Mysterious Forms of the Serpent Riders

Murals for The Serpent Riders from Hexen 2: Portal of Praevus. Thanks, anon.

"The Serpent Riders" trilogy is great. While I still haven't beaten Hexen 2, I'm having fun running around as Paladin on my quest to get through famous puzzles and defeat Eidolon. I really loved original Heretic & Hexen, even though I'm yet to proper beat additional episodes from Shadow of the Serpent Riders or Deathkings of the Dark Citadel. I wanted to talk about something related to this franchise for quite some time and I've got a decent topic for that.

Many players like to remark how D'Sparil is the only "Serpent Rider" in this demonic family while Korax himself looks more like a serpent and Eidolon prefers classic demon look. How did this happened? That's the question I want to poke by taking a look at each Serpent Rider and some random stuff in order to see what potentially could've been. Perhaps there's more to this than I'm about to present, but I think it's more than enough to make a point with my weird logic.

D'Sparil.

You would've thought that the antagonist of original Heretic shouldn't be a part of this discussion since, as I've noted before, his appearance is closest to the name of Serpent Riders, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In a way, at least. While D'Sparil is a worthy foe with his loyal green chaos serpent, his in-game appearance isn't exactly demonic. If anything, players that don't pay attention to the story (vast majority of them) might as well think that he's just some evil wizard and not demon.

Cover of the Hyper, Issue 16. Taken from Retro CDN.

Even in Heretic 2's introduction D'Sparil kept his humanoid form with obscure hooded face and some minor differences in design, like blue eyes instead of red. That example is actually a nice touch since now I would like to bring up sixteen issue of Hyper, an Australian video game magazine. I became aware of it thanks to a tweet shared on Dwars' Discord server, after which I searched for its actual scan on Internet. My efforts were eventually successful thanks to both Internet Archive and Retro CDN.

That issue was released March 1995, before the release of Hexen: Beyond Heretic or even  Shadow of the Serpent Riders. The original game was released and the ending screen with Heresiarch(?) was even featured there. Even though D'Sparil here does look cool and reinforces the somewhat popular idea I'll mention later on, I can't state if this art is official. There's a chance, but this cover of Hyper might as well be the only art of his face. Meanwhile, in a bonus material to Brian Raffel's Interview in Inky's Hexen II Mapping Corner, Michael Raymond-Judy does mention that the idea for three Serpent Riders "came mainly from D'Sparil".

Korax.

Let's talk about Heresiarch and why many people fight that he originally was meant to be Korax instead of a dark "proto-serpent" form he got at the end. Or the end boss of first Hexen game was actually meant to be a chaos serpent of another Serpent Rider, that's also  a common idea. Trivia for Heresiarch on Doomwiki points out a few of the observation that point towards the idea of "original Korax":

• Appearance of Heresiarch in a throne room of sorts where he watches Corvus through what might be an early iteration of the Chaos Sphere.

• Heresiarch's death animation also matches the D'Sparil's.

• Hexen's source code and game data refers to Heresiarch as "sorcerer", similarly to D'Sparil in Heretic.

• Korax's wall texture that appears throughout the game also resembles Heresiarch.

Besides that, I would like to mention that there's a clear difference between the two of them as in-game bosses. Heresiarch just seems more finished, fun and challenging to fight as opposed to the actual "big bad" of Hexen. Both of them still melt in gas clouds from fléchette if you play the best class in the game, but Korax is just too dependent on his lair/arena in Dark Crucible which provides 2/3 of his attacks. While Heresiarch is independent and can be a significant threat in many places, which is why he appears twice in the base game and then return in Deathkings.

What happened then? There's likely a combination of two things. Perhaps developers of Raven Software thought that identical end bosses felt too cheap and similar to D'Sparil. While Heresiarch look would've contributed to the overarching narrative of the trilogy, that's not something that would've interesting most gamers at the time (or even now) who just wanted to play some good first-person shooter. On top of that, many people suggest that Hexen had a rushed development and provides various glitches and other finding from the game files like cut maps. You can read about some of them in this Doomworld topic.

Conclusion.

Well, there's really nothing to talk about when it comes to Eidolon, so I guess it's time to wrap it up. The last and strongest Serpent Rider is also the most consistent one: his hand during a chess play was exposed in Hexen's ending and the sequel unleashed the devil himself on Thyrion and unlikely companions that defended it. Nothing remains, besides the room for good (and bad, considering modern times) old speculation.

Assuming that the Hyper art is canon and Heresiarch was the original Korax, how that would've affected Eidolon's physical form? I have an idea for it that sounds just nerdy enough to be real: RGB, the color model! All colors on computer monitors are deriving from the three primary colors. Since D'Sparil is blue and Korax is red, Eidolon would've just had to be green to complete that circle. And I'm more than convinced that game developers from the 90s would've made such a reference because it sounds cool and fun.