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It's Time For the Descent Games Return
An anonymous reader writes "Gamers of a certain age will probably remember Descent, a game that combined first-person shooters with flight sims in a way that has never really been replicated. GameSpot has an article calling for a new entry in the Descent series, and it reminded me of all the stomach-churning battles I had as a kid (when the game wasn't bringing my 33MHz 486 to its knees). 'Here's where modern gaming innovations make Descent an even more tempting reboot. From the two-dimensional mines of Spelunky to the isometric caves of Path of Exile, procedurally generated levels help deliver fresh experiences to players in a number of genres. The mines of Descent would be perfect candidates for such creation, and they wouldn't have to be limited to the metallic walls and lunar geology of past Descent games.
Imagine exploring organic tunnels carved by some unknown alien creature, or floating past dazzling crystalline stalactites in pristine ancient caves. Perhaps the influences of Red Faction and Minecraft could also come into play as you bored your own shortcuts through layers of destructible sediment. All of Descent's dizzying navigation challenges could be even more exciting with the immersive potential of a virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift or the Sony Morpheus. Feeling the mine walls close in on you from all sides could get your heart racing, and turning your head to spot shortcuts, power-ups, or delicate environmental details could greatly heighten the sense of being an explorer in an uncharted land.'"
Imagine exploring organic tunnels carved by some unknown alien creature, or floating past dazzling crystalline stalactites in pristine ancient caves. Perhaps the influences of Red Faction and Minecraft could also come into play as you bored your own shortcuts through layers of destructible sediment. All of Descent's dizzying navigation challenges could be even more exciting with the immersive potential of a virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift or the Sony Morpheus. Feeling the mine walls close in on you from all sides could get your heart racing, and turning your head to spot shortcuts, power-ups, or delicate environmental details could greatly heighten the sense of being an explorer in an uncharted land.'"
I loved playing Descent. We had our first LAN party back in the day with that game.
It already has, it is called Retrovirus.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
http://www.minerwars.com/
I liked Descent a good deal, of course. But, I really wish Descent: Freespace would make a comeback.. those were and still are some of my favorite games ever made.
Doom had a ~2x speed movement bug along North-South walls when moving forward and right and looking at a 45 degree off axis.
Descent had it it 3 dimensions. (Look, down, right, move up, left and forward)
Part of the charm of older games were the glitches that made the difficult to master but took gameplay to a whole different level.
The Descent games were very descent games.
in VR.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Except was always lost, having no sense of up and down has scarred me for life.
So bring on a modern GPU powered rift version.. always assumed someone would go there and I would buy it.
Speaking for all of us old fogies who got left behind by modern gaming due to our less than stellar reflexes and spatial awareness ... absolutely no to this.
I'd probably hurl within about the first two minutes, Descent used to make me dizzy as it was. In a VR headset? It would get messy real fast.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
For those of us who still have the binaries around, the D2X-XL project (http://www.descent2.de/d2x.html) has ported the game engine to OpenGL and has added a number of great things to the project. It supports more players, TCP/IP, and tons of additional features. As with any community project (or commercial project recently) there are bugs, but some of the builds have been quite good. I encourage fans to check out and contribute to the project :)
I would absolutely play it more if there were a community of descent players ready to go online against (a matchmaking system, for example).
That was a good game too. I got way too attached to my troops and would reload the level as soon as any of my veteran troops died. Loved those fragile little sappers.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
It's available on Steam for cheap, and it is very much a 3-axis Descent-type game. The premise is different, and absurd, but it's fun and gave me a reason to acclimate to dual thumb-sticks again.
I played through Decent and Decent 2. Decent 2 had the helper that would help you navigate through the mazes. (Find power-up, find key, find goal, find boss). I like the idea of a end-boss that chips away at the environment around you as you try to fire and dodge. I also played both Decent:Freespace (1 and 2) games and thought they were the best PC space fighter games created.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
If anyone wants to "bring back" Descent, they need to look at Descent 3 to understand why the series tanked in the first place.
I agree that the game premise is fantastic (I loved Descent 2 LAN play), and I have long dreamed of a union of Descent's gameplay with something like a larger-scale version of Jumpgate. Have rival corporations with mines located in multiple star systems, along with orbital stations, commerce planets, and so forth (okay, so we have some elements of Tradewars in here as well). The goal of a player who runs a corporation is to gain advantage over rival corporations in any way necessary. The goal of a Material Defender/Offender is to do the work of the sponsoring corporation(Offenders destroy rival property, Defenders defend corporate property or deals with automated incursions, like the "virus" that caused mining equipment to go mad in the first two games). Don't like your sponsor's contract? Sign on with another corp; however, beware of what happens to your rep if you violate the standard mercenary contract too often . . .
