Specifically, Overload was made by Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog, who were the original Descent developers. There were also major contributions from people like Dan Wentz (who worked on Descent 3) and from people who spent a lot of time playing the original game, like me and my wife (our 3 sons are all named for friends we know from Descent.)
That is true, furthermore Overload has an usermade campaign called Overload: First Strike, which is a conversion and upgrade of the entire Descent 1 campaign to Overload. Additionally I recommend Desecrators, which is a Descent-like with procedurally generated maps. Think Sublevel Zero or Everspace, except good.
To add, I also loved Fury 3 because it had outdoor environments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmOtHKZHjxU - though Wikipedia tells me it's a rebrand of Terminal Velocity
Now all that's missing is a spiritual successor to Terminal Velocity. Or at least I think so. There's like a 10% chance that game was one of those games that was seriously held up by how much its soundtrack slapped.
I haven't played Terminal Velocity, but I finished the Descent Freespace game decades ago, and I am also itching for modernesque space-sims with 6-degrees-of-freedom dogfights, with some campaigns and explorations.
I liked this teaser trailer of Remnant Protocol, it seems exciting and perhaps a spiritual successor to Descent and Terminal Velocity games:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vemaUWPs6Zo
No Man's Sky was interesting, but its combat is meh, and it is a sandbox with procedurally generated planets made of limited types of biomes. It's inventory management is very clunky, so I finally gave up on it.
I tried Everspace, it is good, but it is more of a roguelite comprising only of dogfights in space. Haven't tried Everspace 2 yet, which I believe has campaign mode and is a better space sim.
I steered clear of Starfield, since Bethesda is infamous for launching buggy games. I will try it after a few years, once the modding community has overhauled it nicely.
I absolutely LOVED this game when it first came out. I played with a trackball + keyboard, and the 6 degrees of freedom, paired with an environment where there often was no natural sense of "up" or "down" (zero gravity, inside tunnels) really blew my mind. I experienced a sensation I had never before experienced, almost out-of-body.
For example, you approach a "T" junction, and depending on your pitch angle, the branches may be up/down or left/right. But since there's no natural ground or sky, you can either maintain an orientation memory (I usually did automatically), or you can just let all that go and travel with no sense of true orientation.
Occasionally you reach an area with some signs or printed panels, and then you realize what the regional up/down orientation was; but it didn't matter in zero gravity.
I used to consider it a form of flow-state when you’ve played Descent/Overload long enough that up/down stops being a thing.
It always took a while each session to get to that point, but once you were there it all just starting flowed so damn well, and manoeuvring the tunnels became so much faster/easier.
Descent was a huge part of my childhood (and surprisingly my little kids are now big fans as well)! Unfortunately this seems to stutter pretty badly with audio issues as well for me on Firefox on Linux. As a huge fan of three.js and other past work... I guess I'll blame Claude?
I remember mostly playing the port of this to the PS1, which had a fully animated opening cut scene. When I got the PC port like fifteen years later at a Goodwill, I was disappointed to see that that was a Playstation exclusive.
Descent is good, but I do think the series peaked with Descent II, if for no other reason than the rocking soundtrack. Very awesome, cool, industrial rock; I used to put the game CD in my car to listen to it since it was Red Book audio.
I was lucky enough to have a flight stick with a hat switch. Absolutely unfair, but I tore up my peers in the dorm because of that. Fantastic memories.
Try configuring WASD controls, mouse look, turning off auto roll / leveling. Use your choice of 'jump' and 'crouch' to slide up and down. Then it feels more like an ice-skating FPS than a flying game.
Keeping the cockpit on screen may also help provide a frame of reference.
I found that helped me enjoy the game more now that I'm older and less tolerant of 6DOF movement.
Seeing this kind of games so beloved by the HN greybeards, makes you wonder what will be the equivalent nostalgia games for the next generation. Pokemon red maybe? Perhaps Fortnite?
And I believe made by some of the people that formerly worked on Descent.
reply