AUSTIN, TX—About a month ago, we called the retro-themed Descent-style shooter Sublevel Zero an awesome Descent-like experience but lamented its lack of multiplayer. Well, good news this morning for folks who are still craving multiplayer tunnel-shooting: as of 11:00 EDT, Descent Underground is available on Steam Early Access for $24.89. Players will be able to jump in and fly three classes of ships in five maps and a few different game modes.

The product of a small Austin company called Descendent Studios founded by former Star Citizen Austin studio head Eric "Wingman" Peterson, Descent Underground was originally envisioned as a Descent clone under the working title "Ships That Fight Underground" (abbreviated as "STFU"). However, the game changed course when an encounter with an Interplay shareholder led to a licensing agreement with Interplay, the studio that controls the bulk of the Descent intellectual property. The licensing deal meant that the game could be re-envisioned as an actual branded Descent game—though because the licensing agreement doesn’t include the character models or sound assets from the original trilogy, some creativity had to be applied.

The result is Descent Underground, a prequel to the original Descent series. In it, the player takes on the role of a miner who remote-pilots drones through mines, blasting other drones and occasionally doing some actual mining to collect resources. Lead designer Peterson explained to us that the eventual goal is to have a metagame that has some hints of Dune about it: players will fly around in a large mothership, cruising through asteroid fields and looking for choice places to mine. A nice asteroid might already have another player group’s ship docked on it, and you can fly up next to it and deploy your own drones to try to fight them for the asteroid. (This is what's going on in the launch trailer at the top of the page.)

The importance of being Descent

When we visited Descendent’s Austin office earlier in October, Peterson laughed as he described the role that Descent played in his life and career. Gamers old enough to remember the long run-up to Origin’s Wing Commander IV might be surprised to learn that the game’s development likely would have gone a lot quicker if the Origin team hadn’t been so enamored with playing rounds of Descent on the office LAN.

There were more familiar faces in the Descendent office than I expected—in addition to Peterson, former Star Citizen designer Rob Irving has made the jump from Cloud Imperium over to the tiny indie studio. We last talked with Irving and Peterson back in 2014 when we visited Cloud Imperium to check on Star Citizen’s progress (things seemed a lot more on-track in 2014 than they do now).

Descendent is operating in many ways in an antipodal model from Cloud Imperium. Though Peterson has kept up the concept of Star Citizen-style video updates for Descent Underground, the studio itself is tiny: just a few rooms on the fifth floor of an anonymous tower in the middle of downtown Austin. After dragging about $600,000 in its Kickstarter, the company is operating as lean as possible: surplus office equipment and reduced salaries are the order of the day, and the priority since closing out the crowdfunding campaign has been to deliver a playable, polished game that brings the original Descent up to modern standards. It’s a development style that Peterson refers to as "triple-I"—the production of a AAA-style game, but with an indie budget and team.

Hands on, eyes up

I was mindful of this as I took to the controls in the Descendent office shared by Descendent developers Tyler Pixley and Joshua Alday. Most of the small Descendent team had jumped into an "Anarchy" match (which, like with the original Descent, means everyone for themselves, kill-on-sight everything you see), and I had to take a few minutes to reacquaint myself with decades-old Descent reflexes.

It turns out that Peterson and team have gone to great lengths to ensure the verisimilitude of the experience. When you fire your Descent Underground drone’s primary lasers, they move with the exact same speed as the lasers in the original Descent. The vulcan cannon fires with the same projectile delay. The dumbfire missiles exhibit the same flight time. This is the result of extensive scrutinization of the previous games, along with a whole lot of consultation with the player community—especially one top-tier backer who goes by the handle "Lotharbot" who, along with his wife, visited Descendent and provided a wealth of fine tweaks to the way the ships move and fire).

The game is being developed with the Unreal engine, which has given the team a solid graphical foundation. The levels we tried all looked great, with appropriate lighting—moody in some places, glaring in others, but never overdone. At least for now, player ships can’t shoot flares and there’s no Descent 2-style ability to shoot out lighting, but we’re hopeful on both features.

Within a few minutes of joining the match, the trash-talking and yelling had started up as the game took hold of the office. I found myself whizzing through corridors, trying to keep from moving in any one direction for too long and struggling not to have my ass handed to me by the devs and a few high-tier early backers who were also on the matchmaking servers. Lotharbot showed up at one point; I saw him only on the post-explosion deathcam after he had waxed me.

