If you’ve been struggling to hook up with ghost pals in newfangled Soulsian RPG Ashen, you should give your dating profile an overhaul. If you’ve just been trying to play the videogame with them, then good news! Developers Aurora44 have fixed an issue preventing some players from accessing multiplayer, leaving them stuck with AI companions rather than a humans. That’s good, because co-op in the Dark Souls vein (where a silent stranger appears and you occasionally bow at each other) is one of Ashen’s key selling points.
All the other selling points also involve being a lot like Dark Souls, which is either FINE or AWFUL depending on which member of the RPS treehouse gives you the scariest look.
UPDATE 12/12/18: It looks like Ashen's PC multiplayer woes are over, as A44 Games has announced the issues plaguing the game since launch have now been fixed.
A new patch is currently available to download from the Epic Games Store, and should help resolve the connection issues experienced by players over the past few days. Along with the update, A44 Games has also created an FAQ page to help players navigate the game's multiplayer elements, many of which had been causing confusion.
Although it took them a few days to figure it out, A44 Games has at least been pretty good at keeping players updated on the situation. The developer thanked the community for their patience and Epic for their support in issuing the fix. Hopefully A44 Games won't have to keep putting out fires in Ashen any time soon.
In case you hadn’t gleaned this detail from today’s many posts mentioning games launching on Epic’s Store: Epic’s new digital games store has now opened for business. While their “hand-curated set of games” only includes four you can actually buy right now, one of them is the surprise new game from the makers of Bastion and that’s not a bad coup. Epic Games have managed to wangle some other upcoming hot exclusives too, including PlayStation darling Journey and Coffee Stain’s first-person factory-builder Satisfactory (which has scrapped its plans for a Steam release). To tempt players into installing another store client, Epic plan to give away a game every fortnight, starting with the splendid Subnautica.
In the opening scenes of the game a god-sized magic bird explodes and brings sunshine back to the world. Congratulations, you’ve won! Sort of. The holy light still needs to be protected and you, a rando with a stick, are the one to do it.
Defending the light involves lots of locking on, dodging through sweeping enemy blows, and executing light and strong attacks until the red health bars are all gone. It’s Dark Souls, everybody. Instead of bonfires you have magic rocks. Instead of an Estus health flask you have a ‘Crimson Gourd’ that restores every time you rest at a bonf—magic rock. When you die you drop your money, but it can be recovered if you return to your old corpse without dying again.
Hello, have you seen my face anywhere?
Pale imitation
I can’t knock it. The formula works, and Ashen’s washed-out world is lovely. The opening areas transition from an overgrown land of ruins to a dark grey desert. The zones are mostly more expansive than Dark Souls, and they are full of impressive sights—the colossal skull of a god-bird, a nameless floating monster, and Journey-style spires of distant light.
My favourite moment of my first few hours of the game actually happened underground. I explored a dungeon with a lantern, splatting disgusting acid spiders with help from my AI companion. If you’re online these companions can be played by other players, though I haven’t seen any in this pre-release state.
The lantern effects are quite beautiful, and turn out to be very useful when we fight the game’s first boss: a shadowy creature that can eat light. It launches itself out of the shadows around the edge of the arena, smashing pillars in the process. When it retreats into an alcove we use our lanterns to burn it out. Each time we do the alcove stays lit, denying the creature a place to retreat. The monster becomes more desperate until we finally club it dead.
Wonder where I'm supposed to go next...
It’s an atmospheric and exciting fight, and gets away from the Souls rhythm. Basic enemies in the opening area are lean on telegraphed three-hit combos and ranged javelin throws. A degree of Souls muscle memory goes a long way here—even the pad controls are near-identical. The first boss encounter gave me something more to look forward to beyond pretty views in new areas.
There’s room for some interesting character-building too. You can imprint your character with four buffs. The basic bronze ones are dull; two percent health here, a bit of stamina there. Fortunately I have seen a couple of weirder ones, like an effect that improves your attacks when you hold a lantern in your off-hand, and another that summons orbs that make you stronger, and another that increases your health resistance for being close to your companion. You seem to earn minor stat bonuses for levelling up, but your power seems to be overwhelmingly dependent on your gear.
Walk softly, and carry a ridiculous mallet.
The weapons and character designs are lovely as well (apart from the acid spiders, which look a bit like like novelty pipe cleaner toys). Of course you first have to get used to the fact your character has no eyes, nose, or mouth, but once that seems normal the outfits are sweet. I have a particularly cool desert ninja number on at the moment. Ashen looks beautiful.
