:\<doom folder name>\loadhx.bat <wad name>" in the run box where <name of wad> is the wad you want to run and <doom folder name> is your doom 2 folder. <wad name> needs to be without the .wad extension! So type loadhx.bat mm2 to play mm2 then...
For doom 1 players run the loadhxd1.bat file instead. The usage is the same.
Final doom players I don't have batch files for you because I barely play it anymore...
People who want to run Doom 1 or 2 in the mod with the 10x enemy count increase can run
load10x.bat <wad name> (doom 2) and loadd110x.bat <wad name> (doom 1).
All the batch files load all of the addons including the monster packs
You need the latest gzdoom to play this mod!:
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