ASCENSION UPDATE REVIEW Really like Reality Break and want to *love it* but it still has some real problems, despite coming a long way since launch. The base game systems and balancing are much tighter now and generally feel good, but some of the tweaking has come at the cost of the sense of "power" gained from affix rewriting; IIRC, part of the original fun was that when using your fate points to rewrite an affix (eg change "+ X% credits" to "+ X% power"), the value of X remained constant (I think?) which meant changing affixes felt like a way to "break the system," allowing you more powerful bonuses for a given stat than you would otherwise be able to get. Nowadays it doesn't preserve the value of X, acting more like a general "swap this affix for one of your choice" feature. It's still neat, though, but I think leaning into the former idea (preserving X or some factor of it) would be more rad. On the same note, the affix *modifier* rewrite has been nerfed too hard; the only times it's ever been interesting have been when I successfully bugged the rewrite system, rewriting a mod from + to x and then getting it to bug back to a larger "additive" value which is now multiplicative instead, resulting in huge numbers like x300 power. Yes bug, but also yes feel excellent. Turns out I actually have a lot of thoughts so I'll add them in point form. - Several skills/items still organically lean you toward mass pew-pew builds (i.e. fire as many lasers per second as you can) but the game optimisation is *bad bad bad.* With a brand new gaming rig (Core Ultra 265, RX 9070 XT, 96GB RAM) the game still slows to 1-3 fps during combat if I push those kinds of builds, so I'm forced to avoid relying too much on things like the Twin Bolt affix simply because it makes the game unplayable at a certain scale. - The new ascension skill tree has some fantastic, game-changing feats that should be commended, however the balancing around the entire thing kind of sucks. - Ascension points would function quite well as an outer prestige layer (or "second reset which resets first reset gains") and that appears to have been the design intention, but the game also offers you the option to gain the points WITHOUT resetting; the option to fully reset for "even more points" is actually way too little of a boost, so it's almost *never* worth it. Faster to do multiple quick runs for points the normal way. - Further to that, Ascension Point gain scaling is abysmal, with severely diminshing returns beyond the first handful of points (just for example, not real numbers, but if you exchange 100,000 reality points you might get 6 ascension points. If you exchange 10,000,000 you might get 7). This fundamentally undermines the late-game because it creates an incentive to reset early for few points rather than rewarding you for making real progress at higher difficulties. From a progress perspective there is no real incentive to actually *get stronger* at this point because it does not translate to increased rewards. - The above is further compounded by the fact that the character level cap is 100 meaning reality point gain is also soft capped, and item levels (generally tied to difficulty scale, which is limitless) stop climbing beyond 25 or so meaning there's no actual reason to increase difficulty any further. Then on top of THAT, the fact that you can only keep gear for a functional max of a few cycles means you don't really want to play long sessions focusing toward build optimisation; there's no reward and you'll ultimately lose all your gear anyway. - The Ascension update promises limitless progression but even aside from the above, the actual limitless upgrades you unlock turn out to be woefully, woefully disappointing. The benefits they provide are so small they're not functionally noticable in-game, and then on top of that the cost scaling for them is exponential without really offering the possibility for exponential currency growth, the result of which is you level them a handful of times, don't notice the difference, and basically don't benefit from looking at them again. - There's a weird endgame problem in which I get flooded with the red 'Artifact' tier gear but even though its item level appears normal, the stats it's generated with are clearly equivalent to a very low level item. I was getting these Artifact drops from basically every enemy squad and even from destroying asteroids, which made them feel less special both by frequency and uselessness, and made identifying actual non-bugged loot extremely tedious. - The Artifact tier gear is also, in many or even most cases, not as good as the Epic gear from the tier before it (better in stats but the actual unique perks attached to them just don't scale as well or aren't as useful as their Epic counterparts). There are also definitely still way too few Artifact tier options. I will say though that in general the Epic/Artifact loot uniqueness is very thoughtful and each item is capable of changing your build meta. - Endgame spoiler: Ultimate tier gear is extremely cool but again it doesn't feel like a full and well fleshed out tier, with seemingly one ultimate of each item type which of course leads you to pretty samey builds In summary I think the game could be amazing if the Ascension system is re-thought out -- the skill tree is great but give it higher cost scaling, while also higher Ascension Point scaling from the "full reset" (pure ascension? iirc?) option so that it exponentially rewards higher Reality Points on reset, encouraging long runs to get as powerful as possible and climb to the highest challenge level possible. Likewise, removing the item level cap and instead just slowing down ilvl growth (so maybe every 4-5 difficulties, item level increases by 1) would go a long way to encouraging this kind of growth, and so would a larger scaling reality point bonus based on highest challenge level. (NB I did RARELY get items far exceeding the normal 25 cap so it seems like it's a random thing that can happen on higher difficulties but all a bit murky and too infrequent) Finally I'd probably completely redo the "limitless leveling" idea; instead of letting players scale up the reality tier bonuses which are by late game trivial, it would be way more exciting if you increased the caps on existing reality skill levels, or provided some other new limitless skill options or something. Basically, just need some decent scaling!
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