Or, maybe you could be an anti-corporate anarchist. I envision them using patched-together "transforming" mech/ship vehicles (think Macross?) that look like punk rockers in mech mode with crazy weapons like electro-whips (think Whiplash from Iron Man 2) or versions of the Helix Cannon that shoot uncontrolled bursts of death in unpredictable patterns (It's gonna hit somethin!). Metal mohawks, grafitti tattoos, speaker systems blaring noisy music during battle, stuff like that. Your goal would be to destroy all corporate profits. Lots of freedom of gameplay, but fewer supporting resources.
That aside, Descent 2 really needed some gameplay updates that 3 never brought to the table. 3 choked on the weapons (at least the ones I remember in beta were pretty weak), questionable netcode, and non-twitchy play. Any new Descent game needs a twitch element: namely, the option to make directional thrusters ultra-sensitive for fast acceleration in any direction. The booster from Descent 2 needed to be adapted to run in any direction with a longer burn time. I would totally love to see a Descent game (NOT a Freespace game) where a mine incursion starts in outer orbit. Penetrate orbital defenses, fight your way through surface missile batteries/AA batteries/rival drones, blast your way into the mine complex, fight off mine equipment and intrusion countermeasures, take out the reactor, and then get the hell out, fighting your way through all the same nonsense.
Raise the terminal velocity in atmoshpheric settings (that is, on a planet), and lift the velocity cap in space for truly insane speeds. Coordinate your planetary incursions with fleet actions from your sponsor. Give the bigger munitions (Earthshakers, etc) different settings (space, surface, mine) so that the blast could scale upward depending on the scope of the environment. An Earthshaker in "space" mode should be big enough to punch a whole in a fleet blockade. Such munitions should come at a huge cost to anyone who wants to use them, though.
Done right, I would look at the new Descent gameplay as being similar to some of the more frantic battle scenes from Gundam Wing . . . action so fast and furious that the pilot would be at risk of suffering cardiac arrest just from the g forces involved. High level play in Descent 2 was usually very precise, but not terribly fast-paced. Change that.
... because gaming just isn't fun until you've managed to get the guy in the next cubicle to have a vertigo attack.
(the problem was, he got over it after a while, and would come back to really crush everyone in our office)
But watching someone play would set most people off, so it wasn't safe to play during lunch (when people might walk by and see your screen); we'd have to wait 'til after hours.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
since Descent, there have not been a lot of games where you have to navigate through 3d space without a sense of "up" or down". loved it, back in the day - gimme a kickstarter-remake to back. a new game would be even better (as long as they don't dumb down the level-design)
I would love doing the trench run with a Rift on. But like Descent, you really need a joystick to play it properly. Those used to be a standard accessory. Now they're not.
20 years and I can still recall that annoying screech followed a moment later by an instant hit from those vulcan-carring robots.
i love descent, and i love that it's now software libre. i hope the guy who maintains d2x has stopped being an idiot by including patched versions of standard libraries such as libsdl without providing an option to replace them and forcing the patched versions to overwrite pre-installed software, but yes - awesome.
the thing about descent was that it was the first game with 6 degrees of freedom. i actually bought a special joystick that was capable of dealing with it (one designed for flight simulators) and after 2 to 3 weeks of practicing i was competent at side-motion circular slides firing at a target at the centre. the first 2 weeks were spent mostly getting motion sickness and having the nose of the craft bashed against a corner :)
it was also fun to watch spectators swaying from watching the screen! but, again, after a couple of weeks you got used to it, both as a player and as a spectator.
yeah - to those people who set up LAN parties: i hear ya :) i did the same. i think the lowest spec i got away with was a 486 SX 25 with 12mb of RAM, setting the screen to 320x240 and it was just about tolerable. i had to use 10-Base-T with terminators for goodness sake - what the heck i was doing with 5 networked computers in my house back in 1996 with just a 28kbaud modem i _really_ don't know!
so yes, absolutely: descent (the software libre version *or* a commercial version) gets my vote... *as long as* it has a community portal similar to that of Dark Reign, with a chat room so that people can meet other players, set up a match and play. that is bizarrely what's missing from bzflag: although bzflag has an in-game chat it doesn't hatve out-game community chat, very odd.
also, it would be awesome to see planetary-surface action as well, not just in mines (no matter how large). i always felt a little claustrophobic and the attack vectors would be very different in free space... interesting to think about the possibilities here, hmmm :)
I remember buying an S3 Virge DX with Decent as a pack-in. I do believe this was the only game that ever got 3d acceleration on the Virge. Yes, it was a blast to play. I would really really really like to see the original Quake remade with a modern 3d engine, but otherwise completely the same down to the physics. The ecosystem that sprung up around that game was marvelous.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Still wait for decent games to make a comeback.
