Star Wars: Darkish Forces, the primary Star Wars FPS and predecessor to the Jedi Knight collection, has lastly gotten the ZDoom (opens in new tab) remedy. Builders luciusDXL, winterheart, and gilmorem560 have launched the 1.0 construct of the Drive Engine (opens in new tab), an open supply reverse engineering of Darkish Forces (and shortly, its lesser identified cousin, Outlaws) that permits you to play it with fashionable conveniences and at excessive decision.
Launched in 1995, Darkish Forces is firmly of the “Doom Clone” period of first-person shooters. It has that slippery, speedy boomer shooter motion, a terrific weapon choice, and sprawling, mazelike ranges, but it surely actually innovates in its presentation. Darkish Forces nails the music, sound results, and look of Star Wars whereas additionally telling a fairly in-depth story about Han Solo-alike Kyle Katarn doing battle with the Imperial Remnant.
Today, Darkish Forces is considerably overshadowed by its sequels within the Jedi Knight collection, which see Kyle grow to be a Jedi and have interaction in what remains to be the best-feeling lightsaber fight anybody’s ever accomplished in a recreation. Outlaws (opens in new tab), in the meantime, is a western-themed Lucasarts FPS that reuses Darkish Forces’ authentic Jedi Engine. This shared DNA will let the less-fondly remembered Outlaws experience Darkish Forces’ coattails into the twenty first century with solely a bit of additional effort from the Drive Engine workforce.
In its 1.0 launch, the Drive Engine enables you to play Darkish Forces to completion with a extremely customizable collection of quality-of-life options like mouse look and excessive decision help. The Drive Engine additionally now helps GPU rendering versus the unique’s archaic software program renderer, and includes a mod loader for previous and future user-made creations. The Drive Engine workforce has indicated that full Outlaws help will come at a later date within the mission’s 2.0 replace.
Set up of each the Drive Engine itself and mods is a snap. You may nonetheless want a replica of Darkish Forces to begin—it is not freely out there and included with the supply port like Bungie’s Marathon is with Aleph One—and you could find it on Steam (opens in new tab) or GOG (opens in new tab) for $6 often (on the time of writing it is on sale for $2 on GOG!) After downloading the mod, working the Drive Engine executable will routinely detect your set up path for the sport.
You may simply drop any user-made maps or tweaks within the “Mods” listing of the Drive Engine, and choose which of them to load from an choice on the Drive Engine’s startup display screen. I grabbed the fan mission Among the many Shadows: Fortress Quadrigon from the DF-21 (opens in new tab) repository of Darkish Forces mods and had it up and working in seconds. Like with GZDoom (opens in new tab) or Aleph One (opens in new tab), the Drive Engine opens up an entire world of free FPS ranges along with letting you extra comfortably and conveniently play an outdated basic.