Descent-style "six degrees of freedom" tunnel shooters are undergoing a mini-renaissance. First, some of the Austin-based Star Citizen team jumped ship and started working on Descent: Underground, a multiplayer-focused prequel to the original game using the "Descent" name on license from Interplay. Next, UK indie studio Sigtrap Games announced Sublevel Zero, another Descent-like tunnel shooter—this one with blocky, retro-styled graphics and a focus on single-player.
We’ve played both, but as good as Descent: Underground and Sublevel Zero are shaping up to be, they’re missing something: the original development crew from Parallax Studios that worked on the original Descent and its sequels. We’ve been wondering since last year if Mike Kulas, Matt Toschlog, and the rest of the folks behind Descent were going to throw their virtual hats into the ring—and, as of this morning, they have. They’ve started a new company called Revival Productions LLC and launched a $300,000 crowdfunding campaign for a game called Overload.
Defending materials
The Overload Kickstarter, along with the game’s website, paints a pretty detailed picture of the kind of game Revival is developing. The game is not a sequel or prequel to Descent—Eric Peterson and Descendent Studios have the right to use the Descent name and are doing that with Descent: Underground—but is instead a new game in a new universe (Revival told Ars that its own attempts to license the Descent name from Interplay were unsuccessful). However, Overload will feature gameplay mechanisms that are undeniably Descent-y: zipping through underground mines in a small spacecraft, finding keys, opening secret doors, fragging robots, rescuing hostages, and finally blowing up a reactor and escaping the level before it collapses around your ears.
The images and video available look very much like an updated version of the game I played in the mid-'90s: a mix of tight corridors and open spaces, colored beams and blobs shooting forth from your ship, polygonal enemies exploding in showers of sparks. "Overload has a classic inspiration, but that doesn’t mean it’ll look pixellated or have an 8-bit soundtrack," explains the Kickstarter page in an apparently sly jab at Sublevel Zero.
Sound design was as important to the original Descent games as was the visual style, with each enemy robot having a distinct set of noises. The Kickstarter page preemptively addressed the concerns we had about Overload’s soundscape, explaining that audio design will be in the hands of veteran Descent and Freespace designers Dan Wentz and Allister Brimble.
But 2016 is not 1995, and there are a lot of things possible now that weren't with Descent. "One thing that's going to be really cool about Overload is how lighting affects gameplay—it's about more than just being pretty," explained Revival co-founder and original Descent developer Matt Toschlog. "In the Kickstarter video, for example, there's a shot where you see a robot's shadow before you see the robot. And we can have completely dark levels, with only the player's headlight (and glows from the robots) providing illumination."Toschlog also is hopeful that Revival will be able to release a version of Overload that supports VR, though at this point it's a stretch goal rather than a solid part of the initial release. Interestingly, this is ground the Descent series has trod before—the original game and its sequel had some limited support for the head-mounted displays available in the mid-'90s, like the LCD shutter-based Simuleyes.
As for how it actually feels, we don't yet know. The Descent: Underground developers have taken great pains to have their game feel as close to the original Descent as possible, but Toschlog says that Overload won't aim for total verisimilitude. "We absolutely want the game to feel familiar, though that doesn't mean that Overload will fly exactly like Descent," he told us. However, he also said that the game might include an optional "classic" mode "for people who don't like any changes we make."
All for one
The original Descent’s eight-person multiplayer was groundbreaking back in 1995; even though it was IPX-only, it was one of the first multiplayer games where players could join and leave mid-level without waiting in a lobby for a round to complete. Descent players around the world could play a continually shifting set of multiplayer matches over the Internet using IPX emulators like Kali, and I can attest to having personally spent hundreds—possibly thousands—of hours fragging away at my buddies back then.
Unfortunately, and in spite of its strong multiplayer heritage, Overload is going to be single-player only. According to Toschlog, the single-player decision was made in order to allow the Revival team to release the best possible game without having to divide its efforts between two very different development goals. "Overload is single-player (for now) because we want to get the gameplay right and get the game done before focusing on multiplayer," he said to Ars. "We absolutely want to do a multiplayer version, but we're working with a small team and a small budget, and we don't want to overreach. If Overload does well, we'll be excited to work on a multiplayer version."
Folks who can’t live without Descent-style multiplayer should at least for now look to Descent: Underground, which is currently in early access on Steam and which is being designed to mirror the feeling of old-school multiplayer Descent as closely as possible.
Who, what, when
According to the crowdfunding page, Overload is targeted for a tentative March 2017 release on Windows, Playstation 4, and Xbox One, with a Mac and Linux release as its first stretch goal. The crowdfunding campaign has 29 days to go and has until the morning of March 11 to hit the $300,000 goal; the minimum pledge to get a copy of the game is $25. (Disclosure: I backed the game. With so many hours sunk into the mines when I was younger, how could I not?)
We’ll follow up again with Revival after the Kickstarter ends—and you can bet we’ll do everything we can to get our hands on a playable build as soon as possible.
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