Ascent - The Space Game is a space MMO set in a future where civilisation has almost completely collapsed.
Players must work together to prevent total disaster, and rebuild a civilisation of their own choosing.
History
In January 2013 after years of enduring PVP dominated space MMOs, it looked like the next batch would be more of the same, and we set out to build an entirely new experience focused on PVE, on Industry, Trade, Research, Mining and Farming both from asteroids and planet surfaces. Near the end of 2013 we expanded our game world to encompass the entire Milky Way galaxy with a detailed scientific system of generating planets and star systems. In 2014 the experience expanded into a deep city-building colonization sandbox, which led to the formation of player governments and the construction of jump gates by players. In late 2014 our KickStarter was funded, allowing us to finally hire our artist full time and complete a starbase construction system to rival the huge colonies already in existence. We released on Steam Early Access on the 27th of Febuary, 2015 to great success. As at 20 June 2015, 83% of 127 player reviews are positive.
Features
- Exploration - more than 270 billion star systems generated with unique planets, mineral concenrations, agriculturual values and climate. Exploration is now a career option with government and player bounties for data.
- Farming and mining on planet surfaces - players can build their own planetary bases for resource harvesting. City simulation style play.
- Personal starbase construction - players can construct their own starbase to their own design. This becomes your home in space, and your centre for heavy zero-g manufacturing and research
- Trading - dynamic local NPC markets, player to player global market
- Dynamic NPC mission system - combat, trade (supply/demand), passenger transport, courier and salvage missions
- Asteroid mining - manual control of ship and axial mining beam. Player and character skill based.
- Research - blueprint fragments attainable from salvage missions allow the player to research forgotten and new ships and components, as well as enhancements to their buildings
- Manufacturing - every ship, weapon and utility module in the game can be manufactured by players and sold or used to customise their ships (which can also be given a custom paint scheme)
- Gas giant harvesting - because sometimes you need things like hydrogen and oxygen!
- Space combat - manual control fighter to fighter dogfighting, scales up to big ship broadside duels between cruisers
- Colonization of outer systems - the largest so far has over 50,000 structures and hundreds of thousands of colonists
- Outer Star Bases - these can also grow to vast size, open ended in 3D space just as colonies are on the surface
- Governments - Players who own colonies in a given system can vote for a colony mayor, planetary governor, system Senator and a colonial President. Governors can rename their planets, Senators can rename their systems and approve Jump Gate construction to their systems, and the President can approve jump gate construction to the inner systems.
- Player constructed jump gates - when approved by the relevant government authorities, players can band together for a community mega-project of constructing new jump gates, extending the reach of new players into the colonized outer systems
