1.3 Update - Affinity System, QoL and Arsenal preview!
about 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 14, 2024 at 05:09:45 AM

Hello everyone!

We just released the 1.3 version on PC and Switch (EU/NA) and in 1-2 weeks for Playstation and Switch Asia. This new version is focused on elements often requested by the community.

Patch Note

Find the full Patch-Notes of 1.3 here!

Affinity System

The most frequent request and complaint about the game since its 1.0 release was the lack of Synergy of your build during your run. Wanting to go in a direction and loots would go in another direction gave the feeling of being unlucky during the runs.

We have created a new system called the Affinity System that increases synergies of the loots depending of your current build so you are more likely to make a fully coherent build at the end of your run. Keep in mind that keeping some flexibility on the loots you find is still important, if you find something very powerful, you might still want to re-orient your build during your run!

We have also made Auras rarities stand out more on your interface.

Destiny Fragments

You will now be able to get up to 3 Destiny Fragments at once per Zodiac victory!

The way it currently works in 1.2 is this :

• You get 1 Destiny Fragment per Zodiac per Destiny Level (up to 54) and the Master gives 3 fragments per level, you can at best get 7 fragments in a run.
• If you defeat a Zodiac at a high Destiny Level, you will only get 1 Destiny Fragment and it will increase by 1 the Destiny Level you need to get a new fragment of this Zodiac.
• Ex : if you have all fragments of Taurus at Destiny Level 10, if you beat him at Destiny Level 20 you will get his 11th fragment, and you will need to beat him at Destiny Level 12 or more to get one new fragment.

This system is slow, does not reward players wanting to take more risks in higher Destiny Levels and it exhausts the Master Destiny Fragments much faster than the Zodiacs fragments, this is how the 1.3 system works :

• You get from 1 to 3 destiny Fragments per Zodiacs depending on the difference between your current Destiny Level and the number of Destiny Fragments already collected from the Zodiacs.
• Ex : if you have all fragments of Taurus at Destiny level 10, if you beat him at Destiny Level 13 you will get 3 fragments. Then you will need to beat him at Destiny Level 14 or more to get new Destiny Fragments.
• The Master still gives 3 Destiny Fragment per Destiny Level and you cannot collect several ranks at once so your maximum Destiny Fragments per run is now 15 and the Master and Zodiacs fragments would exhaust at the same time if you win all your Destiny Levels runs.

Improved Descriptions

We have made descriptions for Effects, Player Statuses and Elite Aspects much clearer adding details for how they work, durations, chances to add stacks in order to give you a clearer idea of what to expect from each of these elements.

Some Astral Auras also used Common Spells without giving informations on them, they now have the descriptions added as hints.

Permanent spell icon

We added an option to make next spell icon always visible above your head. We know this option can help players having an hard time checking the icon during action.

Astral Dragons 

Small Astral Dragon now gives 3 Auras to choose from instead of 2 so you have more choices to start your build during the run.

We have also replaced the Void Catalyst element that increased strength when killing enemies without being hit by Barbecue's Grace giving the Echo of Barbecue to reroll the Auras you do not want with new Auras of same rarity. This gives even more choices to build during your runs.

Darker Background Option

In order to give more options related to readibility, we added an option to make everything in background darker so enemies and players stand out much more.

Ultimate Challenge

We sponsored Gellot ,a great content creator that performs very hard challenges on games, to do all Zodiacs no-hit at Destiny Level 6 which sounds ridicously hard but that wasn't even close to the challenge he did, making a no-hit on all Zodiacs at Destiny Level 54, it sounds really impossible but he made it!

Send him some love in the comments of the video for the incredible performance this is!

Arsenal Update Preview

The Arsenal will be the next update, the 1.4, it will give each Hero 2 new weapons and 3 passives modifying gameplay of each hero, including for their base weapons.

We announced Ayla will have a Katana giving her more impactful attacks with a longer range.

Kiran will have a Double Falchions for large range attacks at a slower pace but keeping high mobility.

Octave will have a Rocket Launcher to kill enemies from far but without auto-targeting, you will need to position correctly to hit your enemies, a bit similar to the one from Hades.

