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Tag: Nightdive Studios

  • Heretic + Hexen: Raven Software’s classics get the Nightdive makeover.

    Heretic + Hexen: Raven Software’s classics get the Nightdive makeover.

    Updated 8/21/2025 with clarification and some new information.

    Last year, Bethesda surprised us with Yet Another Remaster of Doom. Titled DOOM + DOOM II, this one replaced the 2019 remaster done by Nerve Software with a from-the-ground-up approach by Nightdive Studios, which have become the go-to developers for FPS remasters these days. It even came with a brand new Doom episode made by members of id, Nightdive, and MachineGames called Legacy of Rust, which I wrote about last year. I jokingly asked when they’re gonna tackle Raven Software’s Heretic and Hexen next. Well, I got my wish.

    Back to back badassery.

    Heretic + Hexen – keeping the naming convention from DOOM + DOOM II – is a complete overhaul of Raven’s two medieval action games from 1995-96, pushing the Doom engine to its limits at the time. New levels, new art, a vault of concept art from the previous games, and of course, a newly arranged soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult. (there’s the option to revert to Kevin Schilder’s original soundtracks if you wish, but I like Hulshult’s work when he’s not doing generic metal covers of game music, this remaster included.) This also marks the first time in over 25 years that you can play Heretic and Hexen on modern platforms with all the niceties that come with it.

    This also means Nightdive has officially remastered every major commercial Doom engine game from the 90s: Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, and Strife. Congratulations, y’all. Now if you wanna count stuff like Chex Quest and HacX, you’re more than welcome to, but I’m excluding those here, as Chex Quest was a free* product and HacX has been made freeware by the developers for a while now. I can’t see a remaster of either of these, though I wouldn’t mind one for Chex Quest, just for laughs.

    When DOOM + DOOM II came out,I said that they “didn’t need to do this,” that the Nerve Software remaster was perfectly fine for what it set out to do: Make it so you could play Doom on modern devices, without the need for DOSbox wizardry. Anyone who’s diehard into Doom know they can just drag DOOM2.WAD into a source port of choice – GZDoom, dsda-doom, Doomsday, you name it – and play.

    A screenshot I took earlier this year while playing Hexen through dsda-doom, which was the ideal Hexen experience until now.

    Heretic and Hexen, however, are different. Heretic never left its DOS origins, and the last time Hexen got home ports was the mid 90s, on the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64. (From what I’ve heard, the PS1 port is the worst, while the N64 port was the best.) While Doom had been ported to every platform under the sun, these two games haven’t. So this is the chance for a new audience of folks dealing with annoying Iron Liches spitting tornadoes, or get annoyed at trying to find the hidden switches in Winnowing Hall.

    Enhanced, but these guys are still as obnoxious as ever.

    If you’re familiar with Nightdive’s remaster work – They’ve remastered System Shock 2, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Blood, Quake and Quake II, Powerslave, Killing Time, Rise of the Triad, among countless others – you know what to expect here. Polishing up the original game assets, updating levels for clarity and fun factor, and, especially in more recent remasters, a new set of levels often made by Nightdive themselves. Heretic + Hexen have all of those in spades, with a bunch of enhanced features.

    Speaking of enhanced features, let’s talk about the updates the port brings. Nightdive updated all the maps from both games to be a bit nicer looking, moving them a bit more closer to “modern” custom Doom map sensibilities. This surprised me to find out during Heretic, as I was trying to find the secret levels in episode 2 (Hell’s Maw) and episode 5 (The Stagnant Demesne), only to realize that the regular way you’d discover them in the original game wouldn’t work here. That’s when I discovered they updated the maps as well.

    I liked whoever at Raven thought that Episode 3’s theme should be “backdrop of a seafood restaurant.”

    The last time I played Heretic in its entirety – the three episodes plus the two bonus episodes from the Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion – was 2016, so I just figured the levels just looked like that. I should’ve expected this, as that seems to be their MO with every remaster. Well, barring DOOM + DOOM II, they treat all 68 levels of those two games as sacred and don’t touch a thing on them besides maybe fixing a bug or two.

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  • A little thing about Legacy of Rust, the new Doom level set.

    A little thing about Legacy of Rust, the new Doom level set.

    They really didn’t need to do this.

    In 2019, Doom got a remastered port handled by Nerve Software, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was serviceable enough. It got a few updates that fixed a few of the major problems – including requiring Bethesda.net to login – but it was fine. A perfectly playable version of the 1993 classic.

    DOOM + DOOM II is a bit of an unwieldy title, tbh

    Five years later, at Quakecon 2024, they remastered Doom again. This time handled by Nightdive Studios, the wizards who remastered a whole bunch of games, from Turok to Quake II. This time they added support for Boom, a Doom source port framework that added a whole bunch of new features and expanding older ones. But they weren’t done with that. Of which has become tradition with all id Software remasters by Nightdive at this point, they added a new episode called Legacy of Rust.

    Mild spoilers for Legacy of Rust within.

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  • Strife: The Outlier of the Doom Engine.

    Strife: The Outlier of the Doom Engine.

