I'm not surprised. Descent was cool, technically superior, and it was a game I really would've loved to love. But people loved Doom and so did I. Search for "d

I'm not surprised. Descent was cool, technically superior, and it was a game I really would've loved to love. But people loved Doom and so did I. Search for "descent speedrun" on YouTube and then do the same for Doom. The dynamics make a completely different game. Doom's gameplay was better. Regardless of the graphics, Doom was more fun to play. Doom is actually blazing fast: not as for just rendering but for gameplay and player movement. You can zip around the levels at inhuman speeds, and this allows you to handle more enemies, swarms of them, at once. Doom is really a scary shoot'em-up in 2D while Descent was of a completely different nature. The "real" 3D and the "real" 3D controls in Descent made moving around more difficult. Thus, the levels were created differently for Descent and it was also played differently. Unlike Doom you wouldn't have large open spaces to contain dozens or hundreds of enemies. Instead, you would encounter a small handful of enemies at a time. Much of Quake and Doom 3 also suffered from the lack of this as the player speed is more realistic, preventing the fun inhuman maneuvres which could create a lot more fun. Similarly the gameplay, due to moving around in 3D, meant more work at the controls of Descent. Doom is basically a 2D game which allows for faster movement as only having two axis is more easily mastered. Being unrealistically fast enabled a lot more tactics to be used in Doom. Also, most people played Doom keyboard-only back in the 90's which only served to give Doom a lot more edge.