There are more features I've yet to see play out in these early stages. There are co-op moments where you team up to open a big door or climb up a tall ledge. They seem basic at the moment, but there could be scope for more interesting puzzling further in. The first resurrection stone you touch becomes a village that seems to slowly grow as you meet NPCs and send them back. I like the idea of your character actually trying to push back against the ruin and start a new life—a life beyond dodge rolls and light-light-heavy attack combos.
Ashen was surprise-launched at the Game Awards, so it's out now. Surprise!
Ashen is about exploring and cleansing a newly radiant world, but it's often at its best in the dark. A few hours into this derivative but engrossing third-person RPG, there's a quest that takes you deep below ground in search of a corrupted giantess queen. Entering her realm is an ordeal - the nearby hills are alive with other giants who are fond of leaping on your head, to say nothing of coyote-type predators that breath fire - but the catacombs themselves are something else.
The surface world's packs of club-wielding vagrants give way, here, to more treacherous breeds of foe. Skeletons who lunge from their dust as you pass (in a masterful bit of risk-reward design, you can shatter them with one blow if you catch them mid-resurrection), and wraiths who evaporate on contact only to pounce from the blackness. Wall-crawlers with peeled-open chests who lurk below ledges, popping up behind you with an easily-missed slither of flesh. All these violent delights plus yet more giants, silhouetted near corridor mouths or looming in the stark but short-ranged glare of your lantern - unhelpfully, given the perils of dodging with deadfalls to either side, you can't hold the latter and a shield at the same time. It took me a couple hours to bumble through that wondrous nightmare to the cavern at the area's base, where the abundance of space felt positively decadent. It's probably the finest dungeon environment I've set foot in this year.
For all that, Ashen is also often at its best in the light. There's another area later on that is much less clever but similarly oppressive, not least for its population of spear-chucking cultists. Survive it and you're treated to a glorious vista of a fallen city, inspired (to my untrained eye) by Mughal architecture - bronze domes catching the daybreak above pastel pink cobbles and demolished houses. The nature and timing of this spectacle immediately recall Anor Londo, the heavenly city of Dark Souls, much as the queen's realm feels like a mishmash of the latter's Catacombs and Tomb of the Giants. Ashen owes an awful lot to From Software's work - to pick out the most obvious mechanical debts, all your XP is dropped in a puddle on death, and landscapes are woven around runestones where you can meditate cross-legged to refill your healing gourd, at the price of reviving all the enemies you've slain. It's essentially a cleaned-up cover version, though its art direction and scanty multiplayer elements have more in common with Journey. But if it never really surprises, and lacks the scale and elusiveness of its inspirations, Ashen is elegant and demanding enough to stand on its own feet.
Epic has revealed the first slate of games coming to the Epic Games Store, which is now live.
The list is headlined by new games from Bastion maker Supergiant, Abz developer Giant Squid and Killing Floor studio Tripwire. There's a mix of games out now and games coming soon, as well as some currently free games, such as Subnautica.
The Epic Games Store is the Fortnite and Unreal engine company's attempt to take on Steam. It offers developers 88 per cent revenue share, which is more than Valve's 70 per cent standard.
In most video games, you re the hero. You might be the foretold chosen one or of more humble means, but in any case, the game still revolves around your agency and impact on the world. This fantasy falls apart quickly in multiplayer games, where if everyone is the hero, then surely no one is.
Ashen might have the solution to this. Join a friend or stranger on a quest, and you’ll unknowingly step into the shoes of an NPC while still appearing as the hero from your own solipsistic screen. It s kind of confusing, but when you play it, it s so natural that people don t care, laughs developer Aurora44 s creative director Derek Bradley.
Developer Aurora44 has confirmed that its long-awaited co-operative action-RPG, Ashen, is still due to launch on Xbox One and PC before 2018 is through - despite the lack of release date news so close to the end of the year.
Ashen - a game that was first revealed during the Xbox E3 media briefing in 2015 - has been loosely pencilled in for a 2018 release for a while now, but time has continued to tick on with little further word from Aurora44, leading some to wonder if plans had changed. However, in a recent tweet, the developer confirmed that things are still on schedule - which means we can narrow its launch down to one of the only two remaining months (and a bit) of the year.
The last significant look we got at Ashen - at its stylish fantasy aesthetic, its stamina-based melee combat, and its brooding, open world setting - was at this year's Gamescom and, joyously, it was (as you can see in the video below) still looking pretty swell.
Darksiders III - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (RPS)
As we stare into the weary, craggy face of the final quarter of 2018, there is still a glimmer of hope. The games are not yet done. They will never be done. And the impending release of them, some close, some a little further away, stirs something within us. The delicate, easily crushed butterfly of excitement. We may catch it yet, to keep in our collection of emotions – the sharp pin of time pushed through and through it into the cork of eventual disappointement. (more…)
