| Descent (computer Game) |
Article Index for Descent |
Website Links For Descent |
Information AboutDescent (computer Game) |
''Descent'' is a '' due to trademark issues.1 ''Descent'' was developed by Parallax Software and released in 1995. Although unsophisticated by modern gaming standards, it is still cherished by a strong community of fans, particularly for online multiplayer, and new levels continue to be developed. The series has a strong following due to its unique "six degrees of freedom" gameplay. However, because this gameplay can be challenging and strongly favors the use of a joystick, ''Descent'' never gained the popularity of more conventional ground-based 3D first-person shooter games. Being regarded as a ''Doom'' Clone by casual gamers meant that ''Descent'''s unique aspects were often overlooked, confining it to a niche. Limited support for modifications, compared to some competing games such as '' Doom '' and '' Quake '', also effectively limited its lasting appeal. The Trademark for ''Descent'' was allowed to lapse by Interplay in 2002.2 STORYLINE The game begins with a briefing between a bald anonymous executive (in later games named Dravis) of the Post Terran Minerals Corporation ( PTMC ) and the player, a "Material Defender" (revealed as MD1032 in the briefings) hired on a mercenary basis to gather information about a computer virus infecting the robots used for off-world mining operations. The game progresses through the solar system, from the Moon to Pluto's moon Charon . After defeating the boss robot on Charon, the Material Defender is informed he cannot return to the PTMC's headquarters in lunar orbit, as there is a chance his ship may be infected with the same virus as the defeated robots. GAMEPLAY Navigation Although the keyboard interface for moving and rotating in full 3D space is easily learned, many players initially suffered from Nausea and confusion since any viewpoint became possible. With practice, however, most people found the game fluid and very enjoyable. A bigger annoyance for casual players was getting lost in the mines (some of which were very large and complex). Highly experienced players who could memorize the mine layouts became adept enough to play the game with their point of view continually upside-down. The game also supported the use of two joysticks that could be configured freely, which made playing the game easier than using the keyboard. Like ''Doom'', ''Descent'' provides a navigational Wireframe map that will display any area of the mine visited or seen by the player. Since it is truly 3D, however, navigating the map can be challenging, especially so in the shareware demo. The commercial release of ''Descent'' made map navigation more intuitive. One helpful trick is to use the "-" and "+" keys to decrease or increase the scope of the wireframe map. The flight control keys are used to control the map. Compared to other 3D shooter games, ''Descent'' never became particularly popular; probably due to its increased demand to the player's ability to keep his orientation in a fully 3D environment with a 6dof flight model. Also learning to effectively exploit ''(tri-) chording'' - increasing movement speed by simultaneously pressing the acceleration controls for several movement directions - steepened the learning curve. The challenge this poses attracted and still attracts players even 10 years after the first game of the franchise appeared. Multiplayer Like ''Doom'', ''Descent'' offers excellent competitive multiplayer game play over a LAN . ''Descent'' is also touted as being one of the first games that allowed on-the-fly joining of multiplayer games, whereas in many similar games of the era such as ''Doom'' it is presumed that all players have to be queued prior to initiating the match. With the advent of Internet s and variable packet rate, which significantly improved quality of play over the slower Internet connections prevalent at the time. An important element of the online gaming community was the Invitational Descent Ladder {Link without Title} . The ladder facilitated one-on-one duels between some of the most skilled ''Descent'' players in the world. IDL matches were chiefly played in the original ''Descent'' game and to a lesser extent ''Descent 2''; ''Descent 3'' was not as well received and saw little use on the ladder in comparison. The D1X Project significantly improved gameplay for on-line ''Descent'' games. Levels and robots In the original ''Descent'', there are 27 levels corresponding to 27 different and unique mines (and also three secret levels). The first three begin on the Moon , the fourth on Venus , and the sixth and seventh take place on Mercury . These levels also make up the shareware version. In the commercial release, the path continues out towards Mars and on towards the moons of the Gas Giant s Jupiter , Saturn , Uranus , Neptune , and finally until Pluto and Charon . There are 3 secret levels, located in the Asteroid Belt , which can be accessed by secret exits that are placed as an alternative to the regular exits in certain levels. The complete list of levels of the original Descent mission is as follows:
