Screenshot credit: Mobygames
I did not really proofread this post because it is not a script or an article this is simply the amount of thoughts I normally have on a subject like this.
I am not sure whether I like Descent, and I'm not sure whether it is (or could be) a good game. I feel like it suffers from a problem that many games have, in which the core conceit is so sicknasty that while you know the game is doing something cool, you can't really look past that and ask "am I actually having fun? is this fun?" Certainly, I have that problem with it.
Here's the breakdown:
- Pro: Fast as hell 3D engine.
In 1995, this was still novel. Nobody had seen really fast and smooth 3D until Doom in '93, and even that really needed an 80486 to do its magic.
It was also a massive hack, which avoided needing to deal with texture correction by using a fixed camera angle. This is why Doom's textures looked clean compared to the "true 3D" polygonal PC & Playstation games of the following couple years, because there was almost zero perspective distortion. Sort of like an isometric projection in just one axis, or something. It made the math so simple that a 386 could run it acceptably, and a 486 could hit a continuous 35fps, which was breathtaking at the time.
Descent went harder. I argue that Doom was "truly 3D," more than people are willing to admit, but Descent was truly truly 3D. The engine was capable of rendering anything from any angle, it was performing realtime perspective-corrected texture transforms across dozens of arbitrary polygons, and it could do it on a high end 486* without breaking a sweat.
* I'm not sure what the slowest machine I ever ran it on was, but there are people with 100MHz DX2s on youtube getting good framerates. I'm pretty sure that was the minimum that a Serious Gamer had in 1995, so I feel good saying that it whipped the llama's ass.
- Con: Fast as hell 3D engine that was somehow totally unimpressive.
I saw Descent when it was new, and I was nonplussed. Something about it just didn't floor me. It was fast and dynamic and seemingly impossible. It probably didn't run as well as, say, Tomb Raider on the PSX, but since the Descent demo came out nearly a year before the PSX hit the US market, nobody would have known that.
Anyone who had played Doom would have immediately recognized that Descent was doing completely new things. Being able to tilt the camera was incredible; using polygons for enemies was incredible. I think it even had vertex lighting, but don't quote me on that. It looked absolutely breathtaking, and really did nothing for me.
Were others just as unimpressed? I don't know. If this were a video, and thus I was getting paid to do research, I would go find out what magazines thought, and then check Google Groups, and similar shit. I'm just talking about my own observations however, since that doesn't require opening any tabs.
I do have some suspicions about why it might not have floored people, however, which stem from the rest of the game's concepts.
- Pro: Wild new level designs.
The game takes place in a winding, self-intersecting maze of tunnels going in all directions. You can fly up, under, around, do a barrel roll. Enemies can come at you from all directions, and if you're using a good joystick, you can match their moves with your own. Dodge left, right, up and down, spin in whichever direction you need to, and use your arsenal to obliterate everything around, above and beneath your little ship.
It was cool, and unlike anything else that would exist for some time. Doom obviously locked you to the floor; Duke Nukem 3D would come out a year later and offer a jetpack, but it wasn't very dynamic; Quake offered no flight capabilities, and wouldn't even introduce the jumppad until 1999.
Descent was unquestionably the most dynamic title available for the PC or almost anything else for several years to either side. Unfortunately, it was a bit too dynamic.
- Con: Wild new level designs that were stale by the end of the first stage.
The game only takes place in a winding, self-intersecting maze of tunnels going in all directions. You do have to fly up, and under, and around, and very soon you're just going "Okay, but why? What's the purpose of it all? What are these places?"
The premise supposes that a bunch of mining robots have gone nuts from a computer virus and need to be stopped. This was probably a convenient way to avoid involving any sapient enemies, during a period of unrest in the Videogame Violence! "conversation."*
For many years I've assumed that the premise was entirely about protecting property (making this a Cop Game) but I guess the robots are ostensibly coming to earth to murder everyone, reason unknown. Later games might explain it better, I don't know.
The trouble is this: the places you're exploring don't look like anything.
Doom got this right
Doom's levels were nearly all abstract and meaningless, but mostly because they chose that approach. Tom Hall was all set to make the game's spaces diegetic, human-shaped, meaningful. Eventually everyone realized that was too much work, both to make and play.
The rest of the staff wanted to sell the game to "Jocks," as they themselves were, who never would have had the attention span for any of that shit. If you want to make something good, you need to make it what you want. So they put Tom Hall in the penalty box for the rest of his time at the company, and Romero went balls to the walls, designing a thousand maps which all looked like nothing, but felt like somewhere.
Doom's spaces are utterly implaceable, but somehow humanesque. They're already abstract at the outset and only become moreso as the episodes proceed. As a child, I cannot describe the effect that Doom II in particular had on me, with it's sort of... dark spin on human architecture.
Monster Condo (MAP27), for instance, is mostly covered in dark wood affects that, as a child, I never really paid attention to, correctly identifying them as "some random textures they got from somewhere or made with no particular goal in mind, just to cover the game in colors."
