Ashen will finally arrive on Xbox One and PC in 2018.
This third-person action RPG originally announced at E3 2015 was shown for a brief moment during Microsoft’s ID@Xbox montage at their E3 2018 Briefing in Los Angeles. A few hours after the press conference, the Creative Director at Aurora44 Games, Derek Bradley stopped by Geoff Keighley’s YouTube Live @ E3 event and shared an update from the development of Ashen.
Published by Annapurna Interactive, Bradley showed a brief gameplay demo of Ashen‘s minimalist style and spoke about two of the central features in the game: passive multiplayer and stamina based combat.
First, passive multiplayer. With it, you will be able to traverse the game’s ash-covered world and engage in multiplayer interactions modeled after thatgamecompany’s Journey. Nothing lasts forever in the world of Ashen including your relationship with other players. This gameplay element is core to Ashen but if you would prefer to explore the game’s dungeons with your friends, it will have a feature to prevent other non-friends from entering your game world.
The other main feature is the stamina-based combat. In Ashen, stamina is a resource that will need to be carefully managed. Getting out of danger will take careful planning; your stamina will control all of your player-character’s major actions including dodging and using a shield, for example. Strategy will be key to taking down the game’s “…lonely giants and hungry, twisted inhabitants of the night”.
Bradley also mentioned that founding your own town and gathering survivors will be integral to the gameplay.
During the Xbox E3 event, it was announced that Ashen will be coming to Xbox Game Pass upon release.
Ashley Speicher, Head of Engineering at Xbox Game Pass presented an update on the game subscription service during the event. In addition to announcing the new Fast Start feature and sharing new first-party titles hitting the service, she announced that several new games from third-party developers would be added to the service upon their release. In addition to Ashen, she announced that Warhammer: Vermintide 2, After Party and Phoenix Point would hit the service day and date with their retail releases.
Ashen is the first game from New Zealand-based Aurora44 Games.
