The vibrant (and dangerous) world of The Ascent will provide the same graphical experience on both the previous- and current-generation Xbox consoles.
Speaking with SegmentNext in a recent interview, co-founder of developer Neon Giant and creative director Tor Frick confirmed that The Ascent will maintain nearly the same population density on Xbox One and Xbox Series X in order to “preserve the mood and presentation” for players.
Frick added that since The Ascent features cross-play between both Xbox consoles, it was important to maintain the “mood” across the board. The dense crowds of civilians are crucial for the cyberpunk-themed game and as such, optimizations are underway to enable as close an experience on the more powerful Xbox Series X as on the older Xbox One.
The Ascent was previously confirmed to be targeting 60 frames per second at 4K resolution on Xbox Series X. Neon Giant has now confirmed the game to be targeting 30 frames per second on both Xbox One and Xbox One X. While the resolutions are being finalized, the Xbox One and Xbox One X versions of the top-down role-playing game will reportedly be 900p and 1440p respectively.
“The game features cross-play for all Microsoft platforms, which means that everything that you have seen with crowds of civilians and so on, is also fully there on Xbox One,” said Frick. “The density of the world is key to the mood we want to achieve, so that was important for us to keep for all players.
“We have worked really hard to bring the Xbox One experience to parity with Series X where we can, preserving the mood and presentation as far as possible.”
The PC version of The Ascent will however have no frame-rate caps. Frick noted how “the game is quite scalable on the graphics side of things” and players will have immense freedom in tweaking graphical settings based on their needs and hardware specifications.
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.
