1d ago

Remembering Descent, the once-popular, fully 3D 6DOF shooter

arstechnica.com

PC Gaming @lemmy.ca

Agent Karyo @lemmy.world

1d ago

Remembering Descent, the once-popular, fully 3D 6DOF shooter

arstechnica.com /gaming/2025/07/remembering-descent-the-once-popular-fully-3d-6dof-shooter/

48 comments

If you like 6DOF games, check out Everspace 1 and 2.
Never had the chance to play it properly. I had a demo of it in a magazine CD, but could never figure out the controls
Played the hell out of 1, 2, and 3, along with Freespace. Planetdescent was my home for years. Shakerheads unite!
I remember I had a super low Kali number.
- Descent 3 using Kali was my first online game experience. What a crazy time that was.
If you liked and miss Decent, check out Overload on Steam. It's great.
- Overload is VERY good I highly recommend, not even for nostalgia it is just a great game period.
- The resemblance is immediately obvious. Didn't know this existed. Thanks.
  
  It's made by the original Descent devs and it genuinely slaps :)
- For those that don't know, this was made by the original Descent devs. It's also great on Deck.
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/
- Fun fact: Overload supports VR.
  It didn't make me motion sick, so I'm confident nothing ever will.
I played terminal velocity, kind of like the 'we have descent at home'
Also around that time there was a game Magic Carpet EA published that had a similar feel
- Terminal Velocity was a fantastic game in its own right
  
  Yes, I loved it.
Man I friggin loved Descent II. Game was so fun and immersive. I watched that opening cinematic over and over. The soundtrack was fantastic as well.
I later went and played Descent 1 as well but 2 was the one I played the most.
2 also has the thief bot which while infuriating also lead to some of the most memorable gameplay for me. Just chasing that little piece of shit to the ends of the earth and then feeling so triumphant when I finally nabbed it and got my stuff back.
- Descent II has maybe the most unique soundtrack I have ever heard in a game.
  
  It really was incredible. Especially back then when I hadn’t had much exposure yet to that style of music. The fact that it was CD quality instead of midi really helped.
  I vividly remember discovering how you could just put the game disk in a regular CD player and it’d work. Kinda blew my mind lol.
- I was in a computer club in High School. So we were able to play a few games in the computer lab after school. The teacher that headed it absolutely loved playing Descent, but she was also so bad at it that it was pure blind luck if she ever actually hit anyone.
that was a great game
One of the things I've always remembered about Decent was when you put in cheat codes it would play a little sound effect of someone saying "cheater..."
- I remember getting punished by trying to use the Descent 1 cheat codes in Descent 2.
  gabbagabbahey
Nausea has never been as fun as it was back then.
- FYI, there's a modern Descent-like game called Overload.
  It has VR support.
Played the shit outra this and descent 2. Sad its gone, but it gave us my favourite space sim: Descent FreeSpace 1 & 2
- I loved Descent: Freespace, but I liked X-Wing: Alliance better.
I remember playing this on my Voodoo graphics card back in the day.
I always wanted to check it out again, but there are no proper discounts of this game anymore, and the price even increased to 20€ a couple of months back. Who thinks that anybody will buy Descent with DOSBox for 20€ in 2025? Might as well just use my old pirated copy on a burned CD I have somewhere.
- Playing on a Pentium with 3D accelerator was a blessing and a curse. Multiplayer Descent 2 with someone who used one was wild. The game used client-side calculations that would break if your computer was fast.
  Enemy homing missile trajectory was calculated per frame, so they were extremely difficult to avoid. At the same time, weapons like the gauss or plasma beam would shoot per frame, so you could kill an opponent so fast that it seemed instantanous on their end.
Civvie 11 had a good video on both Descent games.
I used to have an early VR headset. With 3DoF headtracking, 640x480 at 60 Hz (combined, so actually every eye got only half of that). Descent supported stereoscopic 3D and the headtracking could be added to almost every game with a mouse driver. It was bad. Really bad. Descent alone could be nausea inducing. In VR it was a literal pukefest. Still I had to try it every few months or so, because it was so cool on paper.
- I would really like to try out this VR headset, almost as a technology history type project.
  
  The late 90s first VR wave was something to behold.
  
  Unfortunately it died a few years ago.
Fuck yes, Descent 2 was even better, with your small helper robot and even more cool weapons/rockets.
I played the shit out of this. I bet the controls are still hard coded in me.
- I remember spending hours configuring the controls to something I would like. Mouse aiming? Never heard of it!
  All I remember from my scheme was that A and Z were for up and down. Orientation probably with the cursor keys. I know I had something on capslock and shift. Maybe forwards and backwards.
  
  You rolled with Q and W, dude.
I never played Descent itself, but I played a shitty clone on one of those “1000 Games on 10 CD-ROMs” packs back in the day.
After learning about the source material, I always wanted to go try it but haven’t taken the time.
Great game, but I could never play it for more than ten minutes at a time before getting woozy and nauseous.
This game holds a special place in my life. Back in the 90s we had it on the family PC and it was so awesome.
Every once in a while I play it on DOSBox. I fully recomend it. It's an amazing game.
I used to play the hell out of both 1&2, but now my old brain can no longer compute the 360 movement in a claustrophobic environment.
Descent was one of the first games I had to play, I remember it fondly. It came bundled with my family's first computer (along with Lemmings and Simcity 2000) so I spent a fair amount of time on it. The freedom of motion you had in Descent was impressive - albeit easy to confuse yourself with - and something I have rarely seen since.
Descent was ahead of its time. Are there any modern games that are similar?
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/
  Overload. It was made by the old devs of the original Descent.
  I think there are custom maps that recreate the original Descent levels.
  
  Adding this to my wish list!
- Miner Wars 2081 has similarities. Same people who made Space Engineers.
Brilliant game.
Worth playing with the PS1 Descent soundtrack too for a different experience (or Descent Maximum as it was across the pond), it got me in to Type O-Negative too.

48 comments