Doom teases a "Medieval Doom" forgetting they already did it 30 years ago

Recently it was revealed that ID and Bethesda have been working for a few years on a Doom prequel game that shows the origins of "Doomguy" in a medieval fantasy setting. A lot of people are hyped for this because it's a fun and exciting new way to reinvigorate and, admittedly, tired formula.

Here's the thing though, three decades ago they already pulled it off with one of a game series I used to play the unholy hell out of. In 1994, 14-year-old me (I'm old) found a game called Heretic.

Heretic was one of thousands of "Doom Clones" but this one was actually made BY the people who made Doom. It copied almost all the elements from Doom but in a fantasy setting swapping out the shotguns, machine guns, and rocket launchers with different spells. Instead of a shotgun, how about a crossbow that fires three blue energy bolts. My personal favorite was using the fire rod to shoot a flaming phoenix across the map into enemies like a rocket launcher.

It was also more than just a simple Doom Clone however. Heretic was one of the first FPS games to allow the ability to look up and down. It added inventory management in the form of health items, armor items, and a special item that allowed your weapon to gain a powerful secondary ability. It even added interactive environments complete with traps and things that would actively move your character.

In a time when every game on the PC was gun guy fights alien demons, it was so awesome to be able to get rid of the generic bullets and rockets of all of those games and take up spells and archery. I loved it.

Eventually Heretic spawned an unofficial sequel called Hexen (which was also super fun) and it's own official sequel called Heretic II which really fleshed out the story before ID unceremoniously just stopped making more. Which was a shame because I feel if they would have put more focus into this we'd see a very different gameplay market considering how much of gaming branched out from cloning Doom and various other major PC titles at the time.

I'm excited to see what Doom: Dark Ages will bring to the table, but it will never be able to hold a cursed ritualistic candle to the fun that was Heretic.