Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War

About Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War

Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War (1998) is Volition's space combat sim in which a Terran pilot fights a 14-year war against the alien Vasudans until a genocidal third race forces the two into an alliance, famed for its huge capital ships and explosions.

Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War in Depth

In the 24th century, a war between the human Terrans and the alien Vasudans is interrupted in its fourteenth year by the arrival of an enigmatic, militant alien race whose genocidal advance forces the two sides into a ceasefire to fight together. As a Terran pilot, the player flies a campaign of increasingly difficult missions with briefings, command briefings and training missions mixed in, meeting cruisers, destroyers, transports and space stations in orbit or asteroid belts. Some objectives are scripted to fail as part of the story, and the player chooses ships and weapons for themselves and their wingmen before most missions.

Fighters cover space superiority, assault, recon, interceptor and bomber roles, armed with energy guns aimed at shields, hulls or subsystems and dumb-fire, heat-seeking or aspect-seeking missiles and bombs. The HUD tracks shields, weapon and afterburner energy, damaged subsystems, targets, incoming missiles, wingmen and an escort list, with a flexible targeting system that can lock onto the nearest hostile and match its speed. Players balance energy between weapons, shields and engines, deploy countermeasures, call support ships to repair and re-arm, and order wingmen to attack, protect or depart. Its flight model is simple, with some Newtonian elements such as collision physics, but its controls go beyond an arcade game, and the main menu is set on a ship's deck.

Making Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War

Volition developed it and Interplay published it in 1998. It was well received as a single-player space sim that brought together everything wanted in the genre, from capable AI wingmen to capital ships that dwarf the player's fighter and break up spectacularly, though its multiplayer suffered from lag and inaccurate statistics. Next Generation gave it four stars, saying it was too similar to other space sims to be "revolutionary" but "does take the space-combat simulation genre one step further". Reviewers were divided on its graphics, some admiring asteroids against glowing nebulae and others finding the 3D effects unconvincing and ship textures blurry, and it was compared with Wing Commander: Prophecy and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. PC Gamer UK placed it 20th in its 1999 Top 100. It sold around 100,000 copies and earned nearly $4 million by October 1999. The Silent Threat expansion was less well received, while FreeSpace 2 followed in 1999 to critical acclaim.