The Ascent is set to release this summer, and it is going to be the very first game from Neon Giant. While this is its first game as an established new studio, The Ascent's developers also worked on Bulletstorm, and with Neon Giant, they plan on delivering incredible action games capable of competing with triple-A games despite them being a small team.

Creating The Ascent was no easy feat, and developer Arcade Berg talked to Game Rant about the challenges the studio faced, what developing The Ascent has felt like, and how excited they all are to have people finally play it. Game Rant was also able to briefly play The Ascent, which inspired many of these questions. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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GR: Character creation in The Ascent is very deep compared to other similar games. Did you draw inspiration from any other title for character creation and gameplay, too?

Not really for the character creator. This is basically the first time you get to have any input into the game. There’s the intro cutscene, and then this. So, of course, we wanted to put effort into it because a cheap character creator that doesn’t get any love is not a good start. We made everything that could be an option, actually be an option. We can have tattoos, so let’s have tattoos. We can change hairstyle, let’s change hairstyle. Some people might like the colors we don't, and we want to have options. We feel pretty good about this.

co-op the ascent screenshot

GR: The Ascent can probably be compared to Diablo and Shadowrun. Were they an inspiration for you?

Not really, actually. They are great games, so whenever The Ascent is compared to games like them, I take it as a compliment because they are truly pinnacles. I love them both dearly, but I think The Ascent is very much its own thing. I think a lot of people think about these games because they hear it’s an ARPG, and they see the top-down camera. However, when people will start to read more about the game, especially when people start to play the game, they’ll see what sets it apart from other titles.

For example, in The Ascent, everything is handcrafted. Every weapon, every piece of armor has its own art, its own name, its description. The description is there to help build the world, and these items are made by specific manufacturers that exist in the world. Maybe you’ll find a factory of that manufacturer somewhere in the world, and if you want a specific thing, you could read our wiki page and say “Oh, that one I can find there, it’s dropped by that enemy.”

The experience itself is handcrafted. Shadowrun is a turn-based game, whereas The Ascent is a full-throttle action game if you let it be. If you want to play it that way and you have your grenades ready, a rocket launcher, a minigun, and use a dash, it can hit a very high climax of action with the mechanics the game has. We are very much our own thing, but I really appreciate The Ascent being compared to such great titles.

GR: Indeed. Every piece of gear felt peculiar in a way and some of them look really great. It’s not that common for a sci-fi game to have its own identity, so it feels good that The Ascent does. That said, how long have you been working on the game, and for how long has it been in a polished enough state?

We’ve been working on this game for three years. Just last month, we celebrated three years for the studio, and we started with this game right away. It’s kind of a special case, though, because three years ago we started building our studio, then the team, and then we started working on the game. This means it’s not been full speed ahead from day one because there were so many puzzle pieces to lay down. For every team member we brought on, that person would bring a new skill set to the studio, which would allow us to say “Ok, we have hired an animator, which means we can have things that move.”

That changes what the game is and what the game can be. It’s been a very slow process deliberately because we are very keen on building the right team, and with that, building the right game. But we have been polishing The Ascent all of this year, as last year we wrapped up experimentation on what the game can be and what’s what. We’ve been working for the entirety of this year on trying to tighten it all up, and we will continue to do that before we release it.

the ascent two-story bar

GR: Do you plan on adding more to the game in terms of what was shown today thus far? Are you going to add more elements to the character creator? Will the mission first mission I played today be the first on release, too, or was this just a demo?

What you played now is the start of the game. The character creator is a good example of what we can do, and we can do a lot of things. If time allows, we can do something like more hairstyles, more tops, and stuff like that. There are things we can still add to that. The missions are done, and they are locked in. We can still polish and tweak, move a few bits here and there, but overall, the game is set. Still, the character creator and more armor pieces, are things we can still do, and we are still working on them.

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GR: Are weapons, armor, and gear in general divided into tiers in The Ascent? Meaning, do they come with a certain degree of rarity, or are they just randomly obtained?

So, all weapons, for example, are found at their base level. There is nothing random with the weapon. Different weapons are found in different ways, with some being only mission rewards, some weapons can only be purchased, some others can only be found in specific places, some weapons can only be found by killing certain enemies. What you can do with every weapon in the game, though, is that you can upgrade it by going to the gunsmith in any of the towns. You will start finding components while playing, and they are used to upgrade the level of the weapons to make sure that they scale with you as you start encountering more and more difficult enemies.