Looking closer however, the walls are a strange mix, drawn from a single theme, but what theme is it? Many of them look like the belowdecks bulkheads of an abandoned mid-millennium freighter, while others are hardwood panels, broken up by things like bookshelves, doors and switches with complex hand-carved details.
Much of it looks like it came from some kind of Dracula House - but none of it makes any sense in context. Yes, okay, "library full of evil books" is an eldritch horror trope, but this clearly isn't that.
It's like the imagery of horror tropes that draw on centuries-old aesthetics of the rich, but broken up into shards so that the way the pieces ever fit into reality is no longer clear. In other words, it's like a nightmare, where things are different in no way you can explain.
Most of Doom II feels this way. The spaces feel purposeful, even if the purpose is so alien that any attempt to visualize it would just feel corny (oh noooo the monsters are all crowded around some candles havening a summoning. far less spooky than all the rooms just being empty.)
Descent didn't
Descent's problem is that the spaces feel both abstract and pointless. Nothing feels like it does anything. It's just tunnel after tunnel after tunnel, plastered with flashing computer screens and doors and the occasional caution stripe.
You're supposed to be down in a mine, and to be fair, that's an incredibly boring setting. Mines are a bunch of tunnels. They aren't decorated or filled with anything more than the bare minimum equipment needed to get the job done, so you aren't going to find anything to look at or do, generally speaking. There will be no "architecture," just tubes creating the most efficient path from one location to another.
But hey, these are future mines, made by robots. Surely they could have created some larger internal spaces with intriguing textures and lots of weird little nooks and crannies...? Well, no. The engine can't really do that. Descent may be fast, and Truly 3D, but for all the detail its enemies gain, the levels suffer.
The maps are basically large "voxels", with each node having only a small number of possible shapes - a square, or one of several prisms. I think that's the case, anyway; I went looking for a mapping tutorial and it seems most of that stuff has rotted.
Still, I know that you cannot simply draw a wall at an arbitrary angle, as you could in Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, or Quake, and that means, despite having some angles, that the levels are almost as orthogonal (a word people only know because of Doom) as Wolfenstein 3D. I suspect this simplicity is much of why the engine is so god damn fast, that the squareness allows them to perform some optimizations that just weren't possible in games with more freeform environments, but it really, really hurts.
If you've played two Wolfenstein 3D levels you've pretty much seen the entire game. Even now I cannot bring myself to put any serious time into it. By the second stage you go "Oh. So this is all there is." Descent is similar.
These levels suffered from the same problems as many novel, technically impressive game design elements: the method used to implement them seems to be a one-trick pony. At any given moment in Descent, you're likely to be surrounded on four to five sides with walls, stuck in a tunnel exactly the size of your little ship, and there is only so much fun you can have in a hallway, however many enemies and exciting weapons you pack it with.
Certainly, there are rooms where the game opens up a little, but they have nothing in the way of detail. Doom let you put sprite objects in the middle of a room just to decorate it. Descent didn't. The only shapes the engine supports are walls - made of legos picked from a beginners' set - and textures on those walls, which could be animated, colorful, or have transparent elements, but were ultimately flat. So all rooms are empty by definition, and you just can't do much with that.
But none of that really matters, because of the fundamental problem that
Vehicular combat is a boring genre
It blew up in the 90s. We had so many games, for a brief period, where you drove around in cars, tanks, hovercrafts and spaceships and tried to Do Things, or at least Kill Guys. They were all excruciatingly limited. Let's see if I can name a few:
Just Shooting Guys Games
- Twisted Metal
- Deathdrome
Trying To Do Things Games
- Necrodome
- Redline: Gang Warfare
- Recoil
These were excruciatingly limited for the simple reason that cars are clumsy and do not have hands.
Descent is essentially a first person shooter with half the features missing. You can't interact with stuff because it wouldn't make any sense; the only verb you have is "destroy." Other than keyfinding quests, you do nothing other than shoot things.
For that reason, Descent may have been intriguing as an arcade game, in an actual arcade, or at least for that Arcade At Home Experience - except that it was too complex.
You can drive around in circles for half an hour in a level before realizing, with Rivenesque frustration, that you needed to pilot yourself into one specific little junction and turn riupght to find the critical path. That's a word I've coined to mean "up-right," because yeah - this game has no gravitic frame of reference.
The selling point of the whole "6DOF" genre (which is basically Descent, and then like 4 other games ever) was that you can turn and move in any direction. Unfortunately that meant that such a game pretty much has to be little more than "a collection of hallways connected to other hallways."
You can't have any rooms that are shaped like anything, because you'd always be coming into them turned upside down or sideways and they wouldn't look right. And you don't want to have to constantly rotate to feel like you're Doing It Right.
They do actually give a lot of rooms "floors" and "ceilings" but nonetheless, because normal gameplay often gets you flipped upside down and sideways, and because nothing "looks like anything" due to the general lack of gravity-informed design, you can't really remember where you are unless you have a phenomenal sense of 3D direction.
That's why it's so easy to get lost, and in my opinion, that makes it a crappy pure-action game, because you can spend so much downtime just doing nothing, not even finding anything to kill.
