Ascent: Infinite Realm (TH-SEA) Beta – My 2nd Day Impressions

I was able to finally get a few hours of game play in where I got to experience more of the questing (from the tutorial) and aerial combat up to level 15. Level 30 is when the housing, guild, and open world PvP becomes available. With the exception of the open world PvP, those are the systems (including the other life skills like gathering and crafting) that I am looking forward to experiencing.

The character based aerial combat itself still needs work in my opinion; it just does not feel as good as the regular ground based combat since all it is utilizing the exact same skills while both mounted and suspended in the air. Your mount effectively becomes a small area of ground which your character does most its attack animations (a few skills are done while still sitting though). Because of that, most skill animations that make sense for ground combat don’t really feel natural/impacful from that mounted/flying position. What is gained is an additional axis for LoS (line of sight) combat meaning you can strike a monster from above or below (similar to surface to air combat and vice versa).

While on the ground and mounted, a character can also engage in combat with the same skill animation caveats. This LoS system may likely be challenging for healer type classes due to the soft-lock since as noted before, the combat does not utilize tabbed targeting (you cannot hard lock or cycle using tab; matter of factly, the Tab key is assigned for stance switching skills). But since I am not playing/trying a Mystic, I’m not certain how their healing skills are implemented (it could end up being like TERA’s).

Many class skills are naturally latency dependent. I’m playing with an average ping of 175+ms (via ExitLag VPN) and it is the most noticeable aspect of the game play (I press a skill and can feel that short pause; it’s really annoying when picking up items since both the loot explosion and their onscreen remnants lag behind by a good second). This of course is expected playing from outside Thailand which itself, doesn’t have the best international routing. The games netcode does a decent enough handling that aspect though which means that the gameplay must feel incredibly crisp without those constraints.

The questing (at least what I’ve experienced up to level 15) is nothing remarkable (I was hoping at least to see some different twists to the usual fetch/gather/kill mob quests). The amount of onscreen clutter sometimes detracts from easily seeing where your objective is though so I often times just use auto move (using the End key); this is a QoL feature that I sorely miss in games that do not have them. There is also a lot of missing NPC voiceovers and since all of the text dialog is in Thai script, it is naturally difficult to get any sense of the details of the story (I’m not using the community created english patch for my initial play through).

There are a bunch of UE3 generated cutscenes that could’ve used more love in terms of texture quality (many of Lost Ark’s were done the same way and showed what is possible). Which brings me to the custom enhancements Bluehole/Krafton put into UE3 for A:IR. It’s actually pretty decent which says a lot when considering how skeptical I was of them when it comes to their ability to optimize period. Some Thai players streamed post-level 30 small scale PvP with full effects and there was no discernible client FPS lag or actual major graphics FPS drops. See the following video.

Bless Online would’ve been choking on something less than this while TERA would not look this crisp. While I know it will never happen unless hell freezes over, I would love to see TERA overhauled with this custom UE3 enchancement (far less work compared to a complete code rewrite, remodeling, reanimation in UE4) along with a lot of the QoL stuff.

They also managed to get seamless transitions to solo quest instances free from stutter. This is where portions of the open world transitions seamless to a solo instance (there’s a graphical visual barrier that you pass through to convey this is happening). Riders of Icarus has something similar but there is always client FPS lag during the transition. Most games tend to use a loading screen in those cases which tends to break that open world immersion. Some of the open world Guardian Legion missions in TERA tried to use this technique to load different graphical textures in an area (but there is noticeable client FPS lag when that happens) where the amount of players are also load balanced for that mission when using the Vanguard Request UI to enter (more players can enter that zone manually per channel).

Obviously, a players mileage may vary depending on their system configuration. For myself, I haven’t experienced the client FPS stutter in the heavily populated areas and have only come across texture loading priority a few times in the starter areas. Simply put, Bluehole/Krafton designers working on A:IR have exceeded my own expectations in this area.

On a side note, portions of Devilian lives on in A:IR. The Assassin class borrows a lot from the class of the same name in Devilian (Assassin in the Korean and Thai versions, Shadow Hunter in the NA/EU version) including some skills and visuals. I’m going to have to roll a Gunslinger to see if they utilized some of skills from the Cannon Shooter/Cannoneer.

As for the cash shop, I don’t believe it is worth delving into for now given the fact that Kakao Games is not the publisher for the Thai-SEA version. Kakao will be driving their business model and monetization methods for Korea, North America, and Europe. And that is where I have great pause given how Black Desert Online has a cash shop design where you buy back elements of functionality, RNG and QoL (that design is why I refused to even buy the game even though it is inexpensive; the only time I did play was during the free weekends they offered awhile back). Until I hit the soft level cap (45) and play there for a bit, I can’t really determine if A:IR (the Thai/SEA version) will be something I will continue playing.