    Doom is over 25 years old. The tale of id software’s first-person shooter causing a new wave of clones and derivatives has been told to death. But id wasn’t just content with making games. They were willing to license their technology out to other developers who would add their own spin and magic to it, sometimes those games becoming big on their own. For example, Raven Software ended up using id’s Doom engine to greatness with Heretic and Hexen using id’s fancy engine. The two were practically inseparable for 15 years after that, using id’s engines for their games for a very long time.

    But there was one other major game that used that engine. One that had a troubled development due to a multitude of factors. You could say they had a bit of strife. The result is one of the more ambitious games made on that old Doom engine.

    Not to be confused with that other Strife, the MOBA.

    Enter Strife. A first person shooter that had a troubling development cycle and came out to little fanfare in 1996. Why did this game get thrown into the world of abandonware? Let’s find out.

    Strife had a rough history: Developer Rogue Entertainment consisted of ex-Cygnus Studios people after wanting to make a new game after 1994’s Raptor: Call of the Shadows. The developers had conflicts with their boss, and decided to take their ideas elsewhere. After co-operating with people at id, Rogue got a deal with publisher Velocity Inc, makers of the JetFighter games and Battlezone clone Spectre, to publish their new project. Strife ended up releasing in May 1996, to passable reviews.

    Problem was that by 1996, old “Doom clones” like Strife looked incredibly dated compared to the mind-blowing 3D visuals of Descent and id Software’s upcoming Quake, which came out a month later. This, combined with publisher Velocity folding not long after Strife’s release, meant that the game was basically dead in the water, and mostly forgotten by the general PC gaming populace.

    more like “Thanks, die”

    Rogue would eventually bounce back, making expansions for id’s Quake and Quake II – Dissolution of Eternity and Ground Zero, respectively – and helping out on a former id Software employee’s pet project: American McGee’s Alice. In an ironic sense of history repeating, Rogue itself would dissolve in 2001 as the CEO left to go join EA, resulting in the remaining people forming Nerve Software, which is still around making games today.

    Back to Rogue’s debut. I found Strife thanks to the now-defunct Home of the Underdogs, which was a common go-to spot for so-called “abandonware” titles. (Other games I found thanks to Home of the Underdogs include Blood II: The Chosen, which I wrote about back in 2012, and the amazing System Shock 2.) At the time, I had made a good amount of progress into the game itself, but at some point, I forgot what I was supposed to do and ended up bumping around in a sewer area repeatedly before giving up and moving on to other games.

    After not touching Strife for so long, I decided to give it another try, nearly 15 years later, and see if it was as good I remember it. Turns out it’s… alright.

    Well, it’s a better remaster title than the dorky “Darksiders Warmastered Edition” that THQNordic was doing for a while…

    Around 2014, some ex-Rogue developers had the rights to the game and went to developer Nightdive Studios to make a remastered version of the game. The result was Strife: Veteran Edition (available on Steam and GOG). Nightdive’s remaster was reverse-engineered by some modders in the Doom scene that are still with Nightdive to this day, remastering games like System Shock and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (something I wrote about back in 2017), and as of this writing, are currently hard at work remastering Doom 64, SiN, and, oddly, Shadow Man. At least they’re broadening their horizons, I guess.

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  • Budget Shooter Theater #3: Turok: Dinosaur Hunter: The 2015 Remaster

    Budget Shooter Theater #3: Turok: Dinosaur Hunter: The 2015 Remaster

    Budget Shooter Theater was not going well. After playing the amazing Doom, I tried to play through the dreadful PC version of James Bond 007: Nightfire. That did not go well. In the only time I ever bothered to, I rage-quitted and moved onto the next game. The Decision Wheel gave me Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

    As opposed to other games on that list — which include future entries like Serious Sam and and Christopher Brookmyre’s Bedlam, this was one chosen by me because I wanted to pad the Wheel with options until there were enough people requesting stuff that it wasn’t necessary. I also was itching to try this game for a while, so now felt like a good time as any.

    turok-header

    The version I played is the recent remaster on Steam, co-developed and published by Nightdive Studios. Nightdive’s been hard at work re-releasing older DOS and Windows 95-era games and making them work in modern machines (or at least putting a DOSBox wrapper with it). Most notably is reviving the long-dormant System Shock franchise, and even trying their best to bring No One Lives Forever back from the dead, among other notable revivals. Naturally it makes sense to bring back Turok.

    20170107161044_1
    Of course there would be a literal maze in a game like this…

    The Turok game franchise is mostly known as a console series, where the main games were on Nintendo 64. However, the first Turok as well as its sequel Seeds of Evil did get PC releases, but rather than reverse engineer the game to work on modern machines like System Shock 2 or Aliens vs. Predator Classic 2000, the game’s assets — models, maps, sounds, and music — were ported to a proprietary engine known as the “KEX” engine. The engine is the same engine that handled the Doom 64 source port known as Doom 64 EX and would basically be the engine framework for Nightdive’s games going forward. As a result, this remaster is a mix of old and new: It’s like the console game, but not an exact port of the PC game. This might piss off some purists, but not me.

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