Are You Descent?

Some of us remember playing that old confusing 3D game in some gray level where none of the controls made any sense. Chances are that that game was Descent. A game released in 1995 which, despite its many innovation in terms of use of 3D, level design, and AI, was largely forgotten. People say Doom was a proto-Touhou game in first-person, but they've never played Descent. Fly into interplanetary mines, destroy robots, destroy the reactor, and reach the exit before the self-destruct timer counts down.

Descent is a 6DoF shooter, meaning you can freely move in any direction, which the level design makes good use of. Enemies and secrets are placed above you, beneath you, and everywhere around you. Most enemies fire projectile weapons and the level design is rather tight, so you'll have to learn how to dodge. One technique is to hug one side of the wall with the belly of your ship, and then change sides once the enemy fires at you. However, most of your weapons are projectile-based too, meaning you'll have to learn how to lead your shots. Enemies are smart and will often dodge your projectiles. Concussion missiles can destroy enemies with backblast if you hit the wall behind them, but the same goes for you too. Insane is quite insane, but not as sadomasochistic as the Nightmare difficulty in Doom.

Descent 2 adds more new levels, new enemies, new weapons, new missiles, and new gadgets like the afterburner, headlight, and energy -> shield converter which converts surplus energy into shield power, which is quite useful. It also removes the FUCKING CLASS 1 DRILLER but instead replaces it with the fucking Niggerbot in terms of annoyance. You tell me which is better.
Descent 2 is pretty much Descent 1 but better, unfortunately the AdLib soundtrack isn't as big as it was for the first one due soundtrack constraints. Descent 2 also has the Vertigo expansion which adds a whole fuckton of more new levels and enemies, but you'll need to find the files on the internet for it by yourself.

Nobody really talks about Descent 3 outside of the multiplayer.

If you want to play Descent on modern systems, you should first get the games off GOG (magnet:?xt=urn:btih:db24ed5952366034de3db9d6b63d2db43aaa6d82&dn=Descent+%2B+Descent+II+2.1.0.10+%5BGOG%5D&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fzer0day.ch%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969), and then download the DXX-Rebirth sourceport off: dxx-rebirth.com/download/dxx/user/afuturepilot/download.php?f=DXX-Rebirth_Setup.exe

The set-up allows you to choose your own soundtrack (some like the redbook soundtrack, some like the classical MIDI versions on this soundcard and so on). You then probably want to mess with the controls a bit, I have sliding up/down bound to Space/CTRL, sliding left/right to W/D, accelerating/reversing to W/S, banking left/right to Q/E, and Pitch U/D inverted (so pointing your mouse downwards also makes your ship look downwards).

Anyways:

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When I was a kid I had a demo disc with the shareware version of Descent 1, sank hundreds of hours on that motherfucker

hah, good luck.

did anything ever come out of those descent games on Steam that got put in early access months/years ago? I rememer the game that actually was called descent was terrible buggy and had very little content and then there was some rogulite buzzword buzzword game that was basically descent. Subspace Zero or something.

I've heard of this game but never played. Think Ill give it a go when I get home.

It's Sublevel Zero, actually. Randomly generated levels are a cancer which ruin conceptually okay games and shorten its lifespan with a lack of custom levels. Doom wouldn't work with randomly generated levels, Descent wouldn't work with randomly generated levels either.

Speaking of Descent clones, some guy who used to work on Descent got the rights to the franchise, formed his own team, and started development on Descent: Underground, which has more of a multiplayer focus than anything.

The actual brains behind Descent are working on a game called Overload, which looks much better.

Fucking triggered.

Fuck, I'd shill for this game. There is already a playable teaser on Steam for free which was pretty good, go try it out if you have the chance.
Unfortunately Holla Forums seems to prefer circlejerking about shitty new games rather than old games which aren't in any top 100 old games list.

Dont forgey jacking off to the latest eceleb drama.
Does descent have a modding scene?

I think you can find plenty of custom levels made over the past two decades, though lately the games themselves don't see much custom content made, probably since most hopes are riding on the new 6DoF games. A lot of them are also included with the Descent Rebirth sourceport, if you wish to try them out. Here's some terrible Web 2.0 Descent webcomics I found too.

You can bet the new memegame won't have one :^)

The soundtrack was amazing, that's about all i can say about this game.

Looks good besides the generic shinyeverything Unity graphics. Explosion effects are nice.

That aside, 6DoF SHMUPs are some of the best games.

