Descent: Underground and the future of our game

[Crankor]

def a case of two similar games being completely different. Tbh seem like this one will be more like the original. I have a feeling they will go too overboard with underground and turn it into a minerwars type thing

[Ghostplops]

Hello! I signed up to share my two bits on this whole debacle. Let me first say that i think SolC is gonna be superb and it's looking excellent! I've been vaguely following it off and on since I heard about it on Kotaku last year, and recently heard about this D:U Kickstarter and it prompted me to wonder what was up with SolC, I didn't know you got C&D'ed, such a shame, while I don't know the full story or anything detailed with these incidents, I never understand why companies get riled up over fan projects like this, I mean, freaking look at Skyrim, people mod whole other TES games into it haha. And then Valve, hell didn't Valve end up backing up Black Mesa in some way? When a company decides to stop projects like this it just irks me a little in my opinion. Even with their own project they shouldn't be so worried about a free fan creation, wouldn't it be better to be like "hey, people who like Descent, you have TWO modern games to play now!" Not only that but these seem like very different games, They're doing the multiplayer route, and it seems like SolC has more of a single player focus, both seem like something for different tastes.
Anyway, it could really be for the best, you could potentially get financial backing now and it gives you more creative freedom, I think SolC will be excellent. D:U could be excellent.. but I dunno, right now it looks like they're trying to do the whole MoBA thing, it's hard to say at this point but it doesn't feel true to Descent, sometimes I feel like I'm honestly the only person who gets excited about single player, and remain pretty "meh" about multiplayer :S it has some pretty cool people working on it and I wish them the best.. it just seems like Interplay could have handled this a lot better..

A side note, has anyone heard of that game Strafe being developed? Maan it's not a 6DoF game but it totally channels that over the top 90s game vibe haha

[Vertigo Fox]

I agree about singleplayer, I enjoy multiplayer somewhat but I'll always be a singleplayer guy.

[Yoshimitsu]

Aha! You must be Splotchie-Fox from elsewhere. Greetings .

[Earthshaker]

Perhaps I'm in the minority to think this, but Drakona's post over on the D:U forum completely lost my interest at the point he said

I'm talking about the fact that Descent is a brutally difficult game to get into.

Excuse my French but to me this is plain bollocks. Yes, I realise his comments are aimed at the Anarchy multiplayer side of things. But talking about it taking "years" to get into that - sorry, no, no way. I was a fully paid up member of the Kali brigade at the time D1 and D2 were around, and I played against enough folks who made use of things like the orb controllers to dominate the matches. I wasn't brilliant at the game, but with just a plain mouse and keyboard, nor was I ever ground completely into the dust. I had fun and could hold my own even after just a few matches... except in Minerva and its variants. I hated that level, even if it somehow became one of the most popular maps. But anyhow, my experience wasn't anything like what Drakona suggests it might be, and though I haven't played multiplayer recently, I simply can't believe the situation has become as ridiculous as he suggests.

Also from his post:

Wingman said to me, "I want to be working on this for the next 10 years."

Oh, really? 10 years is an awfully long time. Such a statement is easy to make and even easier to come back and bite you in the backside. If WM really did say this... well, I don't know what to think. He's either extremely passionate and focused about what he plans to achieve, or extremely misguided in believing he can create a game that generates continued revenue for ten years without D:U being legendary to the degree of the Half Lifes and Civilizations of our time. Maybe I'm just dulled by the industry constantly overpromising things at this early stage of projects - Peter Molyneux and Godus, for example. I'd love to be proved wrong, and proofreading this post I sound more negative than I want to. But eh, that's what I feel.

[homeyduh]

Drakona is actually a she. But I agree with you. It doesn't take that long. I don't think I'm better than her our any of the Kali players or anything, but I would be able to at least get some kills. I feel like SP trained me to pilot my ship well and once I got to Hotshot or Ace, I could attempt to take on MP. Also, 6DoF isn't for everyone. I know a lot of people get motion sickness or really hate the complicated controls, even if they're playing SP on Trainee. 6DoF is just not natural to people. You don't naturally wake up saying "I'm gonna spend today upside down" because our feet are 100% always planted down. We are the few who actually get it. The ones who either chose to persevere in learning to pilot, or were naturals at it. I hope DU's model does draw in people who wouldn't normally be attracted to 6DoF so we can have more pilots, but I don't think that a few extra game modes will prepare anyone for the anarchy that is Anarchy.

I sure as heck know that my 10 years of playing SP on Ace (because I had been isolated from the community for so long) didn't prepare me for the madness So that when I did play Anarchy online, I did pretty bad. And I think Tylo can attest to that since he was in one of my first games in Rebirth.

