Classic FPS Descent to be rebooted by Star Citizen alums

The last time we checked in with Eric "Wingman" Peterson was August of 2014, where he was running Cloud Imperium Games’ Austin office and overseeing development on Star Citizen’s persistent universe. However, just a few months after that, Peterson left Cloud Imperium to develop his own game: a reboot of the mid-'90s first-person shooter game Descent.

Peterson has formed Descendent Studios, hired a development staff, and is currently overseeing a Kickstarter to pull together a minimum of $600,000 to finance development of the game, which is titled Descent Underground. Critically, Descent Underground has something that previous attempts to resurrect the Descent franchise have lacked: a licensing agreement with IP-holder Interplay.

Old name, new presentation

Descent was published by Interplay more than 20 years ago, in 1994. The first-person shooter developed by Parallax Software had players zipping around underground in a series of cavernous (and sometimes claustrophobic) mines filled with mad killer robots. Players navigated the underground environment in a Pyro GX spacecraft, which led to the game’s main selling point: it wasn’t just a regular FPS, but one which offered "six degrees of freedom." In other words, you could move in any direction (X, Y, and Z) and turn in any direction (roll, pitch, yaw).

The game spawned a pair of sequels and became a popular alternative to Doom 2 and its contemporary FPS siblings; although it only featured LAN-based multiplayer using Novell’s IPX/SPX protocol, Descent and its sequel Descent II were widely played over the Internet using Kali, a TCP/IP wrapper for IPX/SPX DOS games.

Peterson has big plans for Descent Underground, which will be both single- and multiplayer and will be set as a prequel, telling the story of how the games' Post-Terran Mining Corporation came to be. At the same time, Peterson emphasized that this will be a Descent game before all else. "We’re staying true to the flight mechanics of Descent 1 and 2 and adding a bunch of modern gameplay elements," he told us when we caught up with him on Skype. "We’re adding many new elements, such as mining and drilling through walls, customizations of ships, and team-oriented combat with team goals."

Peterson at his former gig as head of Cloud Imperium's Austin branch.

Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Although the last official game in the Descent franchise was released back in 1999, publisher Interplay still owns the IP rights. In fact, Peterson originally set out to make a 6-DoF shooter in the style of Descent without actually being a branded Descent game. "We were making a game that was called 'Ships That Fight Underground,' or STFU—it was a working title!—and we got approached by one of our fans that was a shareholder at Interplay and said, 'Would you guys like to do Descent?'" This led to a series of meetings with Herve Caen, CEO of Interplay, which then resulted in an official licensing agreement to use the name and be part of the franchise.

"He liked the pedigree we were bringing," said Peterson about the talk with Caen. "I think he had a few other people try to reboot it, but they weren’t doing it to the AAA level. When you’re going to reboot something you really need to take it to the next generation or else you’re just doing the same game, and that won’t really work."

The entire set of gameplay ideas Peterson and his team had dreamed up—ideas that were patterned after Descent anyway when they were still making "STFU"—thus were promoted into officialdom when the project went from "a game in the style of Descent" to "a Descent game."

Peterson also said that Descendent has been in contact with the original Descent developers from Parallax Software (which split in 1997 into two separate studios, Volition and Outrage; Outrage was shuttered in 2004 and Volition was recently rescued from the ashes of THQ by Koch Media). For now, the original developers remain uninvolved with Descendent’s efforts, but Peterson remains open to the idea of working with them, along with other developers who have worked on Descent reboots in the past few years.

Gameplay, sound, and graphics

From a gameplay perspective, Peterson plans to use Descent Underground to expose modern gamers who might not have been playing games in the mid-1990s (or might not even have been alive in the mid-1990s) to Descent’s 6-DoF style—but to do so in a modernized fashion. For the game's single player campaign, that means not going back and recreating D1 and D2’s find-the-three-keys-nuke-the-reactor level progression but instead giving players more interesting and varied things to do.

Concept art for the drone bay, the place where your Internet spaceships will live in Descent Underground.

Credit: Descendent Studios

For multiplayer, it means even bigger changes. Although the original games' deathmatch-style arena play will still be available, Peterson plans to implement a more modernized style of play, with a multitude of different ships that bring different abilities to the battlefields.

"You’re not actually in the cockpit," explained Peterson as we delved into gameplay specifics. "You’re actually flying a drone," he said, "so, you’re in your harvester—think of Dune—and a contractor comes from Earth and says, 'I need ten thousand pallets of this type of ore,' and three or four teams will pick up that contract, land on an asteroid, and launch their drones." The drones you’ll be flying—from a first-person view, or else it wouldn’t be Descent—run the modern gaming gamut in terms of abilities. Some will be suited to take and deal out tremendous amounts of damage, some will be able to repair other ships or extend their shields, and others will be able to drill through walls. The idea is to introduce a more modern role-based multiplayer experience with team objectives and the ability for teams to balance out with players of different play styles and abilities, without falling into a MOBA-style pit—because Descent is an FPS, not a MOBA.

Peterson has been very up-front about wanting to give the Descent name the full AAA treatment, so that also means not reusing the original game's video or sound assets. "No, we’re not doing sound and graphics from the original—we’re bringing everything up," he said. "The assets are owned by somebody other than Interplay. So we can do prequel derivatives—we’ll show you the genesis of some of these things, like the PyroGX."