...

This comic probably predates Loss itself.

Shit man I played this with my dad all the time when I was about 10. I gotta try playing it again, though I did try it about 2 years ago and got decently far. Seems like the sort of game to pull out an old joystick with the buttons and trigger on the tip.

Sublevel Zero is especially a joke with the procedural generation because it's pretty much 6 exact rooms copy and pasted over and over again.
There's also Retrovirus and Miner Wars but unfortunately both aren't that good.
There's also NeonXSZ which would have been really good if it had an ascend/descend button.

newb

user never played Freespace games.

Dude, you know there can only be one correct answer.


Never played it. Was the SP so bad?

It wasn't bad, just different in a rather bad way.
Instead of 'fly in a cramped robot-infested mine, blow up the reactor and escape in time' the levels were more objective-focused, with more open levels. Part of the fun of Descent was the cramped level design where you couldn't predict what was under or above this tight passage, whereas in D3 the open levels have you repeatedly circlestrafing around enemies because the levels nearly always allow that in D3. On top of that, the enemies in general were more bulletspongy, which makes combat in general get tedious rather fast.

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It used to give so many people vertigo. I was the only one of my friends who could play it without getting sick.

I gather strike vector is still an empty ghost town, huh?

R.I.P. Peter Steele.

Descent with a HOTAS made pure sense. Confusing? Not at all.
Descent 1+2 was one of the first games re-released on GOG and made the store known to gamers immediately.
Descent also was one of the early 3D accelerator and VR showcases during the 90s.

Maybe I might be overrating the obscurity, considering people rarely talk about Descent here, even alongside old good games like Doom

Descent was VERY popular in the mid 90s, it's not as obscure as you imply. Back when everybody and his dog was playing Mechwarrior 2.

Consider how popular and Wing Commander and flight\space simulators were, back then, and it becomes natural to see them meshed with the Doom formula. Unfortunately at the time of Half-Life, FPS grew increasingly realistic and cinematic, and oddities as this disappeared (Descent 3 flopped).

The greatest challenge were definitely the controls. Back then, most people had an analog joystick for flightsims, but it was never enough buttons with Descent. If you need a good ripoff, try Forsaken.

That might be, because they grew up with an X-Box with Halo on it. Or were just Nintentoddlers. :^)

GOODBYE, SHIELDS!

Dodging shots in Megaman would also make it a proto bullethell?

The buttons weren't the problem, some Thrustmaster joysticks implemented matrix input to expand the four buttons to 15 and were fully supported by Descent.
6DoF requires six axis input, but legacy PC could only handle four axises maximum.
Still a two-stick (four axis) setup was kicking ass in multiplayer.

How else would you explain people fondly remembering Goldeneye's multiplayer? We were bunnyhopping and rocketjumping in Q2DM1, while our kids were playing splitscreen on the retardbox.

People don't talk about Descent because every inch of it has been discussed in detail. With a few major exemptions like Doom or Thief, the older a game is the less discussion it gets, not because "muh kids these days" but because they've been discussed to death. There's only so many times you can tread old ground, Doom and Thief have huge amounts of new content being created by fans every year, Descent not so much.

Duke3D too.

hi

would you drill a driller

I went to look up Vertigo after remembering that I'd never played it and had a hell of a time finding the fucking thing. Ended up finding a different source for the whole game that happened to have Vertigo included, and was so shittily packaged it somehow ended up >1GB. To save others from having to do the same I've uploaded the files D2X-R tells me it wants to make the expansion work.
mega.nz/#!jokC3aSb!zF4DhwBKHkBJAEDmbyc8zMhiReVd_9a-EpTG3fIFyBE
Note: Untested.

I always thought it looked like a pig.

I only really played Forsaken 64, didn't get a PC until the early 2000's so never really played any of the Descent series.

Played the shit out of that game though.

Fucking love this game man.

Duke 3D had better expansions than the original game.

I have to be the only person back then that didn't know what Mechwarrior 2 was.

But yeah, I wish FPS games, and all genres, did off the wall shit again. I really liked Superhot despite being short.

I returned to Descent a few years ago after originally playing it back when I was too young to be comfortable with the controls, only moving in one direction at a time and shooting while stationary. This meant I had to use cheats.

Coming back after gitting gud with age meant discovering that the game is truly amazing. After a few minutes I was instinctively doing insane aerial moves and flowing through the mineshafts with ease.

