Descendent Studios sued over unfinished Descent prequel

[Neptin]

According to the suit, several former Star Citizen developers left Cloud Imperium Games in 2014 to establish Descendent Studios and create a game inspired by Descent.

The following year Descendent entered into an agreement to license the Descent name from Interplay, changed the title of the project to Descent: Underground, and raised over $600,000 through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to help bring it to life.

The project received additional funding when Little Orbit signed on to publish it in September 2017, with the intention of bringing it to consoles as well as PC, but Descendent is alleged to have missed multiple project milestones and planned release dates, the last of which was scheduled for February 2019. Little Orbit alleges that the content that was delivered didn’t meet the agreed quality standards, compelling it to invest more funds in additional development capacity outside of Descendent.

The publisher also believes that Interplay cancelled its license of the Descent trademark to Descendent.

“Upon information and belief, Descendent fraudulently induced Little Orbit to commit to fund payroll as part of the Terms Sheet Amendment with no actual intent or desire to provide concrete deliverables on specific dates, including a delivery date for the final PC version,” the lawsuit alleges.

Little Orbit also claims Descendent CEO Peterson “made multiple false and disparaging statements” about the company to the gaming community in an effort to cover up the studio’s own failures and to cast blame for the project’s problems on its publisher.

It claims to have suffered damages which have “not yet been ascertained but not less than $2,000,000.00 to be proven at trial”.

Little Orbit also wants the court to rule over who holds the contested intellectual property rights for the project.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/new ... t-prequel/

[LightWolf]

Descendent is countersuing for over $5 million in lost wages and profits.

Someone on the Descendent Discord server has been purchasing and uploading all the court documents to the free law project.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16 ... udios-inc/

[vision]

Holy crap, what a mess. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

[Neptin]

Descendent is countersuing for over $5 million in lost wages and profits.

Someone on the Descendent Discord server has been purchasing and uploading all the court documents to the free law project.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16 ... udios-inc/

Thanks for the info and link! So I'm slightly confused. Descendant Studious was working on a prequel? I thought it was like a reboot, same concept but different stuff? The page for it on PlayStation says nothing about it being a prequel. + Will this ever see the light of day now?


I just want to play this series on PlayStation. Hopefully one day... still need to ger Overload.

[vision]

Thanks for the info and link! So I'm slightly confused. Descendant Studious was working on a prequel? I thought it was like a reboot, same concept but different stuff? The page for it on PlayStation says nothing about it being a prequel. + Will this ever see the light of day now?

The game went through a lot of changes during development. I think it started as a reboot, but as the Kickstarter campaign progressed it became a prequel. The game was called Descent: Underground and had fairly complex objectives (convoluted it probably a better word), but when Little Orbit jumped in they dropped "Underground" from the name and refocused the gameplay objectives. The last video I saw looked pretty good and I started to get excited again... but then silence.

I just want to play this series on PlayStation. Hopefully one day... still need to ger Overload.

Overload is awesome. I played it last night. Just having Challenge Mode alone is worth the price. I did finally buy the add-on levels, but don't know when I'll get a chance to play them since I'm so busy with work right now.

[Neptin]

Any updates on this project? The PS version lists a December 2020 release date.. I'm guessing that is an optimistic projection.

[CDN_Merlin]

I got an email last week from them.
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Posted by Descendent Studios
Sep 15, 2020
View on Kickstarter

Well, here we are, 5 years after we initially Kickstarted Descent Underground.

Thanks to all of you, we raised more than 600k, and off we went, believing that a Descent re-imagining deserved as much effort and support as possible.

Clearly we would not be able to do a triple AAA game as those run in the 10s of millions, but we thought why not a triple III (Independent) game? Where we get a very high end Independent game! We all decided to work towards that goal, making individual sacrifices along the way to make it happen

Eventually we signed with a publisher to help us have as wide a launch as possible, and to get console versions of the game. Heck, with cross play on consoles and cross promotion it might help launch Six DOF back into the mainstream - which was our team's biggest hope.

However, as we got to the end of primary game development and about 2-4 weeks from our Beta release to early backers a dispute arose with the publisher.

This has since lead to a lawsuit and our counter lawsuit. Now, I am not going to disparage, or say whom is right or wrong, Here is the the link to all the court filings if you feel like reading them for yourself and making your own conclusion about the state of things.

All I can say is our entire team is committed to getting our work out to those of you who backed us - and have been so danged patient. We just need to get through this legal process first and settle on whom gets to do what.

Also, there is a matter of the Descent trademark, a few weeks after the dispute, the trademark license with Interplay ended.

So, once the court rules - the publisher of the game will need to re-enter a license agreement with Interplay for the rights to call it a Descent product.

If no agreement is reached, the game could be released as the original pre-kickstarter title "Ships that Fight Underground" or something else, as Descendent Studios owns the assets and the game IP. Our strong preference of course, is to re-engage Interplay and procure another license and release as a Descent product - that will need to be negotiated after the court has their say in the dispute listed above.

Here is a video that shows some of the first mission (didn't want to spoil it for you by showing too much, like where secrets are hidden etc). So, we do jump around a bit, the full first mission takes about 20-25 minutes for most people as they find their way. As a heads up, this is not a marketing video, it is meant to show you some of the flow of how you get in and out of missions, as well as a little bit about the customization options of ships. This is all just captured from one of our latest builds.

There are 4 levels of difficulty, our player chose to play as a "rookie" which is honestly pretty easy, but there are 2 levels above that which get much more challenging for those looking for a bot smorgishborg! However, we can't have our own player die in our video (or can we??? BWAHAHA)!


At the end of the video, we show a few of the ships available to earn (20 total), most of which are customizable. We have 17 missions overall, (one is for training) an estimated 30-40 hours of single player story based content, unlimited vs bots action as well as survival mode and in addition, we have more than a dozen multiplayer maps with so so much more game play.

We are very proud of what we have accomplished, we just so desperately want to get it into your hands. It has been a long time since the last update, but we were frankly worried about what we can and can't say when engaged in an active lawsuit. And, nothing much is happening until it is resolved. However, our lawyer informed us that a post that is informational only would be fine.

So, I know it is a lot to ask, as your patience has been tested, but hopefully it will work its way through the legal process soon, and the game will get released. I believe everyone wants that!

See you in the mines!

Descendent Studios Inc.

PS. If you have any questions and I can legally answer them please put them in the comments below and I will try my best.

[vision]

It looks pretty good! Definitely feels like a hybrid game that's 1/2 Descent and 1/2 something else, but I would totally play it. Hopefully they can release the game, with or without the IP. I almost feel like using the Descent IP would probably hurt at this point and maybe a complete rebranding would be better.

[Neptin]

Any updates? The PlayStation store link above is now dead.....

[Alter-Fox]

No, and at this point, I don't think there will be any.

[Hunter]

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... 7.99.0.pdf

Job done?

[vision]

Job done?

Well, that was a wild ride. Both parties essentially lose and the fans get nothing. I think this is the final nail in the coffin for Descent Underground.

[Alter-Fox]

Well, we got Overload, which was better and avoided all legal messes completely.

I feel bad for them, though. This is the type of thing that drives people actually insane. And not the fun kind of insane with too many hulks and drillers.