Hello everyone! ːzimzimSmileː
Today is the day, exactly 4 years ago we finished our Kickstarter Campaign for Astral Ascent and today, after 6 months of work (we nearly doubled the game content, it takes time!), we finally release the 2.0 Update: The Outer Reaches which is by far the biggest update to the game so far, here is the trailer!
We are happy we were able to support the game with so many updates and that was made possible because all of you are supporting and talking about the game!
To celebrate, the game will hit its biggest promotion to date of 50% off for 2 weeks starting at 7PM CET today!
We're self-published and every share and review has helped so much. Thank you for your continued support!ːzagplsː
If you want more detailed informations you can check the detailed Pach Notes below!
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1280930/view/523090111361974309
DLC New Content
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3372880/Astral_Ascent__The_Outer_Reaches/
4 New Worlds
Ophiuchus conquered new worlds and added them to his collection and you can now go through The Outer Reaches worlds!
Explore these new worlds for a new experience!
- Shattered Rises
They said hiking is good for the cardio, but it’s really high up here.
- Molten Wastes
You like the heat, but your soles are melting.
- Frostbound Expanses
You love snow, but you'd better keep moving if you want to keep your finger alive.
- Obsidian Heights
You like fog but care of what it hides from you.
Each new world has a total of 8 new enemies and 4 traps for a total of 32 new Enemies and 16 new traps!
This is doubling the content related to these elements making runs much more interesting, we also made sure to give an incentive to select one world over another one during the run which is explained below in the section dedicated to the new special rooms!
Each new world also comes with a new music from Dale North! The new musics are more rhythmed for dynamic exploration!
Andromeda Boss Fight
Andromeda had enough of hiding and wants to join the battle for freedom!
- Defy Andromeda in an epic duel!
Once per run, you can defy Andromeda in her bar, she wants to see if you have what it takes at your full potential so she will be giving you max life, max mana and a fullfil your healing shards for the fight. - If you fail she will simply set your life mana and healing shards as they were being defying her, so feel free to defy her at each run, you have nothing to lose, this fight is always a quick win or a quick defeat!
- If you win she will grant you her super drink giving 1 drink of each type and join you as a summon for the rest of your run
- Andromeda summon
Andromeda summon is not replacing Zodiac Summons but it's an addition named Zantetsuken that will automatically finish Star Guardians and Zodiacs when their health reach 15%.It's so satisfying to have such a powerful ally by your side!
- Andromeda Ending
You will also be able to get Andromeda's narrative ending if you escape the prison with Andromeda by your side!
Andromeda also comes with a lot of new lines fully voiced in English and Japanese!
Free Update New Content
- New Imprint system - 90 ways to improve your spells!
The Imprint system is probably the biggest addition to the game runs coming with this Update 2.0! We wanted to add a new currency for exploration rooms to have more choices than : Quartz / Gambits / Auras making it more interesting to select rooms. We also wanted to make spells, supposed to be the core of the game, more central in the experience and more interesting! Finally, we wanted to shake a little the currency synergy system consisting of stacking things looking alike to be powerful, the imprints system requires more flexibility to create powerful combos!
- New Loot in Exploration Room
One more loot type in exploration rooms dilutes the existing room types, it makes all rewards overall a little less common and more valuable to get. For example getting a little bit less Gambits will make Cetus room and Sun Room more interesting and getting a little bit less Auras will make the Yalee Kingdom and the New Aura Room more interesting!
You can loot up to 8 imprints per run and you loot them 2 at a time in Exploration rooms, we wanted this to not be too overwhelming by having too many elements to read and compare. You can only equip one of the 2 imprints but all imprints will automatically go to the Imprint Infuser at Andromeda's Bar and Imprints you find during your runs can be freely equiped and removed from your spells at the dedicated UI in Andromeda's Bar.
- 90 Blueprints to collect!
The 90 new Imprints are linked to Blueprints you will have to find during your runs through the game! You can find them by defeating Zodiacs bosses, Star Guardians and Elite enemies!
You can see all of your collect imprints in the Imprints Archive at Andromeda's Bar
- Synergy and Transcendance
Some Imprints can have an effect no matter your spell like the first condition below
Some other have requirements to work even for their first effects like below
In both cases you will have Transcendance Effect giving extra power ups if you meet specific requirements. Sometimes you will already have the right elements and sometimes you will need to work on them to have the effect and the Transcendance activated. As I said earlier, this is changing a bit the habits of focusing only on one affinity, one spell type as some imprints can be of a different affinity than your main one but still super useful or powerful, so make sure to think about that while making your builds!
- Powerful combos
You can create a lot of fun and powerful combos, you can see some examples below, you have 90 of them to experiment!
- New Loot in Exploration Room
One more loot type in exploration rooms dilutes the existing room types, it makes all rewards overall a little less common and more valuable to get. For example getting a little bit less Gambits will make Cetus room and Sun Room more interesting and getting a little bit less Auras will make the Yalee Kingdom and the New Aura Room more interesting!
