We remember the original Heretic and Hexen, but the same cannot really be said about their sequels.

Last year, Heretic and Hexen received a comprehensive overhaul thanks to Nightdive Studios, making these classics of the 2.5D FPS era much easier to access on PC. However, the sequels to Raven Software’s early shooters are not nearly as easy to play. Hexen II can still be purchased on Steam in its original, unremastered form, but Heretic II is only available as a boxed copy – or… from other sources.

Heretic II is the strangest entry in the entire Heretic/Hexen series. Unlike the others, the sequel is not an FPS, but a third-person action-adventure game released in 1998, and it received strong reviews at the time. Zed magazine, for example, gave it a 93, praising its large and complex level design along with its eerie 3D action.

Now there is finally a way to make the game easier to play on modern PCs. On GitHub, a programmer named MaxEd has created a reverse-engineered source port for Raven’s fantasy shooter, and it is basically a remaster in everything but name. Heretic 2R introduces a number of new technical features into the second adventure of the elven wizard Corvus. It adds widescreen support with automatic HUD scaling and unlocks the frame rate as well, theoretically up to 1000 FPS. Heretic 2R makes sure that the game’s special effects update at the proper rendering speed, improves level loading times, and applies numerous cosmetic enhancements so the game works the way we remember it, rather than the way it actually did.

You will need the original game updated to version 1.06, and that patch can be found on PCGamingWiki. After that, either overwrite the Heretic II binary files with the corresponding Heretic2R files, or copy the Heretic2\base folder into the Heretic2R folder without the .dll files. The big question, of course, is whether we will ever see a re-release of Heretic II. At the time of their original release, Heretic II and Hexen II were published by different companies, the former by Activision and the latter by id Software, but since both companies are now owned by Microsoft, it is entirely possible that these games could also receive remasters after Nightdive’s dual release of the original titles…

Let’s just hope Microsoft does not complain later.

Source: PCGamer, GitHub, PCGamingWiki