Yesterday, I said that no one’s really carried Descent’s excellent anti-grav combat forward into a modern game. Now, of course, what I meant to say was the not totally-wrong thing: that Miner Wars 2081 has not only paved over our simplistic notions of “up” and “down” with the fuuuuuture, but it’s also brought in some brilliant-looking features of its own. For instance, fully destructible environments, a persistent procedurally generated universe, and survival elements, among others. And now, finally, it’s adding another fairly key feature to its roster: existence. Next month, Miner Wars will be a real thing. You’ll be able to buy it and everything.

Before December 1st rolls around, however, there’s still a beta test to wrap up. In celebration of the release date announcement, the Miner Wars team updated the beta with “31 missions, 100 hand-crafted space cities, and billions of procedurally generated sectors.” Yes, that’s right: billions. In case you’d forgotten, videogames are kind of totally amazing sometimes.

And now, here’s some fairly recent co-op footage to mostly whet your appetite. And by “mostly,” I mean oh god why won’t the quest introduction dialogue stop? So much restating and meandering and restating. The rest looks great, but I really hope people, um, shut up sometimes. Otherwise, I know which volume option I’m immediately disabling as soon as I start the game.



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