Forgotten FPS sequel Heretic 2 will get a ‘reverse-engineered sourceport’ that fixes bugs, improves the framerate and provides ‘plenty of beauty enhancements’

Basic boomer shooters Heretic + Hexen acquired a lavish overhaul courtesy of Nightdive Studios final yr, making these classics of the two.5D FPS period rather more accessible on PC. Taking part in the sequels to Raven Software program’s early shooters is just not so simple, nonetheless. Hexen 2 is available for purchase on Steam in its authentic, unvarnished kind, however the one solution to play Heretic 2 is to summon an evil demon and promote your soul for a boxed copy.

This can be a disgrace, as a result of Heretic 2 is essentially the most uncommon entry in the entire Heretic/Hexen coven. The sequel breaks rank with all of the others by being a third-person motion journey relatively than a devoted FPS. Launched in 1998, it acquired first rate evaluations on the time, praised for its massive, advanced degree design and grisly 3D motion.

There’s some excellent news for many who occur to personal a replica of Heretic 2 although. There’s now a solution to make it simpler to play on a contemporary PC. A programmer who goes by MaxEd on Github has created a “reverse-engineered sourceport” for Raven’s fantasy blaster, which is just about a remaster in all however title.

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Dubbed Heretic2R, the sourceport introduces a bunch of recent technical options to the elf wizard Corvus’ second journey. For starters, it provides widescreen assist with automated HUD scaling, and unlocks the framerate to a theoretical most of 1,000 FPS.

On prime of this, Heretic 2R ensures that in-game particular results replace on the applicable rendering framerate, improves map loading instances, and makes “plenty of beauty enhancements” in order that “the sport performs as you keep in mind it, not because it truly performed”. Which sounds very remaster-y to me.

Naturally, you want the unique Heretic 2 recreation knowledge with the intention to run the sourceport, particularly a replica up to date to model 1.06. I am unable to aid you with discovering a replica of the bottom recreation, however the patch is offered by way of PCGamingWiki. As soon as you’ve got bought the fitting model, you may both overwrite the Heretic 2 binaries with their Heretic2R equivalents, or copy the Heretic2base folder to the Heretic2R folder (although with out the .dll information).

The massive query, in fact, is whether or not or not we’re more likely to see Heretic 2 get a rerelease at any level. On the time of their respective releases, Heretic 2 and Hexen 2 had completely different publishers (the previous Activision, the latter id Software program). However since each firms at the moment are owned by Microsoft, a follow-up to Nightdive’s double-barrelled launch of the unique video games is not out of the query. If it does occur, we’ll possible discover out about it at QuakeCon, as that is when Nightdive has introduced all its different id Software program-related remasters, like Quake, Quake 2, and the primary two Doom video games.