Runner: ZeroMaster
Date: 20160724
IWAD: Hexen.wad
Difficulty: Skill 4
Source Port: Crispy Doom v3.2
Approximate Time: 26:45

I discovered a really insane trick for Hexen, the void glide!

I watched JCD and Ch0wW do coop runs for Hexen almost a week ago which convinced me to play this game for the first time in 20 years. I will admit that I never finished this game when I first played it, infact I never got past the first hub. While I wasn't stuck at any part for too long in my recent playthrough, it did strike me as something that would be difficult for a child, so I don't feel too bad about never completing this game back then.

The game is obviously very similar to doom, but there are several differences, like jumping. Very few skips have been found, most notably the one in the first Hub where you use jump to activate some switches, besides that there were very minor things. I know that void glides and fence clips are possible in doom, but because of the differences in Hexen I had no idea if anything like that would work in this game.

In my first playthrough I noticed the 32 unit gaps in Hub 3, so as an expert in doom glides I got them quickly. The glide and fence clip in Hub 3 were already discovered by JCD and Ch0wW and so that was one of the most recent tricks found.

I talked to Ch0wW when he mentioned that there was a skip in Hub 4, but they did not manage to do it very often. So I independently discovered the fence clip, and initially I thought I just needed to keep the Wings of Wrath artifact from the previous level to grab the key. It turns out that the game removes this item when you leave the Hub, so for a moment I figured I had wasted my time as I couldn't grab it in single player. Then I got the idea to use the Dark Servant artifact and jump on top of him, luckily that worked out perfectly!

Now for the most insane trick I'll ever discover, almost an entire skip of Hub 5!
Looking at the map geometry of the starting area for Hub 5 I thought maybe a void glide would be possible, but again because of differences in Hexen compared to Doom I was not able to do them. There are usually 3 things you need to check for when you want a void glide to be useful. The first one is if you can actually move anywhere once you get into the void, which in this case you can. The second thing to check is if you can actually do anything useful from the void, like in e2m6 for doom you can hit the exit switch. In Hexen there is no exit switch so I would need to clip back into the map, and by accident I woke up the monster by the exit using cheats and managed to use him to get back inside! I forgot about the Disc of Repulsion and without cheats instead managed to use the Porkalator through the wall initially, but I had to be in a very specific spot for that to work, the disc however is very easy to use to wake up the monster inside.

So with those being possible and the map geometry being there, I spent a few hours running against a wall trying different classes, different speeds, different angles with and without boots of speed and with and without jumping... and finally with monsters when I eventually managed to clip outside! I had no idea if it was even possible, but once I got it the first time, it was all a matter of finding the most consistent way of doing it. I use the Boots of Speed with a specific angle, jumping and monster position for it to work. Then I can simply exit the level, skipping right to the final level!

While it is possible to record demos in Hexen, there are several problems with it. Besides I didn't want to invest too much time into this so I went for an RTA time and just made the video directly while playing, so you will also notice me using both saves and loads.

This was my very first attempt, so needless to say it's completely terrible. However, almost 2 minutes faster than the previous record by Cubeface, so it was worth the upload :) You can tell I struggle even with my key bindings at times, I changed them around a bit since I didn't want to reach across my keyboard to change\use artifacts, but I didn't spend enough time with it.

I just wanted to show of these really cool tricks for Hexen, I don't think I will be doing more attempts as it would be best to spend more time optimizing the route first. The time it would take for me to properly do that would unfortunately be too much.

You might be wondering why I am looking at the minimap at around 16:00, the reason is the game will crash if I look straight forward on my way out the door! Also I have no idea why the intermission screens are messed up in crispy doom.