Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20150204202730/@comment-1496755-20150328123037

Well, Descent's 360-degree movement is not very different from Quake's underwater movement. The only difference is that up-down pitching is not limited, which means you can turn yourself upside-down (and even play the entire game this way, if you want to). Also, there is no gravity, so you don't sink as you would do in Quake's water.

Some historical digging - originally, there was only one Descent source port, divided into two parts - D1X (for Descent) and D2X (for Descent 2). However, development stopped at one point and both were left more or less unfinished. D1X is pretty good and stable, there are just some rough edges to polish here and there... but D2X, on the other hand, was pretty unfinished, full of bugs and prone to crash often. Besides, some important features were not implemented yet. Apparently, there was a need for someone else to step in and continue the development (especially for D2X, which was practically in Beta version stage).

Along came two German guys. They completed D2X's development, also improved D1X considerably. At some point, however, they shifted their focus. One of them wanted ot focus on an oldschool experience, which is faithful to the DOS original, which led to the creation of D1X-Rebirth and D2X-Rebirth. The other guy wanted to embrace modern features and the latest graphical special effects and features, which led to the creation of D2X-XL. It was only a matter of time before they had a quarrel and each went his separate way.

Being an oldschool kind of player, I use the two Rebirth ports, of course. And yes, this most probably makes me an "enemy" in the eyes of the XL users, even though I reject this whole "feud" thing.

I am so glad the Doom and Quake communities are not affected by this sort of madness!

I dislike EA, mostly because of the way they ruined Westwood studios. These guys used to develop some pretty good RTS games. They were a pretty strong competitor to Blizzard's War/StarCraft series. But then they were consumed by EA, they started to lose their spirit, and eventually faded into obscurity. The quality of their old games was oveshadowed by rampant commercialism and greed. Sad.