Introduction: Welcome to Ascenders!

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PlayAscenders

8 min readFeb 28, 2022

Introduction: Welcome to Ascenders

Welcome to the world of Ascenders! We wanted to share the motivations behind Ascenders, what we’ve built so far, and our roadmap for the future.

What is Ascenders?

Ascenders is a sci-fantasy, open world action RPG with a fully decentralized, player driven economy powered by Avalanche blockchain.

Ascenders combines a “Zelda: Breath of the Wild” overworld with an “Eve: Online” MMO economy.

Open Exploration: Ascenders has a rich open-world environment players can freely explore to discover new lands, hidden dungeons, and rare resources.
Dungeon Clearing: The dungeons that infest the land are filled with enemies, and need clearing out before it is safe enough for the community to begin construction. Combat will put players to the test in return for rich rewards — perhaps even land!
City-Building: Buildings can be built on owned lands. Silos and refineries improve productivity, Armorsmiths and stables enable players to craft new items, hospitals and shops provide services, Guildhalls create community. There are a very wide variety of structures to choose from, but limited space to build. Players must observe the market, and choose what to build wisely.
Decentralized Economy: Players have full control over supply and demand. Players find and trade resources from around the overworld, used by players to craft new items. All items are player minted and player distributed, with player-designed specializations.

Ascenders: Welcome to the world of Ascension

Our Vision

Build the world’s first true AAA crypto game.

We are building an ARPG that is AAA in scope, graphics, and quality. We are building it on top of a revolutionary, truly decentralized, crypto-powered economy foundation.
To unlock crypto’s full gaming potential we are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in both blockchain technology and game design.
Our goal is to prove the viability of crypto in mainstream gaming and to push crypto gaming forward as a whole. We want to shake up the game industry, and spark a new phase in gaming.

Terrain

The overworld is built to AAA standards, with lush and varied terrains and lots to find and explore. Each area has unique challenges, resources, quests, culture, dungeons, and gameplay. Some terrains are familiar, others are truly alien and full of ethereal creatures. Exploration is rewarding, cross-trade is essential. The world is alive and active, with new terrains added over time, and frequent world events that change the map itself and bring new stories and challenges.

A Metaverse Economy

We use play-to-earn the way it was meant to be used: to empower and engage players. A metaverse should allow people to freely express themselves in a virtual environment. Many games only provide one fixed path to play-to-earn — which we believe makes a game inherently adversarial.

In real life, each player has their own skills and interests. Ascenders provides a variety of economic ‘lanes’ in which to participate in the economy; allowing players to choose what they want to do, whether it’s fighting, exploring, or building. Each ‘lane’ has its play-to-earn loop — and its own rewards and challenges. The interaction of these lanes creates a dynamic, lasting economy, in which very diverse players can feel equally important.

Ascenders: A player lane for every type of a gamer.

A Blockchain Foundation

Avalanche gives us confidence that thousands of players can play our game and run transactions with sub-second finality and without concerns of high gas prices. An Avalanche subnet gives us the flexibility to build our own game execution environment and set our own custom gas fee structure, which makes it the best chain to build a game with an advanced economy on.

Ascenders uses a variety of token types to support this broad economy.

Glow Gems: An utility token used as an in-game currency for primary economic actions such as building construction, item minting, crafting upgrades, buying items from marketplaces, etc. Uncapped Supply.
Ascenders Governance Council ($AGC): A governance token used by players to participate in votes on important game direction decisions. Supply is capped, staking is rewarded.
Land Parcel: a digital parcel of land situated in the Ascenders overworld, each with its unique layout, terrain, and resources. Players buy Land Parcels to gain passive resource income and to build shops, armorsmiths, refineries, hospitals, guildhalls, and a huge variety of other buildings. Each Land Parcel is a non-fungible token.
Game Items: NFT token created by players when they craft resources into items. These NFTs can be upgraded and sold on marketplaces.

Land Parcels

A land parcel is an ownable piece of the massive and contiguous Ascenders overworld. Every parcel is totally unique — with its size, layout, terrain, and resources. Land Parcels vary greatly in size, from modest-sized Estates to sprawling Sovereign lands. Adjacent lands can be merged to create even larger areas!