Sublevel Zero has cute aesthetics and enemies, but the level generation isn't as interesting as it should be.

My ideal 6DOF shooter would have:

terminal velocity was better

MEIN NIGGA

I remember having the manual as a kid and reading the shit out of it because I had PC broken, I had almost zero knowledge of ingrish too. That triangular claw bot holding the sphere, those illustrations and descriptions, I loved it!

Now that I think back this game taught me some useful shit, it got me interested in english and taught me to deduce information from bits of text that I could understand as well 3-dimensional navigation/mapping in my head which makes me wonder how the fuck do playtesters get stuck in loops in modern games when a kid can navigate a full 3d map in limited time to escape the complex self-destruction. If anything complex videogames let you learn new things if anything.

I didn't know what it was called when i was young, I just played a shareware demo. There is also another demo shareware game I played involving an isometric top down game where you're a ship running around shooting shit and completing objectives and to this day I can't find it. Sometimes I feel like I'm hallucinating some made up game I never actually played.

Descent has an obscene amount of references to pigs for some reason, from game files (.HOG, .PIG) to enemy designs and sounds. Sort of like Jeff Minter's inexplicable obsession with goats, yaks, and every species relates to that family tree.

Let me guess: You're a white Caucasian male?
Descent teached an entire generation mental mapping for 6DoF spaces.
However women and nogs can't navigate 3D spaces, and are very bad at 2D maps either, so modern games have to be scripted rails.

Haunted was a damn good track

I know people aren't going to like it, but is there a way to play these with a controller? It feels like it'd be a little more managable with one,
I'm using a laptop pls no bully

The Rebirth sourceport (and the native game) have joystick support by default. Even twin-stick support.

Thanks user, I apppreciate it and I wasn't sure what to play next till now. This looks like its going to eat up quite a bit of my time now.

what the fuck are you talking about? Touhou has nothing to do with either. shut up.

I was just quoting someone else

Had incredibly dull dogfighting and zero physics.

I'm really curious where you got your information.

Holla Forums

Dude what. Descent was the shit in the 90's

These, along with a tiny handful of others, like Terracide and Adrenix, made me hope the zero-g FPS would split off and grow into its own little Descent-clone subgenre alongside tactical, RPG, stealth, and arena FPSs. But nothing happened, and when the Descent series died with the somewhat disappointing 3 (and the huge waste of potential that was Red Faction), the formula vanished without a ripple.

Years later, I assumed that with the flood of 6DoF controllers like the Wiimote, PS Move, and various VR controllers being bundled or shilled for, the genre would be as natural a fit as lightgun games… But then nothing happened, not even official ports of the old Descent titles!


Not true, even if you don't count Macs, which Apple bundled Descent with for years, especially during the glorious InputSprocket era, doesn't every Descent junkie remember lusting after the original six-axis controllers by SpaceTec?

though it was related to Descent to Undermountain. which is Descent but fantasy, like Heretic and Hexen was to Doom

you might have heard wrong, bullet hell games existed way before Doom

Descent 1 and 2 are damn amazing. I'd say I actually like it more than Doom, if only a bit.Reminder that Descent used the Atari Jaguar method of using Math to prove itself better than Doom

Haunted
Gauss Cannon
Driller
Callisto Tower Colony
nothing comes to my mind right now. maybe later

I've never heard anyone say Doom is like Touhou in terms of gameplay. At most I've seen some comparisons to touhou fans but actual gameplay comparisons never come up.

I like how the game turns from an aereal dodging flight sim to a brutal zero-g tacshooter with vulcan cannons and corner missiles with just a change in the difficulty. It's like a whole new game trying to beat Insane compared to Ace, you actually HAVE to use the best of your arsenal at all times, including your bombs and smartbombs liberally, or else the enemy AI will absolutely demolish you.

Played the Descent 1 demo, read about it in PC gamer magazine back in the early 90s when the sneak peek article was released. I salivated over the visuals at the time, not being able to immediately play it because my computer was shit at the time of release.

I've played Descent 2 and 3, 3 was interesting for it's visuals but honestly none of the subsequent games added much in the way of a single player experience after you had played them for a while. The concept was novel, but that alone was not enough to sustain interest for me.

I do however associated fond memories with Descent 1/2 simply because of the time of my life in which they were released, those were the good old days.

Man, Terminal Velocity, Fury 3 and Hellbender.

Damn, stop making me feel all these feels!

I think I like the music more than the game itself. Vid related.