Extended memory: Descent
DOMINIC BAYLEY can’t be fenced in
Back in the 1990s there was a small contingent of games that you couldn’t help but play even if you tried hard to avoid them. Games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Descent were either on your PC at home, your mate’s PC or they were playing demos at your local department or games store.
These games paved the way for games like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and Forsaken.
Descent (Parallax Software, 1995) was one of the harder of the three and in a genre all of its own because it was a shooter with six degrees of freedom – meaning that you could move your spacecraft in six different axes.
Eve: Valkyrie, CCP’s upcoming virtual reality dogfighting game might seem like a world away from simple, pixelated games like Descent but in a way it’s a spiritual successor to this classic game and may be the messiah the genre is looking for.
But will it attract a flock of traditional 6DoF fans? To find out lets consider the standout feature of Descent: its difficult controls, and see how Eve: Valkyrie stands up.
In Descent movement was forward/ backward, left/right, up/down, and then for rotation: pitch (forward/backward tilt), yaw (left/right rotation) and roll (side to side tilt).
One of best features was the ability to strafe not just left and right but also up and down, while simultaneously moving forward or backward – something called ‘chording.’
It meant that you could move backwards or forwards into a new room and attack an enemy waiting above or below a door –something unheard of in previous games. This made for some incredibly fun multiplayer action, because surprising a foe was a real possibility.
Descent’s controls excited us and scared the hell out of us equally because of the need to master them quickly or perish. In Descent we could use a mouse, joystick or combinations of the two and controller setup was as personalised as a fingerprint.
Gamers took a long time to select what worked best for them, discussing combinations in great detail to find the penultimate.
Why would people ask this? It may well be that Eve: Valkyrie could be too arcade-like for their personal taste
The general consensus was that the keyboard only option was the hardest since there were so many axes to control and thus too many keys.
Most players opted for a combination of mouse and keys or mouse and joystick control, which freed the player up to focus on combat.
To most 6DoF gamers this was one of the reasons they loved the game. In essence, sussing out your controls presented a challenge that when conquered, was extremely satisfying in its own right.
Eve: Valkyrie claims to be a full 360-degree experience in which you can move your spaceship in any direction.
It utilises the Xbox One controller which most gamers are already familiar with and should represent a significantly simpler way to move.
Currently the controls for Xbox One are: left stick will control direction, one button will control acceleration and one will control breaking. The right trigger will fire a machine gun and left will activate missiles. Directional aiming will be achieved by moving your head towards the enemies.
This simpler setup will obviously mean players will be on a more even playing field from the get go.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for some because it means you won’t need a degree in aeronautical engineering to launch into the game, but it may take away some of the satisfaction that some gamers inherently derived from working out their controls, personalising them and then mastering a difficult controller setup.
The feedback on some of the forums seems to reflect this conundrum. Some have called for an Advanced Control mode that might shift some of the directional control or targeting control back into the player’s hands.
Why would people ask this? It may well be that Eve: Valkyrie could be too arcade-like for their personal taste.
It would be easy to jump up and down about this sort of comment and point out the numerous pros that Eve: Valkyrie will have, such as the 1920 x 1080 graphics at 60 frames per second, and a highly intuitive interface - but that sort of reaction would miss the point somewhat.
It’s not that gamers don’t see how kickass a game Eve: Valkyrie will be. It’s just that they crave the extra difficulty, because that’s what made Descent so fun.
We can only wonder if when the hype and praise for the novelty of a HD VR space shooter subsides, if new fans of the genre will be prompted to search out games like Descent and the inevitable satisfaction that comes with mastering something so hard.
We hope this will be the case, because to truly call yourself a master of 6DoF there is no better training ground than Descent and its successors.