Land Parcel owners collect a passive resource income. They can also erect buildings on flat buildable space; building structures greatly increase land parcels productivity. The larger the land parcel, usually the more buildable space available;

However, the number of buildings is limited by the finite amount of buildable space, and upgrading a building often increases its footprint, taking up even more space. Landowners must observe the market, and carefully plan what to build/upgrade:

Customizable houses to relax in, and show off your prized possessions.
Weapon and Armor smiths at which players can use resources to mint items.
Silos and refineries to improve a Land Parcel’s resource production
Player-managed shops, which act as local marketplaces.
Hospitals, temples, and fast travel portals that provide gameplay services
Guildhalls which act as social hubs, with their own rules and local economies

Over time, the Ascenders overworld will become heavily developed by players in response to the needs of the economy.

Battle for Land

While the overworld is huge, ownable land is still limited. Those who missed the initial land rush are not without hope. One of the core systems in Ascenders is the ‘battle for land’ — which lets players compete to unlock new lands at the overworld frontiers.

Players explore the dangerous far reaches of the map to discover and unlock new, very challenging dungeons full of the game’s hardest enemies.

Once the dungeon is unlocked, a ‘Battle for Land’ tournament begins. Players compete at beating the dungeons, and when the tournament ends the strongest players top the leaderboards.
Tournament winners get a token that allows them to buy a brand new Land Parcel. Winners can also sell this “right to buy” token to other players, at a hefty profit.

‘Battle for Land’ is a way for skilled, challenge loving hardcore players to earn big rewards for opening up new areas of the overworld map. Over time, new areas of the overworld are added, giving players new challenges and new lands to unlock.

Player-Minted Game Items

All game items are player minted NFTs: weapons, armor, items, and even heroes. To mint items, players collect/purchase/pool resources, then visit an armor/weapon smith to craft items in limited runs.

Ascenders NFT item value is ascribed by scarcity, utility, and — unique to Ascenders — Work. As in most mainstream games, in Ascenders players level up their items, and then use resources to upgrade them. Ascenders uses an emerging blockchain method to permanently upgrade the NFT itself, even on 3rd party stores. Players can find items, spend time and resources to upgrade them, and then sell the now more valuable item at a profit.

Another source of item value is Provenance, a record of the owners and important history. Rare items wielded by famous people in important battles are rare indeed, and very valuable.

NFT Interoperability

Ascenders strongly believes NFT interoperability is key to the future of crypto gaming. Accordingly, players can use an external NFT to mint an Ascenders hero NFT. The new playable hero retains the name of the origin NFT and has its value and rarity traits.

Team

Our team combines experienced, director-level AAA game devs together with experienced crypto professionals to build a world-class, open-world ARPG. We know how to take a project to scale and have a long history of releasing AAA games. Our Netherlands-based, full-spectrum game development team has extensive experience, including work on AAA titles like GTA.

Our CEO Jackson Poon is a serial entrepreneur, qualified lawyer, and longtime crypto investor. He is a co-founder of Paramount Capital, with previous positions in Morrison & Foerster and Spartan Capital.

Our Head of Global Development Will Davis is a 35-year game dev veteran, with director positions at both Ubisoft & EA. He has delivered over 200 games, including notable titles such as Ghost Recon, Aliens vs Predator, GRiD, DiRT, & Driver.

Our Design Director Chris Rothwell has over 20 years of experience shipping award-winning AAA games. You may know him from genre-defining titles such as the Grand Theft Auto series — including being one of the four designers on GTA3, and the lead on GTA: San Andreas. Chris also lectures on International Games Design & Architecture at the Breda University of Applied Sciences.

About Ascenders

Ascenders is a sci-fantasy, open-world action RPG featuring a fully decentralized, player-driven economy. Players can freely explore new dungeons and discover resources in the distant overworld — Ascension.

Subscribe to our updates to be the first to read the latest posts. Over the course of the coming weeks and months, we will introduce each of the elements described above in more detail.

You can expect exclusive content sneak-peeks, game lore reveals, and perhaps even early access to something special — airdrops, beta access, whitelist to important events.

We are excited to share our vision for the Ascenders universe with you and to embark on this journey into the metaverse together.

About Avalanche

Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality, and has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol. Avalanche is blazingly fast, low cost, and green. Any smart contract-enabled application can outperform its competition by deploying on Avalanche. Don’t believe it? Try Avalanche today.