At the same time, it's also not really about exploration, despite the freeform world design seeming like a prime candidate for that sort of theme. There's nowhere to explore; nothing to discover. Every level is the same thing in a different shape, and you're simply wandering through mazes looking for a couple key items and a generator to shoot.
Descent could have been an exploration-themed game - yes, I'm back on action-adventure, of course, have you met me? - but, unfortunately, there is usually nothing to do in Car Games, because cars are so clunky and clumsy and awkward. If you're inside of a tank, the smallest details in your world are a hundred feet across, because that's your turning radius. It doesn't leave much room for little levers to pull and items to locate.
Blaster Master was the exception that proved the rule. It offered up the fascinating idea of a vehicular combat game in which the machine feels identiably like a vehicle without being constrained as one should be. The tank* in which you ride for most of the game is capable of jumping, and moving almost as dexterously as Mario Mario himself, while still possessing considerably more inertia.
* Called SOPHIA the 3rd in the US release, but unnamed in the original Chō Wakusei Senki Metafight, where that name described the planet the game was set on. I have always wondered if they chose this approach simply because nobody remembered to remove the text from the inventory screen for the US release until it was too late to do anything but retcon it in the manual.
The tank feels absolutely wonderful, one of the most nailed-down platform characters in the entire run of the Famicom/NES, but the pilot, who can in fact exit the vehicle, turns out to be far less capable. It's as if the world was terraformed to suit a society who spends all their time riding in materiel.
Blaster Master's conceits are difficult to replicate elsewhere. In most even semi-realistic environments, a piece of mobile armor is a great big bastard that doesn't fit anywhere except great big open, empty spaces, and while you could add that element of getting out on foot, it won't make any sense for the pilot to explore those larger spaces on foot.
Instead, you'll have to create little buildings or fortresses they can enter, built to their scale, with tasks inside that require hands, and enemies only strong enough to harm soft fleshy targets. Would it surprise you that this is exactly what Blaster Master did?
The reason you can get out of your tank is, in fact, to enter little doors which the tank can't fit into, at which point the game enters an overhead view and becomes a totally different game.
Now, to discredit my knee-jerk opinion on this (which is: wow, that sucks. maybe just don't include the car part.), Blaster Master is arguably more fun and offers a more diverse experience in the Tank portions than the Man portions. But without the latter, I firmly believe that the game wouldn't be complete. It would feel strange to spend the entire experience in your little Gun Car.
And in fact, it wasn't alone; several titles attempted the same thing - in fact, most of the ones I mentioned earlier under "games where you do things" do something like this, or at least hint at it. Here:
- Redline: Gang Warfare
This is basically Stupid Blaster Master, structurally. I actually didn't realize this until... ten minutes ago? I was looking up the game to remind myself which one it was, and I noticed some screenshots depicting gameplay I didn't realize was in there. I knew the game let you get out of your car, but I thought it was only to hit a button to open a gate, shit like that.
It turns out that the missions are a mix of vehicular combat and involved on-foot sections, which are executed as a fully realized first person shooter that you can simply transition into at any moment by getting out of your vehicle. I now need to clear this game so I can find out what I've been missing out on all these years.
- Necrodome
Including this because it's closer to what I thought Redline was.
There are switches, doors, "puzzles" to some extent, but you control them from inside your tank. The game world is built to the conceit of vehicular combat: it's all enormous, and it's clear that the levels are simply huge Car Sandboxes.
You can get out of your tank - but mostly, this is just in case it gets blown up. If you can make it back to a spawn point on foot without getting run down or gunned down, you don't have to redo the level. That seems to be the extent to which they leveraged this capability, which is a bummer, because they did write enough code to have added a substantial on-foot experience. Perhaps it was cut at the last minute.
- Recoil
Much like Necrodome, this one does contain gay little errands that you need to perform, but there are also internal spaces to explore... from inside your tank. There are no on-foot segments. I need to play this more in order to yield a better opinion, but from youtube footage, it seems like the primary purpose is still to Kill, Kill, Kill.
Even this short list mostly doesn't meet my criteria, because yeah, this sort of thing was honestly not very common. I kinda wanted to illustrate how far you have to reach to find good examples. Hell, now that I think about it, I could have included
- Grand Theft Auto 3
because it could be argued that it was one of the first games, a decade+ after Blaster Master, to really figure out how to give a vehicle-heavy game any depth.
The rest kind of illustrate that nobody could figure out how to do this. And this is a bummer, to me.
Even if Descent offers a more or less compelling vehicular action component, in my opinion it was sorely lacking that on-foot component. I'm positive that if there were little doors I could pull up to, then get out and run around in maintenance hallways to flip switches and read computer screens or whatever, I would have found, and would continue to find Descent far more compelling.
It should be obvious at this point, if you've read my one other #gravis-gaming-dot-net post, that I think everything should be an action-adventure. I do not apologize for this position; they kick ass and represent a pure form of experience imo. Descent's primary sin in my eyes is that it isn't a kind of game it isn't supposed to be. What I question is whether anyone really wanted it to be what it was instead of something with more depth.
I should make Descent: Hybrid.
