The Ascent Q&A - Neon Giant Shares Info on Game Length, Crossplay and The Game's Living World (wccftech.com)
Fair enough! How long do you expect The Ascent to last on average? Is there a lot of side content?
Arcade: It depends a lot on your playstyle and how much of the world you want to immerse yourself in. From what we’ve seen, playing through the Main Missions will land you somewhere around 15-20h. On top of that you have many more Side Missions, treasures to find and a myriad of Codex entries to unlock and read about the world and what’s in it.
I know that you've already confirmed 4K and 60 frames per second on Xbox Series X. However, how are you optimizing The Ascent for the Xbox One and Xbox Series S? Can you share the target resolution, frame rate, and settings for these versions?
Tor: We are trying to cater to each platform as best as we can, in regard to tweaking settings for maximising the visual fidelity. The different platforms have different strengths, and we try to adjust as much as we can to get the most out of them, but all versions look and feel similar and scale quite well. Resolutions and settings are in flux as we are optimising and tweaking, so not final yet, but we are targeting 60 fps at 1440p for the Xbox Series S, 4K at 30fps for Xbox One X, and 900p for the Xbox One.
Since The Ascent runs on Unreal Engine, are you going to support NVIDIA DLSS on PC and ray tracing on PC and Xbox Series S|X?
Tor: We are in the optimization stage at the moment so we have not a definite answer on that. Having said that we are exploring all the latest technologies that allow us to deliver the best possible gameplay experience.
Will there be cross-play between Xbox and PC? Also, is The Ascent going to be an 'Xbox Play Anywhere' game?
Tor: There will be crossplay between Xbox and the Microsoft Store PC-version, and it will indeed be an “Xbox Play Anywhere” game.
Last question: I know it's been confirmed for Xbox Game Pass, but is that just for consoles or PC too?
Tor: Both.