Descendent Studios

Descendent Studios

Descendent Studios

Descendent Studios

Descendent Studios

I elected to use the same control scheme that I used back in the day: keyboard plus joystick. Several other folks in the office were using Xbox controllers; others grabbed keyboard and mouse. The game had no problem functioning with whatever the team had on-hand to throw at it.

The patina of the original Descent was everywhere, from the way the ships handled to the maps. Tight corridors gave way to open spaces for dogfights, with looping passages leading off. Glowing power-ups bobbed in places, waiting to be scooped up; shimmering golden recharge zones cloaked portions of some passages, letting you refill your energy if it dropped too low. The thousands of hours I put into playing Descent via Kali in high school and college started to come back—my eyes were drawn to the floating blue shield orbs automatically, and I scooped them up where I saw them without needing to be told. I remembered how to vertically circle-strafe (something that throws off a lot of opponents who, like Khan, are used to two-dimensional thinking).

It wasn’t enough, though, against the dev team and the early backers, who dusted me like bundt cake. No matter which of the four available drones I picked (each with its own special characteristic or weapon) and no matter how hard I flew, it was difficult to eke out more than a few kills against the more skilled players. I took more than one Mega Missile directly to the face (and this time around, the Mega Missile actually has a smiley painted on its nose—the last thing you see before it kills you is that absurdly happy grin).

Practice, as they say, makes perfect.

Virtual reality

Descent Underground, like Elite: Dangerous, benefits in virtual reality from having the player’s in-game position mirror the player’s real life position while playing: sitting down in a chair. This brings with it an automatic reduction in the potential for nausea and disorientation just by virtue of giving the player some in-game proprioceptive alignment with reality.

The prerelease build we played had some limited Oculus Rift support in it, and I was able to put in a few minutes of frag-time on a DK2. It was more disorienting than I’d anticipated, but it was indeed functional. The main issue was that in order to really work in VR, the game needs a cockpit, and there really wasn’t one present yet.

Once a cockpit with some fixed references is incorporated, the game will be fun as hell to play in VR. The massively increased spatial awareness that comes with being able to look around the cockpit will be a huge boon to players; the trade-off will be clarity and sharpness of vision, since even the release versions of popular headsets like the Rift and Vive reportedly still exhibit some amount of the "screen door effect," where individual pixels are clearly visible.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson





Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

The future

Originally, the Kickstarter for Descent Underground mentioned a microtransaction model for adding stuff in-game; fortunately, and largely as a result of negative feedback, Descendent has abandoned plans for anything involving microtransactions. The entire game will be available when purchased, and players will own all of it without having to pay additional money to unlock extra weapons, ships, or skins.

We got to peek at a slew of upcoming maps and other cool features, including an arena-style game mode where players shepherd a glowing energy ball toward a goal. The game is being designed to support matches far in excess of the original Descent’s max of eight players; we got to preview one 64-player map that took the form of a huge series of tunnels laid out in concentric rings with open sides; players can see and shoot across the entire massive width of the map, while their movement is constrained to the rings.

After the gameplay, the Descendent folks let me hang around for an extra couple of hours to try to avoid leaving in the worst of Austin rush hour, and we talked through the game’s development. Above all else, Peterson says that the studio values player input—he issued a standing invite for anyone with questions or comments about the game’s development to post on the Descendent forums or to e-mail him directly (he stopped short, I believe, of inviting random folks into the Descendent offices directly, but many Kickstarter backers have visited, and I get the feeling that the company would be fine with fans calling and asking to stop by).

Peterson hints that we might get some hints into the nature of the mysterious virus that infected all of the machines in the original series. We might even see the birth of the shadowy Post Terran Mining Corporation (though the PTMC name isn’t included in the licensing agreement with Interplay). It’s possible that a single-player campaign will eventually join the multiplayer, too, but at this stage in its development Descent Underground remains a multiplayer-only Descent-style remake, cast as a prequel.

You can grab the Descent Underground Early Access version directly from Steam on sale for $24.89 (Kickstarter backers can request a Steam key from Descendent Studios). After the first week, the price will go up to its standard Early Access rate of $29.99, and the game will be priced at $60 on release. The initial release will be for Windows, OS X, and Linux. No console versions are planned at this time.

Update: Shortly after publication, Peterson reached out to Ars with a quick correction: "We are doing a single player game, too, and with today's launch you can battle a level with bots." So the $60 price tag for the full game will cover both single- and multiplayer.