The futuristic dystopian world of The Ascent has many stories to tell and as such, players should be ready to invest a lot of gameplay hours.
Speaking with SegmentNext in a recent interview, co-founder of developer Neon Giant and game director Arcade Berg refrained from mentioning how long a single playthrough will actually last. He explained that citing a number in terms of hours depends on “how much of the world” players are interested in taking in.
The lore of The Ascent alone features hundreds of entries in various forms. Then there are the many side missions on top of the main campaign, random encounters with non-playable characters, discovering and reading data-pads, as well as just listening to the news for frequent updates.
“…talking to NPCs, listening in on them talking to each other, reading datapads, listening to the news and just overall exploring,” said Berg while explaining the many avenues which will be of interest for completionists. “If you want to go even deeper, you can read about the enemies, people, locations, companies, etc. amounting to a couple of hundred entries or lore.”
Berg previously noted that the main campaign missions will roughly take about 15 to 20 hours of gameplay time. That being said, Berg assured that The Ascent will be “a large game” by all accounts.
“I am very cautious of giving you a number because the game is not done yet and it is a large game so balancing alone can affect this quite a bit.”
Neon Giant is currently still working on The Ascent and ongoing development could possibly change the amount of time required to fully complete the game.
Within the same vein, The Ascent is also receiving optimizations to provide the same graphical experience on both the previous- and current-generation Xbox consoles. The said parity is important, said Neon Giant, to “preserve the mood and presentation” for players.
The Ascent will be officially releasing on Xbox platforms and PC on July 29, 2021. There is no word on a PlayStation release as the developer remains focused on just the Xbox and PC releases for the time being.
