I returned to this recently and man it is brutally hard, I'd argue in not a good way.
The robots with the hitscan gattling gun just plain aren't a fun design they're just a shield-cost you pay for not knowing exactly where they are in the level - and worse there's a bunch of keycard pickups where the moment you grab the card you're stuck dead center of a room where 4-6 of the things then come out of unopenable secret doors (which basically makes them impervious to foreknowledge - you can't complete the level without going through there, you need a minimum amount of shields to survive the alpha strike, and even knowing it's going to happen doesn't help).
Still a heckin' fun game, but yeah once they start throwing those things at you en masse (around the Mars missions) my tolerance fell off pretty rapidly since there wasn't really any "puzzle" to solve.
You might be interested in Extra Credits's video on "Challenging vs Punishing Games" https://youtu.be/ea6UuRTjkKs
They mention some games basically require you to memorize levels (Battletoads) or otherwise have things happen that aren't telegraphed. They remove player agency from the equation and make a game punishing rather than challenging, and punishing games just aren't fun.
When I played this in the 90's, I had a sidewinder joystick, and then used the keyboard for strafing. Once you master circle-strafing, the ai enemies don't really stand a chance.
Yeah I always struggled with that too - I only had a gamepad, or just the keyboard. I always felt I didn't have enough keys/fingers, and I never mastered strafing due to that.
That doesn't quite help with the vulcan bots in the first Descent game as much because their weapons actually are hitscan, they aim ridiculously quickly, and they're often waiting behind corners or behind doors already facing you so they can pretty much immediately hit you when you open the door and/or pop out behind it.
In cases where they're around a blind corner waiting in ambush (not behind those secret doors), it's often possible to sort of preempt them by shooting lasers so that the bolt(s) on one side just barely go around the corner. Since the lasers go from the edge of the screen towards the middle, you can shoot into a place behind a corner that you can't see.
Since getting hit makes the robots lose their ability to shoot (or move) for a brief, sub-second moment, you can use that to kill them without getting hit yourself despite their ridiculously quick aim and hitscan weapon.
Even if you don't know exactly where they are (or whether there even is anything behind the corner), you can start shooting that way around a corner preemptively and slowly and progressively slide around the corner until you'll be actually hitting them or seeing that there wasn't anything there.
Of course if you don't know where they are, you'll have to be doing that preemptively at lots of corners just in case, spending energy which can also be in short supply on higher difficulties. It also means you basically have to creep carefully around corners a lot. And it doesn't help in other kinds of cases.
I agree that those robots were frustrating when I played through the game again after years some time ago. Interestingly, I don't think there are hitscan robots in Descent 2.
My strategy against them was hide and seek. The tactical peekaboo.
I would look fast, see where the Gatling gun sparks appeared, hide fast, wait a second for the bullets to hit something, then move again, shoot at where the sparks were an instant before, and hide again.
This was my tactic for the invisible ones, the others were easy, as they can't aim while being shot. For the visible ones, the missiles were made just for them.
By the time the sparks appear, you're already hit. It doesn't take a second or any time for them to hit something. They're actually hitscan. That tactic can still work against them but generally not without a cost to shields, at least not if you take the time to see the sparks.
You can use that tactic effectively to deal with other kinds of robots without taking a hit because their projectiles take time to travel. And Descent 2 and 3 had gatling gun robots that IIRC were not quite hitscan, so you could in principle do that with them too.
Homing missiles are great against the (visible) vulcan robots but you still need to know where they are, or spend missiles speculatively.
Wow, that's the original release I did ages ago, with my notes and everything! I spent a few weekends extracting proprietary code/libraries from the code base so it could be released. Doing that work changed the direction of my life in a way, leading me from hobby game development work to working on Descent 3.
jcotton as in Kali Jay Cotton? Nice to 'see you' again after all this time! (ps, I think it's funny we both put 42 at the end of our usernames).
Short answer is yes. It's probably on me to get official permission and strip out some code we can't legally distribute. I'm not sure how many people I want to look at my code from the 90's though. :)
I'll shoot an email to the owners and see if it's ok to get it up on github. It's not too much work for me to strip stuff out.
Afraid not, funny that I share a username with someone from Kali though.
As for the Descent 3 code, that would be awesome! D1 and D2 have been modernized through source ports, but getting D3 to work on modern systems has always been rough, and a source release would be an awesome starting point.
What would be the best place to keep tabs on for the release happening?
For some reason, I always think that Descent II came out around the same time as DOOM, but then I remember that Descent II was one of the first games to support 3D accelerator cards.
I was so excited when I got my ViRGE. Then I tried playing games with it. Mechwarrior II came with it but you had to run at 512x384 and even then it didn't run great. My next video card was a 3dfx Voodoo and I was in heaven.
My second GPU was a Rendition 2200. I was pretty upset, to be honest. I had asked for a 3dfx Voodoo for Christmas, and was given the Rendition instead.
It was mostly worthless. At the time, games were almost all using the Glide API.
