Page three of the article on the zero-g shooter and Kelsey’s reflection on the genre
Reflections
When my brother bought a Playstation, the first games he got with it were Crash Bandicoot, Riven, and the Playstation version of Descent. I’m not sure if I had played the series before this point – I likely had. Regardless, I played it a lot on the Playstation until the disc was too scratched to work properly (I since learned how to properly handle a disc). This game was released on the Playstation fairly soon after the launch of the console and sold well enough to warrant Descent Maximum’s release in 1997, a year after Descent was ported to the Playstation. This makes me wonder why gamers only saw a few games inspired by Descent.
Developers seemed to have a feeling that this was a style of gameplay that people would enjoy (and I don’t think they were wrong on this). While zero-g shooters were never released in the same numbers as other FPS games, they do seem to have been in development around the same time. The PC Zone review of Terracide mentions the up-coming Descent III – these were not games developed in isolation. In retrospect it feels like these games were developed so close to one another to try to capitalize, and hopefully overshadow, similar games. However, in the end it seems that Descent was a name that held the genre back as developers tried to create the next Descent instead of improving upon the gameplay, resulting in “Descent clones”.
Descent III has some pretty fire
There was a time when post-Doom FPS games were labeled “Doom clones.” This seems to be a problem with zero-g shooters – comparisons to Descent are inevitable, the issue is that few developers manage to do Descent as well as its developers. When developers couldn’t out-Doom Doom, they resorted to playing with the genre. Different storytelling styles were experimented with, some games used humour, and others offered more realistic style of gameplay. The issue seems to be that Descent offered a style of gameplay that already seemed to be extremely advanced – it took the shooter formula and tweaked it in a way that still seems pretty radical. It was visually impressive to a consumer base that was just recently impressed with games like Doom and Star Fox.
However, the initially learning curve can be a hurdle people don’t want to overcome. Movement exploits in the average shooter are limited to bunny-hopping or running in a diagonal direction to run faster than normal – Descent’s movement exploit is called tri-chording because it involves moving in three directions at once. Thinking in three-dimensions is not something we’re used to. I’m sure all the Trekkies out there remember the climax to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – Khan’s great flaw is that he thinks in two-dimensions while the crew of the Enterprise thinks in three-dimensions due to spending most of their lives on a spaceship. The fact that you can freely navigate in three-dimensions instead of the usual two can be hard to grasp when you’re flying through corridors. This style of control is typically accompanied by wide-open space environments. Even today, when I introduce people to the genre they’re impressed with the graphics (most people remembers the video games they were playing in 1995), but the movement is enough to discourage them from trying any similar game.
As I played through some of the games I could track down – the Descent series, Pyrotechnica, Radix, and Forsaken – it struck me how vital controls are to this genre. This is a hurdle to overcome. I have not played many FPS games where controls will make or break the game, but this sub-genre requires tight controls. The PC version of Forsaken annoyed me because the movement felt like it had a controller in mind, not my mouse and keyboard. Descent III would be a stronger entry in the series if it mouse-look was a viable option. Pyrotechnica and Radix both have controls very typical of a DOS game – unfortunately this is a disadvantage to any gamer that hasn’t played an FPS game in DOS since the 1990s.
The recently announced Wiiware port of Descent is interesting news. I welcome this decision for the exposure to the series and the sub-genre that it could generate. However, I also question whether this is the best choice of console for the game. It seems to me the dual-analog set-up of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 controllers would work better for this game. We can hope it will result in more popularity to the genre, but given the lack of support it’s received in past generations, I’m not completely sure Descent will inspire people to create a Descent-killer.
However, Shattered Horizon is an interesting twist on this style of gameplay. The fact the player does not control a vehicle seems unimportant at first, but this effectively combines the typical zero-g style of gameplay with the typical FPS gameplay by giving players the opportunities to move around as they normally would. While the developers do not seem to acknowledge Descent, or other zero-g shooters, as a source of inspiration, numerous websites seem to perceive a connection between the two. Perhaps Shattered Horizon is the game to help move the genre out of the looming spectra of the Descent series. This sub-genre is one that is fully 3D, not just in terms of graphics but also gameplay-wise. While there do not seem to be any notable releases on the horizon in this style of gameplay, I find myself hoping that this is not a genre that remains an artifact of the ‘90s.
