Description
This mod started with a question? “What if I WANT to fight the monsters?”
Let’s face it. Hexen II was an otherwise unfinished game. Combat is
stiff. Mana placement leaves ranged players hacking away with melee
weapons. Monsters are unpredictable and players are expected to kill
them in their first frame of animation in order to advance. It lacks
features and charm that heretic started but Hexen perfected.
Hexen II is an RPG, and a lot of effort went into making it a rather
beautiful experiment for its time. But RPGs differ from most games. In
action games, every monster is an obstacle to your goal. Fighting less
monsters is a faster path to success. Even Hexen used monsters as
obstacles. Hexen II created a dynamic where players should want to kill
monsters, but skipping monsters is the best path forward.
With that in mind, I started making the melee weapons more useful and
added a feature to heal on level gains. This made it FUN to kill
monsters. Not only do I need their blood soaked XP, I want to fight
them. I want to challenge myself. So from there I started to ask some of
the obvious questions. “Why do I need this tome to throw my hammer?”
and “Why doesn’t the necromancer raise the dead?”. “Am I playing the
next fusion of fantasy and first person shooters, or am I playing  a
re-skinned quake?”
Each feature of the mod stems from one of these fundamental
questions. Hexen II got so close to what the original Quake wanted to
be. Perhaps we can finish that work.