Below, Octave has a passive creating grenades on the third Basic Attack.

Calie will have Spears, all Signature Spells will keep working the same so the spears will create gems when attacking.

And today we announce the second weapon of Octave : the Gunblade! Giving him the ability to fight at a closer range.

We are targetting for this update to release by the end of April 2024.

Backerkit and Physical Rewards

We are getting closer of the final shipment for Physical rewards, we have closed the possibility of changing your rewards and we will collect shipping costs in the coming weeks.

We reached 80% of Survey answer, make sure you answered it if you have a physical rewards to make sure your shipping address is up to date and that Limited Run Games will be shipping to the right place!

We will do our best to keep manually changing the address until the last minute but answering the survey just makes things much easier!

Have an excellent day

-The Hibernian Workshop

1.2 Update - PvP Arena, new Spells and more!
about 2 years ago – Mon, Feb 12, 2024 at 08:22:47 AM

Patch Note

Find the full Patch-Notes of 1.2 here!

20 new spells

We have added 5 new spells per Hero, 2 of them are directly unlocked and you need to buy 3 of them at the Merchant. If you already have a rarer spells you won't need to unlock them with experience at the end of runs

We received a lot of feedback saying you would like to see more spells about making the enemies move. More spells making something else than pure damage. We have tried to include that as much as possible in our new spells design and we are really happy about these new spells!

PvP Arena

The PvP Arena is placed in Andromeda's Bar. It is accessible only in local co-op during runs and you can make as many duels as you want. We had so much fun testing this new feature, we know it won't be used by everyone as it requires playing in co-op but during co-op runs it adds a lot of fun!

When you start the duel it will make you full life and full mana and it will restore the amount you had before the duel when getting out. 

During the duel both players get mana point with time so you can focus on launching spells more than attacking with Basic Attacks to restore mana. We also added some buff trees spawning sometimes to spice things up. We also removed the Echoes and Zodiac Summon during the duels, it was way too chaotic when it was possible.

The player winning the Duel will get a little crown symbol above their avatar as a reward for the run but it can change back to the other player if they win another duel.

We received a lot of questions relative to online PvP but we are not going for it as it requires so much work. We also thought about accessing the PvP from main menu or from the game hub but it would require a build creating system and we also know that the PvP is not balanced depending of the spells you currently have, it's mainly targeted to get some fun when you do co-op runs!

Extras

Some noteworthy change mainly inspired by community suggestions!

• Offline Telescope - We have made the Telescope working offline now, it will solve the problem that it was not working in some regions of the world and it will also be available on Console now. 
• 4 Categories at Cetus Cavern - Cetus Cavern now has 4 categories instead of 3, the fourth one will always be the random one (Nebulous Choice)
• Pavo Feathers - Feathers on Pavo's ruins will always be of a higher level after sacrificing health 3 times (globally)

Arsenal Update Preview

We have also started working on the next update : The Arsenal. In this update each Hero will have new weapons and associated passives. We will explain this better next time but for now you can see one of the new weapons of Kiran below - 

Merch Suggestions event

We are also gathering your ideas about potential merch on our Discord Server, you can give your own ideas and vote for other suggestions you like, do not hesitate to join!

Backerkit Survey

We have received 57% of the Backerkit survey, please do not forget to fill it. More details in the previous update if you missed it. And you can access it anytime from this link.

Have a great time in the game and a fantastic week,

- The Hibernian Workshop Team

BackerKit surveys are coming very soon!
about 2 years ago – Wed, Feb 07, 2024 at 05:29:30 AM

In a few hours you’ll receive an email from us with a special link to your BackerKit survey. It’s important to respond to your survey as quickly as you can since we need this information to fulfill your rewards. If you do not receive the survey very fast do not worry, we are sending them progressively so we can answer better your questions during the process. 

In this survey you will be able to purchase Physical add-ons (visible below) even if you initially backed a digital reward. As announced during the Kickstarter Campaign, the shipping cost will be collected in this survey if you have any physical reward. The shipping costs are calculated based on the total weight of your order based on price ranges per weight per region provided by Limited Run Games.