The same goes for augmentations and abilities. You scale those by assigning skill points in your character. Armor, on the other hand, comes with different qualities. There is nothing random about the stats, but certain armor pieces are simply better than others. Some can be purchased, some can be dropped by enemies, much like weapons. There’s a multitude of ways to find new stuff.

GR: How did you come up with the setting for the game, including The Ascent Group, the story, and the world you built?

That’s a very hard question to answer. Part of it was that we knew we are a small team, and we want to deliver high quality, but we can’t make a game that’s too huge. We didn’t want to say that we made an open-world jungle, infinite planets [and stuff like that]. We wanted to have a very restricted environment, a locked-off environment, and that’s when the arcology came from because that is basically a giant building that’s an entire city. With that story hook, we can choose how big the world is without it feeling weird that you reached the end of the world. We don’t like invisible walls or made-up excuses as to why you can’t leave. You can move inside the entire arcology because we decide how big it is.

From that, knowing we wanted to dive into the cyberpunk theme, there were a lot of ropes available for us with hyper-capitalism, a few individuals owning everything. Then it was just bouncing ideas back and forth to try and support what we wanted to do gameplay-wise, and how we wanted the world to feel. That is one of the reasons why you have different tiers. When starting the game players start in the maintenance tier, far down in the arcology, and then we made a very natural sense of progression with gamers reaching higher up in the building, and leveling up their character, growing stronger, and moving up on the social ladder. Everything fits into the name, which is The Ascent. We tried to make a story that supports what we wanted our video game to achieve.

The Ascent Reveal Trailer

GR: What about the alien races? Did you come up with them at the very beginning, or were they added along the way?

They were there very early. A couple even got cut because of our scope and what we really tried to build. I think alien races are one of the fun things where we set ourselves apart from typical cyberpunk because we also go into more classic science fiction with these aliens, and the reason they are in the game is because it’s fun and we want to build an interesting world. It also allows us to support whatever we want gameplay-wise and in terms of enemies.

We have the huge Larkians, who are 3-meters tall [9'8 feet] and weigh 7 hundred kilos [1543 lbs], and we can do that and say it’s just this alien race doing exactly what it needs to, instead of explaining why humans can do all these things. We can take their attributes very far, like hypermetabolism, whatever it is, we can put that into races, instead of people. It wouldn’t make sense nor feel real, otherwise, and we decided to let the humans feel like proper humans.

GR: I see that, yeah. The scene where you walk into the bar and talk to your alien boss feels a lot like Star Wars, with all the alien races sharing a common space.

Yeah, it’s fun, right? You see all these alien races and interact with them, and it makes for a more interesting world. If you want to see humans, you’re here [on Earth].

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GR: Do you plan on adding the alien races to the character creator as well, so that players can choose one to play as?

Unfortunately, no. That’s one of the limits of the scope. The game would grow too much and there would be too much for us to do as a small team. It’s one of those tough decisions we had to make.

the ascent setting cyberpunk alien races

GR: What would you like for players to take from their experience while playing The Ascent, and why?

I think players should be pleasantly surprised that they can enjoy the parts of the game that they like because we tried to hit a very wide audience. If you’re a person who really likes stories and world-building you can play the main campaign and have these characters talk to you, have cutscenes, voice acting, and everything is narratively driven if that’s the kind of player you are. And if you are a very action-oriented, skillful player, you can go out very early on and take on greater challenges without leveling up too much because we try to reward skill. And if you find yourself running a bit low on gear, you can run around to find treasures, and find characters, side missions, and really immerse yourself in that. Maybe you can start reading about all the entries in the Codex, regarding every location, every enemy, every character. I hope players will be happy to find something for them that they really love.

GR: How long do you feel the experience for completionists would be?

Completionists, I honestly don’t know. We know from the data we received when we’ve had testers play it that the main campaign with a very little exploring and side missions is around 15 to 20 hours. But if you are going to find everything, read everything, immerse yourself in the story, then I don’t know how long that would take, to be honest.

GR: Is there anything else you want to add that I didn’t ask?

We are super excited to have people finally play The Ascent, and someday have everyone play it, that’s the goal right now.

[End]

The Ascent is coming to PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on July 29.

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