#590: Witchaven duology
The pinnacle of mediocrity
Witchaven
Initial release: September 30, 1995
Platform: PC (DOS)
Developer: Capstone Software
Witchaven II: Blood Vengeance
Initial release: May 6, 1996
Platform: PC (DOS)
Developer: Capstone Software
The 1980s and 90s was a golden age for mediocre devs and publishers, from Acclaim with its mixed publication history (especially since their 1985 acquisition of LJN, a publisher of consistently low-quality tie-in games) to the fly-by-night Color Dreams with its unlicensed NES and SNES games and “Christian” spinoff Wisdom Tree, it seemed all you really needed to get in the game industry was a few thousand bucks and a dream, talent optional. Capstone Software were no different: founded in 1984 as a subsidiary of IntraCorp, a Miami-based games development and publishing house, Capstone almost immediately cemented a reputation for being super mid: the Trump Castle series of gambling games that promised The Ultimate Casino Gambling Simulation and fell far short of that lofty goal; by the early 90s, Capstone got into the boomer shooter business with Corridor 7 and Operation Body Count, early examples of taking an existing engine for a popular game — in this case Wolfenstein 3D — and making something shitty out of it. Of course, they didn’t stop there. Well before Duke Nukem 3D would drop onto store shelves, Capstone graced the world with the one-two punch of William Shatner’s TekWar and Witchaven, early adopters of Ken Silverman’s Build engine and both notorious for their mediocrity.
While TekWar certainly has its own reputation — and don’t worry, I’ll cover it eventually — today we’re going to talk about Witchaven and its sequel (the only sequel Capstone ever released, after Corridor 8 failed to materialize.) The big thing about Witchaven though is that — and this applies to both games — it is a thoroughly unimpressive product.
Let’s just be real here: Capstone’s reputation for mediocrity isn’t totally unearned, nevermind Civvie11’s burning hatred for the company. They had clear passion for their craft, pouring all their effort and heart into the games they made; but they lacked talent, and the way the company was run and the development times imposed on the team was detrimental to the final product. Games were produced on an extremely low budget (which makes you wonder how they got William Shatner to appear in TekWar — likely he had bills to pay too!) which meant that most of their staff were underpaid and inexperienced, forced to bang something together under a six-month deadline which meant no time for fine-tuning. The result is a legacy of games that aren’t unplayable, but definitely not good, charming in their way but never going to top anyone’s best-of list.
Witchaven and its sequel are pretty straightforward. The fantasy aesthetic here leans away from the slightly cartoony Heretic, or the moody and atmospheric Hexen; I would describe it as Frank Franzetta’s wet dream, which is only appropriate considering the cover art for both games uses artwork by Franzetta protégé Ken Kelly, also serving as the basis for much of the item and character design. Most of the textures seem to be either photo-sourced, or done in CGI; the same is true for the monsters and items, with the first game featuring goblins that are clearly clay models animated frame by frame. The overall result is fantastically ugly in that way only a 90s shooter could authentically achieve.
The main thing to remember is that both of these games aren’t quite like other games using the engine. No wise-cracking myrmidon hero here, no irreverent humor to stir up moral guardians. What you get instead is something between Hexen and, say, Ultima Underworld, an action dungeon crawler that plays more like a traditional shooter than an RPG. RPG elements are limited to gaining experience and thus growing stronger, but there are no stats to manage, no specializations — you use a variety of melee weapons as well as a bow, and an array of spells, which in any more mainstream RPG would be quite a powerful combination indeed.
At heart these games are dungeon crawlers; the second game even features a rather neat FMV of descending a circular staircase at the end-of-level stats screen, calling back the age-old trope of taking stairs down to the next floor (nevermind that you finish each level by bringing a pentagram symbol to a marked teleporter pad.) The RPG elements, the vague sense of design, the use of deathtraps and other annoyances, all speak to a background in tabletop, and indeed, there’s evidence that Witchaven was based on the tabletop work of Mike Pitts, who published several generic tabletop supplements under the name of Wyrm Works, one of which was naturally titled Witchaven. Some of the maps share similarity as well; even the first game’s story is similar to the premise of the supplement. Now, Mike Pitts is credited, under the heading of “story and original maps,” but I couldn’t tell you what the extent of his involvement was.
So all this sounds pretty cool, right? So what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that the games just aren’t very good. The main issue has to do with the combat. Being primarily melee focused, you’re going to be using an array of swords and other things to hit enemies with, but there’s little feedback that your weapons are doing much of anything, and to make matters worse, many of the weapons have differing animations that fire off randomly, making timing your attacks (that is, moving in as the weapon is swinging to reach an enemy’s hitbox as the animation reaches its apex) something of a crapshoot. The worst of these is the morning star, but nearly all of them have this problem. The magic system is also rather crap. You have a variety of spells of various amounts of usefulness — in the first game, some of these spells are level-locked, but the second game has no such limitation — but to actually use them, you must first revert to your fists before you can cast the spell. Some of these spells don’t have much feedback either — the nuke spell for example will sometimes feel like it’s not doing anything if it doesn’t kill its target outright.
The level design also plays a big role in the game’s poor reputation. I’ve seen it described on Doomworld as having “strong 1994 PWAD energy” and that certainly describes it well — most of the levels are, if not totally featureless, generally fairly abstract with no real sense of place; at most, they feel like generic Dungeons in the RPG sense. It’s worse in the sequel as the level design feels even more abstract despite the addition of sloped floors and other Build engine features that weren’t available in 1995. On top of that is the abundant use of death traps, often hidden under false floors. Now, this is a dungeon crawler staple, sure, but it can be frustrating to run into, especially in a game with the kind of ropey physics as Witchaven (to be fair, ropey physics is just a persistent feature of the Build engine.) One particular feature that I personally feel is bad design is that some levels absolutely require the use of certain spells or items to complete; it’s my feeling that no level should require finite resources to complete, in any game, but Witchaven violates that principle repeatedly, especially in the second game.
Oh, and did I mention that the game makes regular use of a jumpscare in the form of a weird demonic face (rendered lovingly in clay) that pops up in your face with a scare chord out of nowhere every few minutes? Yeah, that’s right, they figured that was such a great idea in Corridor 7 they might as well reuse it.
There’s a couple different ways to play Witchaven and its sequel these days. The games are available on Steam and GOG after languishing in abandonware hell for decades (IntraCorp having gone out of business just as Witchaven II was hitting store shelves) before being picked up by SNEG, a publisher founded by ex-GOG folk that mostly focuses on re-releases of old fantasy games of the 90s. You can play the games in DOSbox out of the box, but why would you do that to yourself? A better option would be to play it with EGwhaven, a bugfixed, DOS-native rewrite that fixes a lot of the game’s bugs. Or you could just use BuildGDX — this is what I did and I regret nothing. A note if you use BuildGDX (and maybe EGwhaven, I didn’t test) — the best way to get the complete experience is to open up the provided .iso (in the GOG version anyway, I’ve no idea what the file structure is like in the Steam release) and simply copy the entire thing to a folder and then dump BuildGDX in it. This way you get the cutscenes and whatnot.
Did I enjoy my time with Witchaven and its sequel? Not really. In fact I kinda hated it. But it’s an interesting piece of video game history, not just for its early adoption of the Build engine (perhaps my favorite game engine of the era — yeah, I said what I said!) but for its commitment to an idea that in more competent hands would probably have become a cult classic.
-june❤
Witchaven 1 and II can be purchased on Steam and gog.com.
Further information about the games can be found at ETTiNGRiNDER’s old website.
My individual reviews of the games are available at my boomer shooter blog here and here.
