Interplay shuts down fan-made Descent reimagining
Remember Descent, the 6DoF (6 degrees of freedom) shooter that twisted and turned its way through dark tunnels on PC back in the 90s? It's got a decent fan-base thanks to those iconic early outings, including a team that has been making a homage project called Sol Contingency.
This reimagining of Descent has, it would seem, irked the owners of once-proud gaming label Interplay, to the point where they've sent a cease & desist letter to the developers, instructing them to stop working on the game.
Project lead Maximillian Schulz contacted an unspecified "daughter company" of Interplay, with the idea being to release the game as an "officially sanctioned Descent game", with a demo planned to be released in the near future. However, after a period of silence, the company got in touch via the aforementioned cease & desist letter.
"Interplay may own the rights to Descent, but they do not own the rights to 6DoF (6 degrees of freedom), to first-person shooters, or to a type of gameplay within creepy and claustrophobic environments," Schulz wrote. "We realized that everything they own the rights to is, at the end of it all, purely cosmetic"
The plan now is for the team to unpick the elements of the game that are directly inspired by the classic shooter, and release it once they've removed all references to Descent (the Proving Ground demo will likely precede a Kickstarter campaign).
"While we are very sad to see these iconic archetypes go, we will come up with new robots, a new plot, a new ship, new levels, and perhaps a few new weapons and names to differentiate our game just enough from the trademarked assets Interplay is so dearly holding on to. We still want to make a game that *feels* and *plays* how we all want, so none of the gameplay will change. The core experience in Proving Grounds' multiplayer will be identical to what you have seen from us so far."
Thanks, PC Gamer.
