The Ascent‘s first Patch came out earlier today, and it claims to increase the game’s performance in DirectX12 mode in addition to fixing a bunch of bugs. Now, performance improvements are a little tricky to quantify since some have claimed that The Ascent stutters and runs poorly on computers significantly better than the one that I have, but speaking only for myself, I did notice a slight improvement to my frames per second in certain areas. Interestingly, these increases seem to occur in the areas that already ran pretty well, with the lower performance of chaotic firefights and busy towns remaining more or less identical. It’s possible that this has to do with my setup or the performance penalty for recording video.

Before the patch, I would get a consistent 30-40 frames per second while recording. That’s still roughly what I’m seeing, obviously, though some areas appear to have received a ~5 FPS boost compared to what I was getting before. As always, I’m playing at 1920x1080 with everything cranked to ultra (but no ray tracing because it’s not possible on my RX 580). That’s then being scaled to my 4K display and subsequently downscaled back to 1920x1080 for the recording. Then upscaled back to 4K for Youtube’s superior 4K bitrate. This back and forth scaling causes some of the smaller text to look weird in recordings.

After I reviewed The Ascent, I ended up loading it back up. Part of that was simple burnout making it difficult to dive into a new game, but I was also paranoid that I had perhaps overblown some of my criticisms while not doing justice to the game’s positives. In the process, however, I ended up running across entirely new bugs. One of these reared its head within 15 minutes of loading the patched game.

At 7:06 in the embedded video, I encounter some of the orange-dot opponents who aren’t immediately hostile. They then become hostile, at which point my controls stop working for some reason. I thought that my controller had become disconnected at first, but that was disproven when the pause menu still worked. Then a special attack managed to unstick me, at which point I moved away and started shooting. That’s when it became apparent that they were invincible. That bulletproof quality didn’t go both ways.

Since my weapon wasn’t damaging them (or even touching them—usually, hitting an opponent causes their level and health to appear over their head), I tried to lure them toward an ally’s turret, only for it to finish me off instead. I genuinely can’t tell if allied turrets are supposed to damage you, which factors into my complaint that basic parts of the gameplay are left up to guesswork. That’s a weird thing to discover after 20 hours of gameplay and completing every mission (at least, every mission that I managed to find).

Needless to say, The Ascent is going to need quite a lot of further patching. This first patch is a good step in that direction, but I do worry that running into a bug so quickly in the patched version suggests that this will become a game of whack-a-mole, with fixes exacerbating other problems. That happens sometimes with smaller dev teams; back when The Witcher 2 came out, each successive patch introduced a new problem. It’ll be interesting to see if The Ascent will follow a similar trajectory or if its bugs can be reined in. I hope for the latter, because this can be an incredibly fun game when everything is working as intended.

The Ascent‘s first patch improves DX12 performance and fixes some bugs first appeared on Killa Penguin