Descent was great (I love Descent 3) but other than that there is only Forsaken, why has noone ever made a modern game like that? I think its a shame :)

Its unfortunatly a niche that not many people enjoy playing. Shattered Horizon is similar in that there is no such thing as up or down. It has a very small community with only a few servers with anyone ever on them though.

It's a hard game to master and even to get the hang of so most people being lazy will tend to flock to games like UT nad Quake.

Also Descent 1/2 sold a combined 500,000+ copies while Descent 3 only sold about 25, 000 copies. Freespace 2 only sold some 23, 000 copies. Hence why there hasn't been a new version.
Check out Miner Wars.

Didn't Prey use Descent style controls for the vehicles rather successfully?
Of course, Prey wasn't a big success either, even though I personally loved it.
But I can understand why it isn't common any more, as most games are developed for consoles first later to be ported to PC - Descent style 360DOF games control terribly with gamepads, at least those I have tried.
arcade flight sim stuff work pretty well since there the planes level when you let go of the analog sticks, but stuff like that doesn't work as well in games where there is no correct up or down.
I don't know how they worked out the controls for the console version of Prey though, might have worked fine there.

Games like Descent don't succeed much anymore because well frankly people are lazey and want the easy to learn games. They think that they are fun and worth while because they can master them in less then a few hours of play.
However teh ones that have played it and still abandoned it, will still tell you that Descent series was a fun game and very cool. Descent is also one of the top 5 games of all time. It is out right amazing that people still play it. I am one of them.

www.minerwars.com
Does look like Descent don't you think?

I was a decent Descent player (heh), I played using joystick.. and I remember no one was impressed when I showed them. They said it was too confusing. Meek :D
Anyway that was the time vertigo from playing 3D shooter was an issue, so I agree: why no one makes this kind of game nowadays? when vertigo is no longer an issue that is

Shattered Horizon is probably the only 6DOF game I can think of that's been released recently.
[url=]http://www.gametrailers.com/video/raid-on-shattered-horizon/58508[/url]

Here's a Doom 3 TC called "Into Cerberon". It hasn't moved from alpha v0.04 for two years now, but last month they posted a news item that they moved to a new server. It's basically a Descent recreation.
http://www.chmodoplusr.com/IntoCerberon/

I found this thread while trying to find a game like this I had forgotten about. I did get round to finding it by stumbling onto a similar discussion on another board but it highlighted how rubbish searching for such things are even in this day and age.
While I'm here I can add some more to the list now its many years since the threads start.


Overload,The links for DRM free windows,mac and linux demos are in the link below.
https://playoverload.com/playable-teaser/

Minerwars 2081 has a demo on steam, it received criticism for remaining unfinished.

Descent Underground which is under development.
https://www.gog.com/game/descent_underground

Sublevel zero redux.
https://www.gog.com/game/sublevel_zero

Retrovirus, the game I didn't find as easily as I should have despite knowing it had virus in the name and it was like descent.

A few other games where you could make vessels and fly them around like Descent but being different games over all would be.

Kerbal space program about building and launching spacecraft.
https://www.gog.com/game/kerbal_space_program

Orbiter 2016 a free but complex space simulator where you can use or make mods for it.
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/index.html




Shattered Horizon wouldn't have sold as well as other games because it forced people to upgrade windows to use the next directx. It also has been removed from steam as of 2014.

Other 6DOF games not mentioned yet are NeonXZS, Aquanox, and Aquanox 2.

There's also Overload which is made by the original developers of Descent

I owned all three "back in the day." D3 didn't offer much new, 1 & 2 had great MP & SP, not much reason to move on to a new one. D3 was also several years after the second one and after Half Life came out. After HL the gaming scene changed, people expected more interactivity & story in the game play. I do remember a very active level + graphics scene from the D1/2 days. My friends and I would make our own maps and play too.

In my personal opinion, the reason the Free Space series died was because they didn't push the game as far as they could have. Everyone I played games with at the time loved the game play, but story wise, other space sims had branching story lines. Free Space had the ability but the dev's didn't do it for some reason.

I also want to say that Quake had some 6DOF mods, but I can't remember exactly. Descent didn't have a modding scene anywhere near Quake's which I would say was also a disadvantage for it.

The only ones that had were the Wing Commander games from 1 to 4 and Tachyon, both had much more of a b-movie feel than Freespace, all the others (well, basically X-wing and Tie Fighter) were linear. Even open world spacesims whenever they had a story it was more or less linear.

Freespace died because it wasn't marketed properly because Interplay screwed up financially, the fact that the other big spacesim title of the time, X-wing Alliance, refused to even boot up if there wasn't a joystick plugged in didn't help the popularity of the genre either.