Descent to Undermountain

Cover

The game box's cover features a painting, "Spellfire", by artist Clyde Caldwell, earlier used as the front cover to Ed Greenwood's 1988 novel of the same name... as well as the front cover to an earlier video game, Westwood's 1992 PC-Engine effort Order of the Griffon.

Development

Originally announced in 1995 (shortly after the release of the original Descent), Descent to Undermountain was supposed to be an RPG powered by the Descent engine and with a strong focus on multiplayer (namely, co-op play). In addition to the absence of the co-op play that was promised, Descent to Undermountain also turned out to be a buggy mess when it was released in Christmas of 1997. Although a patch released in early 1998 seemed to have alleviated some of the game's problems, far too many problems still remain in Descent to Undermountain as it stands today.

Shortly after the game's release, some programmers on the Descent to Undermountain team admitted on a Usenet forum that the game was released even though it was far from finished -- the usual excuse for the buggy, incomplete state of many other games. The reason for the game's premature release was because they wanted to meet the original deadlines for the game -- regardless of whether it was ready for release or not.

The game did not even support multiplayer in the released version, despite ad blurbs stating the contrary.

Graphics

Even though the Descent engine was one of the very first to be modified for 3d acceleration (in Descent II), Descent to Undermountain features no 3D support.

Information also contributed by Pseudo_Intellectual and Spartan_234