You don’t need to create a BackerKit account to fill out your survey. When you receive the email with the survey, click the survey link to respond. Answer the questions about your reward preferences, provide shipping information, and purchase add-on items if you like. You don’t have access to this survey link yet, but it will be available soon via email!

After you respond to your survey, you can go back later and change your responses at any time before we close the surveys and get our final counts.

If you need to review your information or pledge status, you can return to your survey by clicking the link in your survey email or requesting your survey link under "Lost your survey?" on our BackerKit project page at https://astral-ascent.backerkit.com .

If you used your Facebook credentials to log in to your account, the BackerKit survey is sent to the email address you use for your Facebook account.

We have created a FAQ page to answer your questions about it the process -

You can also ask for support from the FAQ page if you need.

As a reminder, you can claim your Digital Rewards on our Discord Server http://discord.gg/hibernian-workshop in the #Kickstarter-rewards channel.

Have an excellent day,
 

• The Hibernian Workshop Team

PvP Arena, public beta and new spells coming!
about 2 years ago – Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 01:57:12 PM

Hello everyone!

We are back from holidays and we are working on our next update coming on February 12!

PvP Arena and public beta

We have made great progress on the PvP Arena and it turned out even better than we anticipated, it is so fun to play! We will explain better everything related to it in the update news but for now here is a work-in-progress video.

The PvP Arena is now available for you to try and we are really interested to get your feedback related to it! 

As a safety measure, we would recommend you to make a manual copy of your saves before selecting the public beta. For that copy the content in :

• Windows (C:)
• Users
• - Your Windows User Name -
• My Games
• Astral Ascent
• Number of your Steam Account
• - Copy the content there to somewhere else -

To select the public beta, open Steam then :

• Right click on Astral Ascent in your Library
• Click on Properties
• Open Betas tab
• Select "public.beta"

The public beta already has a change related to Telescope making it offline now.

New Spells

We have also started working on 5 new spells per hero, these new spells feel very cool to use and we tried to make some of them move enemies around as it was something often requested by the community!

Other Changes Coming

We took time to read all the reviews, all the suggestions and bugs reports we received and we will try to fix and improve as much as possible of these beginning with the most requested ones.

For example we will be fixing the issue making Telescope unavailable in sone countries (and consoles) for this update but we have little time for fixes for this update so more fixes and improvements like improving the synergy between loots during a run should be following in a patch dedicated to improvements in March 2024.

Backerkit Survey

We are finalizing the survey and should be able to send it this month. We are also talking a lot with Limited Run Games recently and things are moving in the right direction to prepare every physical rewards!

Wishing you a great day and the best for 2024!

- The Hibernian Workshop Team

Astral 1.1.0 Update is live on Steam and Consoles!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 07:57:15 AM

Astral Ascent 1.1.0 is live!

Let's dive into the details of what is new in this new update!

You can see the complete Patch Notes here

Japanese voice-over

We just loved the community calling us an "anime roguelite" (some of the late-game cinematics are really inspired by some animes!) and we decided to make a Japanese voice-over version of all the dialogs. It was a lot of work with the 7800+ dialog lines and 27 voiced characters but we assembled a great team to deal with this task and we are super happy with the result. Each character has so much personality and it is an always renewed joy to discover all the dialogs in a different language. You can listen to some of these new recordings below -

 You will have a launching screen to choose the voice-over language one time now, we were afraid all this work would go unnoticed if we did not add a specific screen for it.

Brazilian Portuguese Translation

Having members of our team from Brazil, we are very happy to have the game translated in Brazilian Portuguese!

Small Astral Dragon

We pay a very close attention to the community feedback about the game and one of the most requested change is being able to have more control over the builds we are creating. With this in mind, we added a new Zim-Zim upgrade named "Small Astral Dragon". (also works in co-op!)

At first rank you have the choice between 2 Common Auras and at last rank you have the choice between 2 Mythic Auras. Everytime, Auras have 20% to be of an higher rarity level so you can sometimes start with an Astral Aura. Though we did not want to encourage what we consider being an unfun behavior - relaunching the game many times to get a different Aura - we made the game remember which Aura should appear.