- New Intro Room
We thought the previous introduction room was too stacked and overwhelming, we decided to create a new one allowing to separate better the start of runs bonuses from the classical world intro rooms.
It also makes it clearer and easier to select in which world you will start your run (classical or The Outer Reaches version).
- New Special Rooms
2 times per world, a choice will be attached to world selection, one time it will be a selection among existing special rooms (Cetus, Pavo, etc.) so one biome will have one special room and the other biome a different one, they appear organically (next to Exploration/Fight Rooms) during the world so they are an additional speical room. Another time, it will be among the New Auras Room and New Echo Room (explained below), even if they are guaranteed it will cost you 5. These 2 choices are guaranteed in every run making the biome selection more interesting depending on the reward you want.- New Aura Room
This new room allows you to pick any existing Aura at a Mythic or Astral rarity level, this room is the best choice to complete a build you are making. It should make powerful builds much more frequent and reliable than before!
- New Echo Room
This new room allows you to pick any existing Echo to have the best synergies or to have the support Echo you need for your run!
- New Aura Room
This new room allows you to pick any existing Aura at a Mythic or Astral rarity level, this room is the best choice to complete a build you are making. It should make powerful builds much more frequent and reliable than before!
- Better Impacts
A feedback we received multiple times was the lack of powerful impact feeling with basic attacks so we added new impacts for all weapons giving much better sensations!
We have also added extra vertical bumps on enemies so the hits feel more impactful. - Tons of QoL
- In the Yalee Kingdom, the Camera is now centered so you can see all the Auras at once without needing to go on auras one by one like before and the Reset Yalee is now at the center to walk less to reset the choices
- In the Echo Island, the camera is now centered so you see all auras at once with no need to move to check them and icons above heads show you what they do so you do not need to check them one by one
- Selecting the drinks at Andromeda's Bar could be very slow, even more if you had a lot of stars on you, now it's much faster making it more fluid
- Some rooms are now shorter like Intro rooms, Zodiac Rooms and Star Guardian rooms, they needed to walk too much to get to the next room
- Transitions between rooms is now faster making it smoother to go through rooms
- Teleport rails in Event Horizon is also faster
- The UI windows are clearer for loots
- You can now buy with Sun Pieces (if you already defeated DL6+) the Zodiac Summons, this is made for experienced players who already did the challenges many many times and have extra sun pieces to use!
We have globally tried to improve a lot of small frictions we could find to make the overall experience more enjoyable!
- In the Yalee Kingdom, the Camera is now centered so you can see all the Auras at once without needing to go on auras one by one like before and the Reset Yalee is now at the center to walk less to reset the choices
- Tons of Balancing
We have made a lot of balancing on Auras, Spells, Weapons Passive that people mentioned being too weak and you can find all of that in 2.0 Patch Notes.
We have also made an important change to the Cursed Telescope, we only kept the Astral rarity for effects but we made maluses more important. We think this makes this room much more interesting and the bonuses full to play with!
New Roadmap
We are super happy to announce that thanks to the support we received until now, we are able to commit on more updates for Astral Ascent and that's a great news because we still have a tons of things in mind to make the game better and funnier to play!
- Customization System for the Hub
Following a suggestion event (about what to do with the Extra Sun Pieces) on our Discord Server, the most voted choice was being able to Custom the hub with the Extra Sun Pieces. We are working on many different collections for you to buy and make this place truly yours! Here is an example below with the Coral/Seaside collection!
- Charity Pet DLC We found very inspiring the Paws and Claws DLC from Children of Morta to collect money for Charity for animals, they already collected more than $460 000 for the Humane Society International charity. That's also a cause close to our hearts at Hibernian Workshop and we asked Dead Mage if they would be fine for us to follow their lead and create a similar initiative on our side for Astral Ascent and they were absolutely fine for that so we are completely going to do that! Like for Paws And Claws DLC, 100% of the benefice will go to Charity!
- Boss Rush We have the Boss Rush in mind for a very long time, it was supposed to be the first update post 1.0 release. It just makes so much sense for Astral Ascent to have a Boss Rush given how many bosses we have
Collector Physical editions
Taking the occasion to speak again about the beautiful Collector Editions including Yamat DLC and The Outer Reaches DLC available for preorder coming from Red Art Games, for PS5 and Nintendo Switch!
The DELUXE edition contains:
- Base Game
- DLC 1 : Yamat, the breach Traveler
- DLC 2 : The Outer Reaches
- 6 die-cut stickers
- 1 acrylic stand
The COLLECTOR edition contains:
- Same as DELUXE Edition
- Steelcase
- Double-sided Poster
- OST
These are coming in limited editions for each platforms!
Updated OST
We will soon update the OST of the game as new musics were introduced for the 1.7 and the 2.0 for a total of 7 new musics and 37 tracks in total!
So stay tuned for that!
Big Surprise Coming Soon!
Well, 2025 might be full of surprises from our studio and you might not want to miss what we will announce end of May, so be sure to follow us on your favorite social media!
Have an excellent day and time in game! ːzimzimSmileː
- The Hibernian Workshop Team