[1DVD4D2UDK]

The ones who either chose to persevere in learning to pilot, or were naturals at it. I hope DU's model does draw in people who wouldn't normally be attracted to 6DoF so we can have more pilots, but I don't think that a few extra game modes will prepare anyone for the anarchy that is Anarchy.

If the new 6DoF games in UE4 turns out anything like ut2k4's customizations, and running custom servers becomes the thing to do - you might be surprised at what game modes actually get created, and have a choice between dozens or more to choose from.

Depending on how versatile & accessible the game mode and mod configurations
are made available, like most any popular game engine that can be modded and
tweaked - you might log into a server that's running any combination of mod and
game type that's been created so far for the game, so it would really be up to the
community and their imaginations as to what game types got created and played.

[LotharBot]

I'm talking about the fact that Descent is a brutally difficult game to get into.

Excuse my French but to me this is plain bollocks.

Much like you, I didn't find the transition from SP to Kali difficult at all. I played SP on Ace (I thought at the time that Insane was like DooM's "nightmare" and didn't even attempt it), I have autism-level spatial awareness, and I played modem DooM and Descent games with friends. As a result I could control my ship fairly well and I had a grasp of basic combat techniques like "move in multiple directions while you shoot" and "go get a decent gun before you rush headlong at an opponent". Drakona had a similar experience; she wasn't exactly a world-beater in her early Kali days, but she was able to at least not be totally embarrassed by her scores. But we're the minority. And that's the point of that comment -- those of us who "made it" have a huge blind spot toward those who didn't, so we don't really comprehend why Descent training sucked for the masses.

It's a very common story (which you can find all over the D:U forums and elsewhere) that people played the single player on a low difficulty level, got on Kali or Kahn thinking there would be other pilots of their level, and got demoralized. They wanted to play multi, but they didn't have the skills to play multi without getting completely crushed, and they didn't understand what pathway they could take to develop better skills, other than "get your ass kicked over and over again".

That's the point of crazy-8-ship-mode, the matchmaking algorithm, and a bunch of the other stuff that doesn't look like Descent. It provides the sort of people who washed out -- a community that outnumbers us 10-to-1 or 100-to-1 -- with a clearer path. It lets them learn to fly, first poorly and eventually well, without pitting them in head-to-head combat with Jediluke their first day of playing. This is extra important for a game that only has a limited single player mode, and for modern gamers who are used to jumping straight into multi -- they need a way to learn how to fly, and how to love flying, and get better at flying, in manageable steps. Head-to-head with Jediluke will still be an available mode (and I suspect it'll become an e-sport, if not an especially big one) but it won't be where a brand new pilot starts.

[homeyduh]

I think that we're on the same page on a lot of things. I only think that there should be separate servers for different level players: Trainee, Rookie, Hotshot, Ace, and Insane servers to allow these players to learn with others who are on the same skill scale. I don't think you need to add all this complicated mode to accomplish multiplayer training. This can also be accomplished by enforcing a matchmaking system that recognizes skill to prevent homeyduh Jediluke scenarios.

What I'm saying is that instead of putting so much time and focus into this new game mode to train new pilots, they could put in really neat and innovative features.

[LotharBot]

I only think that there should be separate servers for different level players: Trainee, Rookie, Hotshot, Ace, and Insane servers

Typically this is accomplished through matchmaking rather than separate servers. The game evaluates your skill based on various factors (kills, deaths, ore mined, etc.) and then tries to match you up with comparable opponents.

Note that the presence of mining allows you to evaluate players much more finely than pure kill-death-ratio might -- a player might be so brand-new terrible that they're spending most of the match running into walls and trying unsuccessfully to mine ore, and would never get a single kill. Or they might be kind of noob and still never get a single kill, but be much better at mining. A good matchmaking algorithm will be able to distinguish between "level 1 trainee" and "ready for the level 7 boss trainee", not just trainee vs rookie.

instead of putting so much time and focus into this new game mode to train new pilots

Think of it this way: Descent sold 25 million copies. There were only a few thousand people on Kali, and perhaps a hundred who might be a really good matchup for you personally. If you can make a game that even slightly increases the percentage of people who make it through from one level to the next (Trainee->Rookie or Ace->mediocre Kali pilot or whatever), you might end up with more like a thousand well-matched opponents. So if all this game did was give us better training for D1 anarchy, it'd be a worthwhile endeavor.

But it's not just that. Crazy-8-ship-mode isn't merely a training mode. There are several interesting planned game modes -- some that are familiar (TF2 style capture points, CTF) and some that I'm not quite sure what they're getting at -- which will be enriched by having multiple ship types. There's a lot of room for new and innovative stuff. But cutting-edge stuff is not going to be the focus of the initial kickstarter; that's stuff they can do later as the budget gets bigger and they move from 5,000 backers to 500,000 pre-sales.