The enemy AI was quite good for its time, with most robots being able to dodge a player's fire, making for challenging firefights and duels. There are special AI strategies that complement the bots' attacking style, with regular (firing) robots starting in sniping mode and often aggressively pursuing if the player retreated, close-combat robots which are highly maneuverable and charge the player, and certain "cunning" or "lurking" bots that track the player and only attack when it will achieve surprise. As the mission progresses, new, tougher robots begin to appear with more powerful weapons. The seventh level, which is also the end of the shareware version, and the final level are cited as the most difficult. Both have large Boss robots with powerful weaponry (the first boss fires Smart missiles; the second fires Mega Missiles) and have the ability to cloak (become invisible) then teleport to other parts of the room. The second boss also cause other robots to materialize nearby. Objectives Each level starts with the player in his ship materializing in a starting location within the mine. The player must then navigate through the mine destroying enemy robots and picking up powerups if his resources run low. The player's spacecraft has a fixed energy capacity and most weapons and tools require regular pickups of energy powerups to be able to continue firing. Killing opponents often releases such powerups. There are also permanent recharging areas called "energy centers" and players often make it a priority to seek these out first in order to give themselves an unlimited supply of energy. The player's ship also contains a limited supply of shield energy (normally referred to as "shields"), which is reduced when the player is hit. Unlike energy, shields can only be restored by acquiring the appropriate powerups. The player has limited lives. When the ship is destroyed, it respawned at the mine's entrance. However, all the powerups (weapons, etc.) acquired thus far will be strewn about the area of death waiting to be reacquired. There is also a complementary points system, which the player can earn by destroying enemy robots, picking up powerups, and detonating the reactor. The most points will be earned by rescuing the trapped PTMC workers in each mine and safely escaping with them after destroying the reactor. Hostages are lost when the ship is destroyed, so it is often recommended that they be rescued just before blowing the reactor. Accumulating 50000 points will result in an extra life. In ''Descent'', the goal of each level is to find a series of keys, usually in the order of blue, yellow, and red. Each key will correspond with a door of that color. Beyond the red door is the reactor, which itself will fire back at the player, and the area is also heavily defended by robots. By severely damaging the reactor, it will set off a countdown timer. The player will have to find the route back to the exit tunnel before the countdown expires and the reactor's meltdown vapourizes the entire mine. If the player cannot escape but he has extra lives to spare, he can proceed to the next level but be forced to start with minimal weapons. In the seventh and twenty seventh levels, the reactor is replaced by a boss robot, which similarly triggers the countdown after it is destroyed. Saving In the shareware version, saving will only record the player data at the start of the level. Saving in the full version can be done at any time (but not on secret levels in Descent II); it stores the exact details of every object's location and data, and a small snapshot of the player's view, at the time of the save. Weapons and items The overall gameplay is enhanced by the wide variety of weapons the player can wield. Often, they are used for their novelty and variety instead of tactical considerations. The proximity bomb is designed specifically for multiplayer. ''Descent'''s handling of weapons in multiplayer differs from other first-person shooters. When a player is killed, all the powerups (weapons, etc.) acquired thus far will be strewn about the area of death waiting to be reacquired. Instead of respawning primary weapons, which could potentially allow several players to pick up the same weapon over time, only one player can have it at a time, forcing his opponents to destroy him in order to acquire it. ''Descent'' features ten weapons; five primary weapons and five missiles. Primary weapons
Secondary weapons
All of the secondary weapons can hurt the player at too close a range; the Mega Missile can easily kill even a player with nearly full shield. Flares The player is given an unlimited supply of Flares to fire into dark areas for illumination. Flares cost 1 energy per shot to fire and when energy is completely depleted from the player's ship, they are no longer available. It is common to use the Flare as a weapon to humiliate a near-dead opponent. Since a Flare only causes one unit of damage even at the highest difficulty level, being killed by one is a humiliating experience. Other items
TECHNOLOGY The original ''Descent'' runs under DOS and is (with some tweaking) playable on 386 -based PCs at 33 MHz. With the release of the Pentium , the performance requirements were no longer an issue. ''Descent'' was ported to Apple 's Power Macintosh in 1996 and both versions support multiplayer network play over a variety of protocols. A console port of ''Descent'' was created for the Sony PlayStation . Rendering ''Descent'' was released in February 1995, about one year after Id Software 's '' Doom '' (December 1993). As was typical with those releases, ''Descent'' uses a software renderer due to the fact that affordable 3D Graphics Accelerator Cards (referred to as add-on videocards) were not mainstream as yet. While ''Doom'' uses sprites to render enemies, ''Descent'' features fully-3D-polygonal enemies. '' Quake '' followed in the footsteps of ''Descent'' by displaying its enemies in 3D. Unlike ''Doom'' and its successor ''Quake'', ''Descent'' does not use BSP trees to speed up rendering, but a system of connected cubes forming bigger rooms and tunnels connecting them. This geometry allowed for very efficient visibility culling, and one of the first true three dimensional rendering environments of its time. On lower-end systems, detail levels could be reduced to cut out some of the smaller polygons on robots and render solid color blocks on distant textures instead of mapping the entire texture. The original ''Descent'' uses indexed 8-bit color in DOS's display Mode 13h , using 320 × 200 resolution. Unlike its sequel, it uses only one 256-color set during gameplay, rather than a unique set for each level set; these colors tinge red during damage and purple during fusion charging. The Macintosh and later PC versions allow higher resolutions, such as 640 × 480. The default engine uses a software renderer in which the perspective transformation for texture mapping is only performed once every 32 pixels, causing textures to appear to pop or shift when viewed from certain angles. The software renderer also uses nearest-neighbor texture filtering, as opposed to Bilinear Filtering or Trilinear Filtering used by modern video cards. Nearest-neighbor texture filtering causes Aliasing Artifacts , such as blocky or swimming textures. The engine for ''Descent'' is a Portal Rendering engine, operating on the premise of interconnected cube-shaped sectors. Sides of cubes can be attached to other cubes, or display up to two texture maps. Cubes can be deformed so long as they remain Convex . To create effects like doors and see-through grating, walls could be placed at the connected sides of two cubes. Descent introduced an elaborate static lighting scheme as well as simple dynamic lighting, where the environment could be lit with flares - another advancement compared to ''Doom''. Audio The game uses 8-bit, 11 kHz sound effects, including some vocals. On slower computers, the sound settings could be reduced to allow only one door sound, only one laser sound, only a few enemy sounds, and other simplifications. (It also would make only one sound play per frame, which would potentially slow down things more than it could help them.) The PC version's soundtrack is a MIDI score, while the Macintosh version uses Redbook Audio and the Playstation version uses CDXA audio. SEQUELS, ADD-ONS AND EXPANSIONS In chronological order of release: Descent Mission Builder (1995) A commercial ''Descent'' level editor, created by Brainware . Users can create their own single-player and multi-player levels with the program and then play them. A modernized and enhanced version of DMB2 called DLE-XP has been created by the maintainer of D2X-XL. ''Descent: Levels of The World'' (1995) A popular add-on for ''Descent'', containing all of the entries from a level design competition held by Interplay in 1995. A viewer is included, allowing the player to see a preview of each map, as well as selecting ones that received a "Top 10" award or an honorable mention. ''Descent: Anniversary Edition'' (1996) A bundle released on the one-year anniversary of the original game's debut, the Anniversary Edition featured Descent, the Levels Of The World add-on, and several additional levels created by Parallax. ''Descent'' (PlayStation) A version of ''Descent'' was also produced for the PlayStation . It features the same levels as the PC version of ''Descent'', but adds a remixed soundtrack, prerendered cinematics, and colored lighting effects. ''Descent II'' See Also: Descent II A sequel to ''Descent'' was released in 1996, entitled ''Descent II''. It introduced new weapons, items and enemies, and was based on a version of the same engine upgraded to support higher resolutions, destroyable and flickering lights, and custom robots and textures, among other features. ''Descent Maximum'' Released in 1997, this PlayStation exclusive is basically ''Descent II'' but with different level designs. The cinematics, enemy robots, and goal remain the same. ''Descent³'' See Also: Descent³ The third instalment in the series, ''Descent³'', was released in 1999. It used an entirely new game engine based on polygonal meshes instead of ''Descent's'' cube-based engine; it also touted support for outdoor areas, significantly improved AI and built-in support for Internet multi-player games. Related titles Volition had started work on ''Descent 4'' but it was cancelled early in production, owing mostly to disappointing sales of ''Descent³''. An archived copy of the official ''Descent 4'' website started by Volition is available here . Some fans believed that Volition was working on ''Descent 4'' only to have the decision changed to have the game finished and marketed as the first-person shooter '' Red Faction ''. ''Descent'''s opening briefing made a reference to the "Humans First" strike (see the Premise section above) where the miners rebelled against the new robot technology. Other plot points include nanotechnology, an evil faceless corporation, and the virus they are attempting to harness. ''Descent 4'' was planned as a prequel to ''Descent'', and incorporated those elements. This reportedly served as a basis for ''Red Faction'', although Mike Kulas (president of Volition) noted that ''Red Faction'' does not directly relate to ''Descent''. However, he did admit that code that was meant for ''Descent 4'' was being used in ''Red