If you want to use a non-modern joystick on a modern machine, there are adapters; I have one I like, and if I remember, I'll post the brand when I get home.
Only downside is that it is self-calibrating, so if you have a joystick pot that sometimes jumps to very high (or very low I suppose) resistance, it will scale the axis to that very high value; calibration on the PC in that case will give you terrible resolution (since it is quantized before being sent to the PC). I suggest cleaning the pots with DeoxIT if that happens.
I loved Descent and Descent2! Most importantly, because speed was coded as uniform in the unit axes (x,y & z), everybody who played always chorded and flew in a permanent diagonal, which I recall was much easier to pull off with the keyboard than joystick.
Early applications of Pythagorus' theorem in action!
The Mac version, which was enhanced to run at 640x480 and had a game disc that did double duty as a redbook audio CD soundtrack, was bundled with the Performa 6400 that was the family computer in my house in the mid-90s.
I wasn’t able to play it too much until that computer became mine as a hand-me-down some years later but it was the first “real” video game I’d ever played and it left an impression. For a couple years in the early 2000s it was a minor obsession of mine to hunt down custom levels on the internet to play with it. It was also the first game that I found an alternative client for, when I ran across versions built for OpenGL and GLIDE that could run at higher resolutions.
What’s the best Descent-like modern game? Heavy emphasis on the importance of full 3D movement (3-axis rotation and 3-axis translation), maze-like levels, and a combination of time crunches with untimed puzzles. I loved Descent 2, but found the open spaces of Descent Freespace sorta boring.
IMO they nailed the look and feel. I haven't gone too far in the game though, not a whole lot of time or carpal-tunnel-budget left for playing games sadly :|
There is sublevel zero, also. It's a similar experience, but made for VR and has a procedurally generated map system that makes the playthroughs a bit different from time to time.
My dad used to watch me play it when I was growing up, and he could only watch for a couple minutes before he had to go lay down :)
I blame Descent for my good spatial memory. Getting turned around in those levels really challenges how well you remember your location and where to go next.
Loved Descent, we used to play it for hours on the company lan, multiplayer was awesome!
They were are great early games. I kept one of my office mates transformed into a chicken in Hexen for hours, his cries of frustration still ring in my ears!
++ on ROTT. Just pure fun. I loved the "missile cam", and when you played it on Dec. 25, the music was changed to "Good King Winceslas" in a minor key and characters had Santa hats.
Actually the community that got me into figuring out how to make computers dance for me.
Loved the FreeSpace Source source Code Project. Loved the Universe. Game engine was awesome. So many hours wiled away as a kid on FreeSpace/Silent Threat/FreeSpace 2.
Playing Descent with friends over modems is one of my great memories of the early 1990s. Thanks for sharing the DXX links -- I had no idea we could still play this. The OpenRA titles have been great nostalgia, so DXX sounds promising.
Surprised to see this game on here. This was the first playstation game my dad bought me and I remember the entire family were watching with awe at the opening sequence:
Really a terrifying game for kids. I remember I used to get sweaty hands after blowing up the reactor and trying to remember where the exit was with the female computer voice counting down. No help, it was brutal.
The psx version came with :
- dedicated studio produced soundtrack that simply stands the test of time
- voice over FMV sequences with symphony orchestra track
Descent 2 & 3 continued the trend on the playstation with the same formula.
The story also had a nice element of modern realism. You are a cynical mercenary for a major space mining corp with a machiavellian corporate executive just using you. I won't spoil it but one of the best endings ever in a game.
I've also read Peter Telep's novel based on Descent universe. Yeah I'm kinda obsessed with this game.
114 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadThe robots with the hitscan gattling gun just plain aren't a fun design they're just a shield-cost you pay for not knowing exactly where they are in the level - and worse there's a bunch of keycard pickups where the moment you grab the card you're stuck dead center of a room where 4-6 of the things then come out of unopenable secret doors (which basically makes them impervious to foreknowledge - you can't complete the level without going through there, you need a minimum amount of shields to survive the alpha strike, and even knowing it's going to happen doesn't help).
Still a heckin' fun game, but yeah once they start throwing those things at you en masse (around the Mars missions) my tolerance fell off pretty rapidly since there wasn't really any "puzzle" to solve.
They mention some games basically require you to memorize levels (Battletoads) or otherwise have things happen that aren't telegraphed. They remove player agency from the equation and make a game punishing rather than challenging, and punishing games just aren't fun.
When I played this in the 90's, I had a sidewinder joystick, and then used the keyboard for strafing. Once you master circle-strafing, the ai enemies don't really stand a chance.
Circle-strafing is a must in general, though.
In fact, last week I bought all three games in Steam.
Since getting hit makes the robots lose their ability to shoot (or move) for a brief, sub-second moment, you can use that to kill them without getting hit yourself despite their ridiculously quick aim and hitscan weapon.
Even if you don't know exactly where they are (or whether there even is anything behind the corner), you can start shooting that way around a corner preemptively and slowly and progressively slide around the corner until you'll be actually hitting them or seeing that there wasn't anything there.
