Descent 3

About Descent 3

Descent 3 (1999) is Outrage Entertainment's six-degrees-of-freedom shooter in which the Material Defender fights virus-infected robots across the Solar System, now inside and outside.

Descent 3 in Depth

In a science-fiction Solar System, the player is the Material Defender, a mercenary helping the Red Acropolis Research Team stop robots infected by an alien virus. Like Descent and Descent II, it is a six-degrees-of-freedom shooter: the player flies a ship from a first-person view in zero gravity, free to move forwards and backwards, up and down and left and right, and to rotate in pitch, yaw and roll. The ship fires on enemies, uses afterburners for bursts of speed and lights dark areas with flares or a headlight.

For the first time, the game features outdoor as well as indoor environments, thanks to a hybrid engine combining a portal rendering engine with a flight simulator-style terrain engine. Alongside the single-player campaign, online multiplayer offers eight game types. Its graphics, enemy AI and outdoor areas were especially praised, GameSpot's Erik Wolpaw saying it "improves in almost every conceivable way on its predecessors and reestablishes the series as the premier example of the play style it single-handedly pioneered".

Making Descent 3

Outrage Entertainment was founded when Parallax Software, creators of the earlier Descent games, split in two: Volition went on to make the FreeSpace space combat games, while Outrage continued the Descent series. Development began in November 1996 with a team of eight, and Interplay Entertainment published it for Windows in North America on 17 June 1999 as the sequel to Descent II, later porting it to Mac OS and Linux. It received positive reviews.