A joystick was never "a standard accessory" in the sense that it was bundled with a substantial number of pre-built PCs. Nowadays you can pick up an Xbox 360 controller at a pawn shop for $15. If it's wireless, you'll need a receiver, but if it's wired, it'll Just Work with any game that uses a joystick. Or if you want a more traditional flight sim style joystick, you can use a gameport joystick from a charity shop with a gameport-to-USB adapter.
Agreed. When "All Night Long" by Lionel Richie comes on the radio, I now can't hear the pseudo-African simlish halfway through that song without thinking of the way that voice says "multiple fire rocket launcher".
But seriously, Forsaken fixed the roll confusion (upside-down play) that plagued many Descent players. And if you like the N64 controller, you can plug it into a USB adapter and use it with many PC games.
Remember, descent is the highest form of patriotic.
Loved this game and would definitely play the reboot were it to come to fruition! Imagine what it would be like today with the tech we have now; how would it change and should it?
"I think you know what I'm talkin' about, Mr. President; We're gonna kill us a mummy!" - Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley
At least one of the Descent games was one of the first games to do stereoscopic 3D well. The displays flickered back then with only 30 frames per eye, but it was still a great experience. I'd love to play a Descent game with modern graphics and 3D support.
With all of the Descent love, I can't believe nobody has mentioned Heretic yet. I only played either of them a handful of times (I was more of an RTS guy than an FPS guy, so Starcraft/Red Alert/Warcraft II was more my thing), but my buddies played both. Ahh, the good old days, when Windows 2000 was fresh and new.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
I have been playing quite a bit of D2X-XL recently, an excellent Descent 2 mod with oculus rift support. It all comes together very nicely in VR.
(I didn't have a chance to try the earlier versions of Descent VR in the 90s).
Vanilla versions of Descent 2 (and Descent 1 I think) had VR support in them. I found a second-hand pair of Sega LCD shutter glasses that I rigged up to work with it for 3D, but Descent had head tracking support for full VR headsets too. Unfortunately my old LCD glasses can no longer work, as the polarization of them isn't compatible with the polarization of modern LCD screens.
With Decent you really needed TWO joysticks to play properly. We bought splitter cables and used the offhand joystick to control thrust (forward and backward on the top buttons) and strafing in any variable direction. With this setup you had a terrific edge over anyone of equivalent skill who did not have it.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
The first 3d accel game I played, back in the late 90s. Totally awesome textures. Of course back then it was a custom binary... and I got better performance running in s/w mode due to the S3V being long in the tooth.
Still, awesome, +1, would buy again.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I would constantly get lost in the original game and thus didn't enjoy it much. I'm horrible with real life directions, so I don't think my brain is wired well for full 3D where you need to keep track of even more.
Others have already mentioned Retrovirus (which look quite much like Descent):
http://store.steampowered.com/...
(Damn that was expensive, guess I saw it in some cheapish bundle.)
The game I'm thinking off though is Strike vector:
http://store.steampowered.com/...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
This was in the $10(?) third tier in the Humble Daily Flying Bundle.
Personally I've never enjoyed Descent even though it looked cool. Just annoying.
This game however looked cool, fun and somewhat new.
(I have no idea whatever it's possible to move around upside down in natural selection, isn't shown here at least: http://store.steampowered.com/...)
Sadly, the SpaceOrb never really caught on (too hard for many to use so I heard, or at the other end of the spectrum purists preferred mouse and kbd). I have about 4 of them, they are old school RS232 9600 baud, far behind the curve for plugging into the HID USB world we live in now.
I preferred Descent: Freespace and Freespace 2.
... but the real problem was that Descent 3 was not as good as the prior 2. Descent really shined in multiplayer over LAN/Kail/Kahn. Back when I was playing with friends Descent was eclipsed by quake and other first person shooters because they were easier to play and the single player portion of the game always had serious issues.
I don't have confidence any reboot would understand why Descent 3 failed in terms of single and multiplayer. The developers of the original descent didn't even understand what made descent great then that doesn't bode well.
