Please join me in pouring one out for another fallen board game franchise that’s gone too soon, because the Gloomhaven-style Descent: Legends of the Dark is no more.
Developer Fantasy Flight has announced that its dungeon-crawling series (Descent: Legends of the Dark and its expansion, Act II) is being discontinued. This is because, “Simply put, the game is too expensive to make.” That means the upcoming Act III expansion is no longer in development either, so the franchise’s ongoing story has come to an abrupt end. I was a big fan of how Descent combined mechanics from the best board games with a video game-style app that heightened its RPG elements, so the news has taken the wind right out of my sails today.
One last adventure
Even though Descent: Legends of the Dark is no longer being developed, you can still buy it via Amazon and the accompanying app will continue to work. There won’t be any new content added to it, but “you can continue to use it to play through the first two acts of Legends of the Dark as much as you want.” I was a big fan of the series because it’s the perfect blend of video games and tabletop adventure, so would highly recommend giving it a go.
However, I do get it. Increased costs are taking their toll everywhere right about now, and the tabletop gaming industry has been hit particularly hard. As we’ve discussed on GamesRadar+ at length over the past year, tariffs made life difficult for publishers across the board because much of their printing infrastructure was/is based overseas – thus making production far, far more expensive than it had been. While things have since calmed down due to a variety of factors (not least of which was February’s Supreme Court ruling that use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to instate tariffs last year was illegal), it’s still rough out there. This development is proof of that.
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“Between ever-increasing manufacturing costs, lengthy and pricey app development timelines, and global economic shifts making everything more expensive to produce, it became abundantly clear that continuing to make this game is just not feasible,” Fantasy Flight writes in a post announcing Descent: Legend of the Dark’s end. That also goes for the unreleased Act III. Although Fantasy Flight investigated a variety of strategies to deliver the expansion (even if it was digital-only), none of those options “proved to be feasible, and so the only path left to us is to cancel the expansion outright.”
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. The Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent video game is still on its way, for example, and Fantasy Flight hasn’t ruled out a return to the Descent franchise. “While we don’t have anything to share at this time, there is always a possibility that we will revisit Descent in the future. It would take a different form and would not be Legends of the Dark, but this game universe is near and dear to FFG’s heart.”
Fans should keep their fingers crossed, in other words. It’s goodbye for now, but this might not be the last we ever hear of Descent.
For more tabletop recommendations, don’t miss our guide to the best card games or the best tabletop RPGs.