Of course if you don't know where they are, you'll have to be doing that preemptively at lots of corners just in case, spending energy which can also be in short supply on higher difficulties. It also means you basically have to creep carefully around corners a lot. And it doesn't help in other kinds of cases.
I agree that those robots were frustrating when I played through the game again after years some time ago. Interestingly, I don't think there are hitscan robots in Descent 2.
I would look fast, see where the Gatling gun sparks appeared, hide fast, wait a second for the bullets to hit something, then move again, shoot at where the sparks were an instant before, and hide again.
This was my tactic for the invisible ones, the others were easy, as they can't aim while being shot. For the visible ones, the missiles were made just for them.
You can use that tactic effectively to deal with other kinds of robots without taking a hit because their projectiles take time to travel. And Descent 2 and 3 had gatling gun robots that IIRC were not quite hitscan, so you could in principle do that with them too.
Homing missiles are great against the (visible) vulcan robots but you still need to know where they are, or spend missiles speculatively.
https://github.com/videogamepreservation/descent
Do you ever think the source of Descent 3 could be released?
Short answer is yes. It's probably on me to get official permission and strip out some code we can't legally distribute. I'm not sure how many people I want to look at my code from the 90's though. :)
I'll shoot an email to the owners and see if it's ok to get it up on github. It's not too much work for me to strip stuff out.
Afraid not, funny that I share a username with someone from Kali though.
As for the Descent 3 code, that would be awesome! D1 and D2 have been modernized through source ports, but getting D3 to work on modern systems has always been rough, and a source release would be an awesome starting point.
What would be the best place to keep tabs on for the release happening?
Ask and you shall receive! https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3
> This includes the '1.5' patch that Jeff Slutter and Kevin Bentley several years ago.
wrote several years ago?? ( no biggie, just a heads up )
It changed my life. (See my post above about a senior project.)
Pretty sure it came with my S3 VIRGE.
It was mostly worthless. At the time, games were almost all using the Glide API.
I took a 25 year hiatus playing, from 1996 to 2021 but I'm back at it now, playing on a period appropriate Windows 98 machine.
I love the original Descent and Descent 2 look and feel and graphics, I pass on the rebirths.
If you want a modern game from the same team with similar gameplay, try Overload on Steam.
Only downside is that it is self-calibrating, so if you have a joystick pot that sometimes jumps to very high (or very low I suppose) resistance, it will scale the axis to that very high value; calibration on the PC in that case will give you terrible resolution (since it is quantized before being sent to the PC). I suggest cleaning the pots with DeoxIT if that happens.
Early applications of Pythagorus' theorem in action!
I wasn’t able to play it too much until that computer became mine as a hand-me-down some years later but it was the first “real” video game I’d ever played and it left an impression. For a couple years in the early 2000s it was a minor obsession of mine to hunt down custom levels on the internet to play with it. It was also the first game that I found an alternative client for, when I ran across versions built for OpenGL and GLIDE that could run at higher resolutions.
- https://github.com/BredaUniversityGames/DXX-Raytracer
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eQJKFFEc7E
IMO they nailed the look and feel. I haven't gone too far in the game though, not a whole lot of time or carpal-tunnel-budget left for playing games sadly :|
Gabbagabbahey
I blame Descent for my good spatial memory. Getting turned around in those levels really challenges how well you remember your location and where to go next.
- Doom and Doom2
- Heretic and Hexen
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Rise of the Triad
Descent was special in terms of the freedom of movement. Back then basically all games in this genre felt magical and transportive.
They were are great early games. I kept one of my office mates transformed into a chicken in Hexen for hours, his cries of frustration still ring in my ears!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1311570/Desecrators/
https://youtu.be/FCIKmdrkQEQ
This series and FreeSpace 1/2 (spinoff) were fantastic, The latter had an active modding community over at Hardlight for over a decade.
Actually the community that got me into figuring out how to make computers dance for me.
Loved the FreeSpace Source source Code Project. Loved the Universe. Game engine was awesome. So many hours wiled away as a kid on FreeSpace/Silent Threat/FreeSpace 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceOrb_360
https://3dconnexion.com/us/spacemouse/
It sometimes goes on sale for pretty cheap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM_JQsmrkXU
Really a terrifying game for kids. I remember I used to get sweaty hands after blowing up the reactor and trying to remember where the exit was with the female computer voice counting down. No help, it was brutal.
The psx version came with :
- dedicated studio produced soundtrack that simply stands the test of time
- voice over FMV sequences with symphony orchestra track
Descent 2 & 3 continued the trend on the playstation with the same formula.
The story also had a nice element of modern realism. You are a cynical mercenary for a major space mining corp with a machiavellian corporate executive just using you. I won't spoil it but one of the best endings ever in a game.
I've also read Peter Telep's novel based on Descent universe. Yeah I'm kinda obsessed with this game.
In my mind, if you can strafe, it is an FPS.