We placed this Dragon at the very beginning of the first intro room so you can have an aura before taking the level up statue and have an initial target build to focus on. But do not forget, this is a simple first step into your build, if you started with a poison Aura and only find freeze oriented elements you can switch to it! As Bear Grylls said : Improvise. Adapt. Overcome!

As an addition for easier builds, we have added another gambit slot at the merchant in Andromeda's bar. It is not fun to reset many times the choices in order to find the right affinities and it should be a little easier now!

The Telluric Yalee

Another feedback we received was not getting frequently enough the spells you prefer. Instead of garanting certain spells or banning some others, we implemented a Yalee in the Telluric room, this Yalee appears when you defeated the Master once (in Destiny Level 0) and can reset the spells choices for a small amount of Sun Pieces. We kept the amount low so it always feel fine to use and not frustrating.

We have been looking for a moment now on what could we do with extra Sun Pieces collected. It was supposed to be the Small Astral Dragon for a large amount of Sun Pieces but we felt like it was too important to have it unlocked early and to have this starting Aura in all runs so we reworked very recently to implement it as a Zim-Zim upgrade and we will try to find something else to do with the Extra Sun Pieces in the future!

New Explorations Room

We added 10 new exploration rooms level design variations for each world in this update

We have made a poll on our Discord Server to know what you would like to see implemented in the game and the results really surprised us! 

We created a Roadmap (see below) to take these feedback into consideration.

•  A - Metaprogression content - making more heroes spells as soon as possible for February 2024 update, we have already created some and we tried to focus on making as many spells as possible focusing on creating gameplay like moving enemies or heroes etc as you feedbacked us.
•  B - Ingame content - nothing planned for now given the poll results
•  C - New games modes - PvP is planned for February 2024 and a new very cool mode is coming for Q4 2024, giving it a low priority given this poll
•  D - Harder challenges - nothing planned for now given the poll results
•  E - Exploration runs variety - 10 new exploration rooms level design variations available now! We made it a priority due to the poll.
•  F - Combat runs variety - we planned an altervative world to come alongside Yamat update on Q3 2024!

Talking a bit more about the future below.

Damage Meter System

This is the most biggest change of this update, it registers all the damage you input to any enemies for your current room and globally (also works in co-op). You can pause the game to open the "Damage Meter" option in the menu to see this -

There is also an overlay option that is "Off" by default and you can activate it to show the top 5 elements of either the global damage of your run or of the current room and it looks like this -

For those worried, it's not overlapping with much elements from the interface, we limited it to 5 elements showcased at once.

This new system is inspired by mmorpg addons making it possible to see what causes damage at any time in your build. Our goal is to make you fully understand your build, how it works, how it synergies and what deals damage in it. 

We think that's not something very common but we have a lot of synergizing elements that we think it's really important in our game. Even if we made our very best during the development, this new tool is probably going to show a lot of unbalanced elements so you can expect changes based on our observations in the coming months.

Lisibility and Readability

Among the reported feedback from the community, lisibility is something that we see a lot, we made so many changes regarding this during the development but we are still not there yet. 

Most of games similar to Astral Ascent use a dark background because it makes everything stands out instantly  but we really wanted the game to be colorful, it is definitively more work though! 

In this update we increased lisibility again, we reduce some visuals FX, we set as many as possible behind everything, add some transparency on elements and so on. We have also added an option to remove Damage Numbers if you don't want them being visible on the screen.

What is next ?

We hope we will enjoy this update, as a reminder here is our 2024 Roadmap if you missed it -

We are going to take a well deserved break for the holidays season! Things have been really intense during 2023 with frequent major updates. You can check this link to see all the newsletters we released on Steam since 2020 to see how much the game evolved and how much we progressed as a team!

For now the game keeps selling well and for now it gives a nice future for the game and for our studio and we really appreciate players following us as developers and not just for a specific game, that goes right to our hearts!

That's the last news of this very intense year, 2024 should be easier for us. I will sound like a broken record but thanks again for following us, sharing and caring about Astral Ascent and we will keep you updated about what is next for the game in January!

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We will send the survey for Physical Edition in January with an estimated shipping by Limited Run Games early Q2 2024

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Have an excellent holiday season everyone and thanks again!

- The Hibernian Workshop Team