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PayPalA lot of classic games have received source ports over the years, and now it's time for Heretic II with Heretic2R bringing some enhancements. Right now it seems to run with Proton on Linux, but may need some work to get a Native Linux build going.
This is one I missed from my earlier gaming years, being only 10 at the time it was originally released so it's nice to see it receive some love from the community that I might be able to play it on a modern system soon. From reading up on it, this one was a little more unusual with it changing the series into third-person and it was considered a commercial failure.
Features of Heretic2R include:
- Widescreen support (with automatic HUD scaling).
- Rendering framerate decoupled from network packets sending rate (with theoretical maximum of 1000 FPS).
- OGG music playback.
- Most of special effects are updated at rendering framerate (instead of 20 FPS).
- Improved map loading times.
- Lots of cosmetic improvements (so the game plays as you remember it, not as it actually played).
- Many bugfixes.
Direct Link
You can find it on GitHub under the GPL license. You do need a copy of the Heretic II data files from the game to work with this.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: Jarmerhuh interesting. I thought these old heretic / hexen games all ran on the doom engine.Heretic 1 and Hexen 1 do. Heretic 2 and Hexen 2 run on id Tech 2.
edit: I might need to replay Heretic 2 with this... 😆
Last edited by neolith on 31 Mar 2026 at 2:19 pm UTC
Gamepad support is currently not implemented.I hope it will be. I would love to try this out on the steam deck.
Lots of cosmetic improvements (so the game plays as you remember it, not as it actually played).
Caldathras 2 hours ago
this one was a little more unusual with it changing the series into third-personI did not know this. I'd always assumed it was first-person, like its predecessors.
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