Cyberpunk shooter The Ascent has been out for a little over a week and has received its first patch. Released yesterday, the update deals with performance and stability issues, including making ray tracing available to PC players using Xbox Game Pass.
A good deal of the appeal of The Ascent is how pretty it is. It shines and glimmers, and its angled camera will pan to reveal gorgeous cybervistas. It’s a game where it might be worth caring about ray tracing, then. At launch, DLSS and ray tracing was available on PC via Steam but was absent from the Xbox Game Pass version.
That’s fixed now. As the patch notes explain, the update should also address issues affecting co-op players, including crashes, controller issues on menus, and weapon replication bugs, among many other fixes.
Ed enjoyed The Ascent in his review, after overcoming what he felt was a slow start. “In The Ascent, your body is a temple, but one of interchangeable parts and it’s so fun to experiment with the game’s offerings,” he wrote. “Just like guns, you can equip two Augments at a time. So you can summon explosive micro-spiders that’ll seek out nearby enemies, and a second later deliver a big stomp to send those enemies skyward; shoot them in mid-air and they’ll explode in an electro-static burst. There’s plenty to find or earn, and I found particularly hard encounters much easier once I’d found a golden combination of Augs.”
I don’t really like ending normal news posts on RPS with questions, because it’s a bit pandering, a bit internet-circa-2006 (admittedly the best internet), but I am genuinely curious if you’re playing The Ascent and if so how you’re finding it. I’ve yet to play it but its shiny puddles call to me.