Not long ago I found Descent in a thrift store. With fond high school memories I HAD to buy it. The engine was open sourced, you are supposed to be able to compile it on a newer OS and just use the data files from the CD/floppies. I found a Gentoo ebuild for it. Unfortunately all I get is segfaults :-(
I guess I could just try running the original executable in WINE. I was hoping the open source version would have better networking capabilities (Internet vs LAN)
Was a great game.
It would be fantastic if the Descent game engine could be open source, if it isn't already.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I played so much Descent 1/2/3 back in the day. My first LAN parties were all descent. We took over the school computer lab in the evenings and played there too. For Descent3, I participated in the Descent3 $50,000 contest, won a bunch of smaller prizes but not the big one (flew to San Jose from Canada). I'd love another official entry in the series. The fan made ones are OK but don't quite feel right. I'll have to bring my old Sidewinder 3dpro or Precision pro out of mothballs.
A cross between Descent and Tron, with procedurally-generated levels. Haven't had time to try it yet, but it looks worth checking out.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I remember using phoenix style joysticks for descent with a million buttons. The new descent will be made for consoles, and will lack every good option. It will probably also lack flares.
Same here, I had an 486 DX4-100 when Descent came out and was playing it smoothly. I saw it really choppy and unplayable on i486dx2 50s and 66s which are way above the 'reminiscenced' specs... it's already running 2 seconds per frame on the start of level 1 at that point anyway.
Tell that to CCP Games's developers for EVE:Valkyrie ... of cause, in 2 years, they'll announce the incomplete Beta a failure, and switch to something new...
I was in with DOOM when it came out. My residence had a 6 PC computer lab that I helped administrate (Windows 3.1 and Novell Netware 3.12: *ouch*), and in early '95 I installed a 4-user game of DOOM for the first multi-player deathmatch any of us had played. I was reasonably skilled, but other guys (who played way single-player more than I) schooled me.
Still, it was fun and I enjoyed the heck out of DOOM. Although it was "3-D", the entire map of the playing area was flat, and it wasn't too difficult to keep my bearings of where I was and where I needed to go, which it turns out is a requirement for me to playing FPS games because..... ... the next year Descent came out, and its *legit* 3-D! Holy crap, the tunnels and passageways branch out and curve in every direction! I can't figure where I am, there's no "up" or "down"! Arrgh!!!! (and shoves keyboard and mouse back in frustration). Let the young whipersnappers do this, I'm out! (I was 24 at the time :-P )
I've not played FPS since. I now understand that most games since have been closer to DOOM than Descent (in this regard), but I discovered this too late: 2 decades have gone by, and now the complexity of gameplay and controls is beyond my ability to climb the learning curve. I'm officially old!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
A buddy and I had the game on our playstations, and it was one of the few the supported the Link cable on that system.
Two CRTs placed near each other, two PSXs , two copies of the game and the link cable made for awesome afternoons.
Played and controlled well enough, especially since the dual[analog|shock] hadn't been released yet.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
...you really need a joystick to play it properly.
I disagree - not only do you not need a joystick, you are at a disadvantage if you use one.
I used to play Descent with the coworkers during our lunch hour, and even with their Thrustmasters I used to stomp them using just a keyboard. The number of simultaneous keys I could input at once was my limiting factor, but even then I could maneuver using three motion inputs (i.e. slide on the x-axis, rotate about the z-axis to stay facing them, and thrust on the y-axis to control distance and get that extra speed boost from multiple vectors), and only had to let up one key (y-axis) to fire weapons. It took some nimble finger movements, but was manageable.
The advantage came from lag: my keypresses were instantaneous changes in vectoring, so I could reverse any given axis without delay. To keep tracking me, they had to shift their joystick over a finite distance. Sure, it was a miniscule distance, but that split second to move their stick/hat switch combinations, combined with the imprecise (rather than exactly-on-axis) control, and delay in their reaction time all added up to enough of a gap to keep me in the lead.
Came to you on some floppy disks and had:
1. 12 Levels
2. The games 1st boss
3. Multiplayer
All for the low, low price of FREE!!!
If you liked what you played, you could buy the rest (More weapons, storyline, more levels & bosses) What game today has anything near as cool and this was over 20 years ago.
Descent2 was almost as good. Love the cut scenes. Lets just leave it there with no remembrance at all of Descent 3 and Freespace. (What do you MEAN I can't fly BACKWARDS??) The developers of the later games totally lost the plot...
"Perhaps the influences of Red Faction and Minecraft could also come into play as you bored your own shortcuts through layers of destructible sediment."
You have described the multiplayer game [Miner Wars 2081]. In every way it is the game that the submitter described. It has the full Descent style navigation though asteroids as well as a customizable voxel universe. Seriously, check out the videos.
