Remembering Descent, the once-popular, fully 3D 6DOF shooter
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33491044
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/07/remembering-descent-the-once-popular-fully-3d-6dof-shooter/Open linkView original on retrolemmy.com
The author failes to mention that some of the Original creators went on and made Overload, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overload_(video_game), a modern descent version. It even supports vr (which is awesome). A bit lazy journalism tbh
You made me buy this game, and I'm now sitting with my steam deck enjoying a new descent game. Thank you. I've finished the first few levels, and it's exactly like descent in many ways with qol upgrades.
I love this ☺️, I hope you have as much fun with it as I had. If you get the chance, try it in VR too. it is one of the most enjoyable games in VR that I've played!
If AMD decides to update the drivers so my rift S isn't just showing greens, I will. I'm not a fan of downgrading drivers just to play VR.
My favorite thing in this game was how everyone would orient themselves differently. There was no "the enemy gate is down" mentality, you'd come around a corner and people would be at some weird, sideways angle and you'd think "wait, that's supposed to be 'down'?" Right before shooting them in all 3 of their polygons.
Good times
Relevant
Oh, I remember this one. It was confusing but fun. My friend and I linked PCs via serial cable but I think my machine was too slow to handle it.
He could fly around and shoot me down with no issues but all I could see was a slideshow! It was unplayable. 😄
I, on the other hand, loved it. Especially with a joystick. Though I was too young to really get far. I've picked it up since, and I still absolutely love it.
I really enjoyed it as well. We had a demo of it on the computers in my school back in 95/96, and it was an absolute blast to play in multiplayer during recess. It had 3 multiplayer maps as far as I recall, but we only played one of them. The other two were too much of a maze, and you could easily spend a long time without seeing anyone even though the game was full.
As far as I recall it was inside a space station where there was one large central room, and two floors on the outside that were shaped like a 4-leaf clover where there were weapons and things like that.
The absolute best thing that you could do was to land a missile on someone. They were so incredibly slow!
I never got far either. Civvie 11 did a playthrough awhile back. Apparently it has some cheap high damage enemies as you progress
https://youtu.be/zngj7EVU8t0
@DosDude and Acclaim's technically impressive clone, Forsaken!
One of the only games to give me vertigo.
You had to buy vertigo, it was not given for free :D (the mission pack for D2 was called Vertigo)
One of the few games that worked on my vfx1 20 something years ago… a blast. I tried it’s successor when I got the index but it failed to revive the flame.
I remembered it with VR of those times! 🥹