Eric Peterson, recently of Cloud Imperium (yeah, the Star Citizen guys), but also of Origin, has founded Descendant Studios, apparently with the express purpose of releasing an Unreal 4-powered reboot of the incredible 90s space-tunnel-shooter series, Descent. Featuring a singleplayer campaign based around mining and shooting to unlock ships (unless, of course, you want to pay for them before release! Yeah, this guy worked at CIG alright) and 16-player deathmatch, the game needs $600K to fund and is already almost at $100k at time of writing (shortly after launch).
What say you, Qt3 grognards? The glorious return of one of the most beloved series of all time, or just another KS cash-grab from someone hungry for a little of that sweet, sweet ship-selling Star Citizen action?
Done! I’m so in. Even though I’m sometimes resentful that Descent is the reason that I’m forever locked into reverse Y axis on my mouse-look and controller setups, since Descent’s 7-level shareware version was the first game I played with mouselook and it set the standard for me.
When I got to the moment of Peterson just staring directly into the camera and saying “We love space games!” I knew that Brian Rubin was going to go bankrupt.
In fairness, if the fully customizable ships, destructible terrain, and general level design are up to snuff, I’d buy in post-launch, though I am a little Kickstartered out myself at the moment.
My first thought at that moment was “… then why aren’t you making one? Why make Descent instead?” But then, I’m a fan of both. I loved Descent, not as much as I loved a lot of the space sims he named, but still. But I never thought of Descent as a space game. It’s more like… a first person shooter, but with prolonged fights and 3 degrees of freedom. I loved the prolonged fights though. It made multiplayer so much more entertaining to me than in other first person shooters.
Oh, crap, I meant to post this earlier today - I loved Descent and Descent 2 and played the crap out of them (with a keyboard only, back in those days) and I think this could be real, real fun. Fingers crossed!
Lots of old keyboard-jockeying memories with Descent. Always amazes me when I fire up the original in its blocky pre-3D card glory. Seemed so impressive at the time.
I think he’s actually kind of right. Well, maybe not strictly a MOBA, but it’s an MP base defense thing. Unlocks, skills, etc. Plus, I see some kind of in-game money.
The planned SP campaign is just handwaved away in the FAQ as “we’re totally planning it later!”
An arena based FPS also isn’t a very strong premise for a game. You’d need something else to sell me. Such as it being made by Epic. :)
My point is that I don’t know who these guys are and they haven’t got any sort of proven track record with me. So it’s not inherently exciting to me that they’ve bought the Descent license. I hope they make a good game, but I have no reason to expect they will, and their Kickstarter presentation doesn’t inspire much confidence. So all I have to go on is that it’s going to be a zero-G corridor shooter. And that’s just not enough to get me to care.
By the way, there have been zero-G corridor shooters since Descent. I’ve even played some of them. And search me if I can even remember what they were called…
Personally, I simply didn’t like Descent. I know others did. But it sounds like this will not be a Torment-style direct derivative kickstarter, so even if you’re a Descent fan, be cautious.
I just looked up Peterson as I had no idea who he was, and his Linkedin specifically refers to Descent as “a six degrees of freedom space combat MOBA style of game.”