Miner Wars 2081
Descent to Undermountain. I cried salty nerd tears of lust when that came out.
I got the world's best game controller, in my opinion -- the Logitech Cyberman II -- for playing this game.
And think I still have it... somewhere.
You'd better hope so if you want to play Descent again. It's impossible to find a joystick these days without a dead zone, a spot in the middle of the axis where you can wiggle the stick a little without the value reported to the OS being changed.
Descent, being designed for proper joysticks, is simply incompatible with dead zones. You need to turn slowly left, so you move the stick a little, and nothing happens. Your brain's immediate instinct is to assume it simply moved the stick too little, and so it tries moving it twice as far, but still, nothing happens. So then your brain doubles that, but still, nothing happens, as you've only just now reached the edge of the dead zone. So your brain doubles up again, and suddenly you're turning 8x faster than you wanted.
I tired, but it's apparently impossible for the brain to learn the limits of the dead zone such that it can reliably move the stick just barely past the dead zone to make a slow turn.
I actually thought about making a Descent-like game about a year ago, but attempting to play the old Descent with modern joysticks revealed the above problem, and without a proper joystick, there's just no fucking point.
While we're on the subject of Descent, the Yamaha OPL MIDI tracks were some of the best I've heard. The way it was meant to sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Playing it in DOSBox doesn't sound anywhere near as good as the real deal... you've got to switch the OPL instrument patch bank and the support for doing that in DOSBox isn't too good. If you play the OPL MIDI files with adlmidi and the proper Descent patch bank, then it sounds good.
Because of Oculus Rift. It not only would make a fucking amazing experience, but the immersion and 3D effect of the Oculus would really ADD to the gameplay, especially when using the 3D map, and it even could be included as an "holografic HUD minimap".
"Unfortunately my old LCD glasses can no longer work, as the polarization of them isn't compatible with the polarization of modern LCD screens."
Try rotating the lenses 90 degrees.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Forsaken on pc was much better :p
I played every version made back when it came out, had hand cramps for days on end from playing it on a keyboard. For its day it had the most amazing graphics and immersive gameplay. I'd love to see an updated version!
Not everybody could afford buying the latest and greatest.... When Descent came out, I was running on a 486/66 DX2 Packard Bell. I think I upgraded the processor on that machine to a 486/100 DX4 when D2 came out...
Descent was about piloting a spaceship in zero gravity. There was no absolute up/down: it was always relative to the spaceship.
Can someone explain me how stalactite (suggested by the article author) are expected to grow in a zero gravity environment?
"Unfortunately my old LCD glasses can no longer work, as the polarization of them isn't compatible with the polarization of modern LCD screens."
Try rotating the lenses 90 degrees.
Seems reasonable, but I'm not entirely sure the lenses are square, which would mean some serious hacking. See this image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sega-Masters-Sys-3D-Glasses.jpg
"IIRC D3 wasn't the same dev team"
Incorrect, the Descent 3 team was originally part of Parallax Software (the original devs of descent 1 + 2).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
heh, i started writing a WebGL version of descent a while back. never finished it, but you can play with it here: WebDescent (only tested on Chrome).
If the game uses DirectInput, you are likely to have problems.
I routinely use an Xbox 360 controller without major problems in Pygame games. Pygame uses SDL 1.2, and SDL for Windows uses DirectInput. The only fault I've seen is that DirectInput programs see only the difference LT - RT, not LT alone, RT alone, or the sum LT + RT. On Linux, SDL can see LT and RT independently.
Pygame can see all four axes of the analog sticks on the face of an Xbox 360 controller. I'll grant that Pygame games are 2D, and 2D games are less likely to use the right stick unless they're Robotron-style shooters. Should I download Dwn of Pwn to see how well it works? As for games that use both sticks in general, Pygame sees what SDL sees, and there are plenty of games that rely on SDL for input and audio and OpenGL for graphics.
Don't worry about the lenses being square. Just rotate them 90 degrees one way or another to get the proper polarization. Anything else is a secondary concern.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Only if Descent requires the player to press LT and RT at the same time is my assertion flawed.
LT and RT don't act as buttons under DI; they act as opposite sides of the rotation axis. All the way positive means LT is pressed, all the way negative means RT is pressed, and near zero means either neither is pressed or both are pressed. Not being able to tell difference between positive and negative on the rotation axis is like not being able to tell left from right on the primary X axis.
For my functioning x486 class machine with Descent up and running? Time to find that old joystick
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.