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'Descent' Creators Reunite For a New Game Called 'Overload' (steampowered.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader t0qer writes: In the early days of PC gaming, there was 3 major titles. Doom, Duke Nukem, and Descent. Descent was the first game to have true 3D environments and enemies, whereas Doom/Duke was considered "2.5D." Even though Descent never gained the popularity of Quake or Doom, it's had a dedicated fanbase that has continued playing and updating the game over the last 20 years.
The original programmers got together, and created a "Spiritual Successor" called Overload. Already garnering mostly postive reviews on Steam, the game features the same controls and overall feel of the original Descent, but without the frustration of having to set IRQ, DMA, and port jumpers for your sound blaster.
Engadget reports that the Overload devs "made sure to replicate what defined Descent and its two sequels, and what is still unique today: packing players in tight corridors to constrict their free-flying movement and transforming battles into maddening close-quarters space combat."
The game's lead designer tells them that first-person-shooter games "have evolved a lot, but that evolution has left some gaping holes in its wake."
The original programmers got together, and created a "Spiritual Successor" called Overload. Already garnering mostly postive reviews on Steam, the game features the same controls and overall feel of the original Descent, but without the frustration of having to set IRQ, DMA, and port jumpers for your sound blaster.
Engadget reports that the Overload devs "made sure to replicate what defined Descent and its two sequels, and what is still unique today: packing players in tight corridors to constrict their free-flying movement and transforming battles into maddening close-quarters space combat."
The game's lead designer tells them that first-person-shooter games "have evolved a lot, but that evolution has left some gaping holes in its wake."
Descent was the first 3d game that let you travel in any direction, up down, left right,, forward, reverse, slide diagonally it was all there. It was intensely slickly packaged and it had very few competitors/analogues at the time. Forsaken was really the only other game in it's class. It basically created a genre (6dof shooter) all by itself. It is to 6DOF shooters as Doom and Quake were to the FPS Genre.
It was pretty unique for its time, really. Full 3D modelled enemies. Move in any direction. Came out a year before Quake so it will really first on the scene in terms of what these types of graphics engines could do. And it was an early example of advanced AI on the part of the enemies. They wouldn't just stay there and let you hit them on the harder modes. Pretty large modding community for the time as well. Not as large as Doom's, but still pretty darn big.
Great sound effects. Great soundtrack. Great level design. Definitely a highlight of mid-90s gaming.
I would think of it like this:
2D FPS games (original Wolfenstein) would be like driving a car in a simple grid of streets lined with buildings.
2.5D FPS games (Doom/DN) would be less like operating a car and more like operating a helicoptor - you have to maneuver in 3 dimensions with your vertical axis generally constant, and gravity is still a thing.
3D FPS (Descent) would be operating a starship in deep space with true vector-based navigation and 0 fixed axes...plus the ability to roll like an airplane.
Descent was devoid of gravity, so orientation was truly a challenge. To date it is the only game I've ever had to fight motion sickness.
...when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal.
Interplay sold the license way back in 2015, and a spiritual successor is in the works since then: https://www.brightlocker.com/g...
Back in the late 90s I used to work as a stage AV technician to pay my way through university, and I remember one weekend borrowing 16" projection screen and 3 gun video projector, setting it up in the backyard with a Bose PA system and playing Descent with a bunch of friends on the screen. It was mindblowing, although the 3D was so immersive it was had to avoid occasiionally geting nauseous. So yeah I'm fairly sure in VR it could definately cause nausea too.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
That's pretty strange.
I'd say descent was defined by true 3D rendered environments with collision and polygon fills and 6 degrees of freedom for motion.
There were a few 3d mesh games prior with 6 degrees -- echelon comes to mind.
As for your definitions, sort of:
2D -- you move around in an {x,y} maze, you, your enemies, and everything else all had a fixed Z axis.
Wolfenstein was a good example.
2.5D -- can mean a lot of things, but I think for most people the *defining* characteristic was that you could move in the Z axis; but the world itself wasn't truly 3D. Gravity certainly isn't required, and you could even have a 6 d-o-f camera and 6 d-o-f movment in a 2.5D game.
The key to a 2.5D game is that at any given x,y coordinate on the playing field, there is one z value for the floor, and one z value for the ceiling, and an open interval between them, and the gameplay at that x,y coordinate takes place in that vertical interval.
3D takes that restriction away. At a given x,y coordinate, there might be more than one floor and ceiling interval.
The upshot is that in a 2.5D game, "rooms" cannot be stacked, for example you will never see a balcony that you can either stand on or under at the same x,y coordinate. One tunnel can never pass under another one, etc.
By all accounts I've read, Overload feels more like the successor to Descent than D:U. Here's one video comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In what respect? As I recall, every aspect was true 3D, with the exception being some of the weapon discharges and object drops (rendered as 2D sprites in 3D space.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
it wasn't so much about the angled floor as the idea you couldn't have one path directly above another. the Z axis was rendered graphically, but it didn't actually exist as a calculated, functional axis in the game code. like, you could see ledges and go up or down in elevation, but you'd never have, for example, a building with multiple floors stacked on top of each other.
i could live a little longer in this prison
That's kind of like saying, "explain Star Wars, it looks like every other SciFi space battle movie." Yeah. Now. But at the time, Descent was cutting edge and unique.
geek. lawyer.