Interface

Mouse control? Heresy!

One of the aspects that creates a barrier between hardcore Descent players and fans of traditional first person shooters is how mouse control is handled. In older versions of Descent, you could use mouse, but it was very difficult to maneuver because your turn rate is limited to the fictional physics of the ship and its pitch/yaw rates. The designers of Descent 3 added in traditional mouse-look (one that disregards ship physics) on a whim during the beta test. Many of the experienced joystick Descent players were aghast at this development - players using mouse look can turn their ships far faster than a joystick player can. Nevertheless, the feature stayed in to help bring more first person shooter players into the Descent world. The compromise is that server administrators can choose to lock out mouse look users (in fact, this is the default server setting).

Robots will exit their areas to chase

Here they come!

So how is it?

I was a casual Descent and Descent 2 player and I did use the joystick to play those games in years past. But being more of a first person shooter fan by heart, I was very pleased that mouse look was left in the shipping version of Descent 3. It's actually a lot easier to play with mouse look enabled if you're already familiar with using that control style from other games. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be implemented as cleanly as it could have been. Spinning 180s with mouse look in Descent 3 isn't nearly as crisp as it is in games like Quake/Quake 3. It still beats using the joystick but there's some room for improvement there.

Exploding robots

Random objects can be shot