Faction''.3 '''' also used 3D acceleration. However, ''FreeSpace'' is a space simulator that is an entirely different game from ''Descent''. It is primarily a 3D shooter though without the same "six degrees of freedom" (6DOF), the main difference being that no player-controlled ships could strafe (though some enemy-controlled ships could), requiring the player to adopt a different strategy for dodging enemy weapons fire. As the action took place entirely in deep space, it was harder to judge one's velocity since there were fewer frames of reference. ''FreeSpace'' has no direct connection to the ''Descent'' series, and was given the "Descent" prefix to avoid trademark issues (in Europe, it was released as ''Conflict: FreeSpace''), though some early drafts of the story have the FreeSpace pilot searching for ''Descent's'' Material Defender. ''Descent: FreeSpace'' had a sequel in the form of ''FreeSpace 2'' (without "Descent"), but like ''Descent³'', it was not very successful despite positive reviews. However, a 6DOF game similar to ''Descent'' is in development. '' Core Decision '', developed by High Octane Software, is highly anticipated by many ''Descent'' fans. It is scheduled for release in October 2007, and the developer maintains indications of progress on its website. Another notable project involving Descent is the Into Cerberon total-conversion mod for Doom 3 . This project aims to recreate the experience of ''Descent'' using a modern game engine. ''DESCENT'' NOVELS The ''Descent'' series also spawned a trilogy of novels written by Peter Telep and sold at several major booksellers. The titles are ''Descent'', ''Descent: Stealing Thunder'', and ''Descent: Equinox''. The novels did not follow the games to the word, but expanded on the basic premise, and were very well received. ''DESCENT'' MOVIE There were rumors of a ''Descent'' movie. NBC commissioned a script for a TV movie but then decided to be adapted for movie theaters. Interplay Productions , the owner and publisher of the ''Descent'' games, created a division called Interplay Movies that was going to develop the popular Interplay franchises of the time into movies, one of which was ''Descent''. The last known update was in 1999, so the plans are considered dead. Interplay Movies reportedly successfully got '' Redneck Rampage '' made into a film, although it was never released. One thing that lends credence to this Descent movie is a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office of a 2000 abandoned trademark filing of Descent with the "Goods and/or Services" being listed as "International Class: 041 entertainment services, namely, production and distribution of live action theatrical, motion pictures and television motion pictures and animated and live action television series featuring action, adventure and science fiction stories."4 THIRD-PARTY DEVELOPMENT The Source Code to the original ''Descent'' (minus the audio code, which was replaced with the Allegro Project ) was released in 1997. The source code to ''Descent II'' was subsequently released in 19995. Numerous Open Source projects based on these source releases have appeared on the Internet. The most popular early project was ''D1X'', which added many new features such as the ability to change resolution, customizable primary and secondary weapon priority, and many other features that were previously only available in ''Descent II''. Following the release of the ''Descent II'' source code, the ''D1X'' project sparked another project called ''D2X'', which went on to enhance the gameplay and compatibility of ''Descent II.'' ''D1X'' and ''D2X'' also made it possible to play the games on different platforms like Linux . However, eventually, work on the ''D1X'' and ''D2X'' projects became stagnant. The latest version, ''D1X'' 1.43, added support for OpenGL and Direct3D graphics as well as TCP/IP multiplayer, and runs under Windows XP with few problems. Descent has also been unofficially ported to the . http://blog.dev-scene.com/kayvenm/ ''D2X-XL'' A Windows-specific development branch was spawned from the ''D2X'' project, fixing all of the issues ''D2X'' still had and adding a lot of new features, such as the ability to play ''Descent'' missions in ''Descent 2''. This branch was originally titled ''D2X-W32'' but was ported to Linux and Mac OS X later on, and renamed to ''D2X-XL'' to reflect both the broader scope and greatly enhanced feature set of the project. ''D2X-XL'' is the most advanced and feature-rich user-enhanced version of ''Descent'' to date, and offers many features like colored lighting, smoke, real-time shadowing, new weapon effects and new game modes that enhance the single-player experience and give new twists to multi-player games. As most ports, it retains full compatibility with the original game and can be switched in appearance between a graphically updated version, and the original look and feel of ''Descent''. ''Rebirth'' Another ''Descent 1'' / ''2'' source port called ''DXX-Rebirth'' has appeared about one and a half year after D2X-XL development had begun. It differs from ''D2X-XL'' insofar as its main goal is not to enhance the original game, but to simply recreate the original ''Descent 2'' look and feel for modern operating systems. Development is currently in progress and is encompassing work on a software renderer, allowing to port it to hardware like game consoles, which do not offer OpenGL support. POPULAR CULTURE
REFERENCES SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|