The Avalanche blockchain will soon become home to arguably one of the most compelling games to arrive on the blockchain in 2022. Ascenders combine triple-A graphics with a player-driven economy and have already attracted thousands of players to compete in a combat challenge through a desktop version of the game. Top players are in line for an airdrop once the platform launches its AGC token and NFTs.
Ascenders is a sci-fantasy, open-world action RPG with a fully decentralized player-driven economy powered by the Avalanche blockchain. Players will soon be free to explore dungeons, discover resources in the underworld, craft NFTs, own land, and battle it out to climb the leaderboard and play to earn.
Avalanche is the fastest smart contract 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 quick, low-cost, green, and suited ideally to a blockchain game.
Combat Challenge live
The Ascenders Combat Challenge is live and runs until the end of April 2022. Those interested can download the game for their Mac or PC desktop computer. The Combat Challenge is a time attack against hordes of enemies within a small region of Ascension. Players can explore the area, defeat enemies and break containers to collect as many score orbs as possible before time runs out. Each round lasts five minutes, with players rewarded for speed, creativity, defensive and offensive maneuvers. Notably, players can try as many times to compete for a high score on the global leaderboard.
At the end of the competition, the top 100 players will be rewarded with a share of the 1 million AGC prize pool, with regular snapshots taken to ensure players come back to defend their high scores. Ascenders will airdrop AGC tokens to winners after the Token Generation Event is complete, which at this stage, we can only speculate will be around the same time as the competition comes to a close.
A further 7-day cliff vesting period and a 3-month linear vest will be applied to prevent a sudden impact on the token supply. Read on to understand better the game, its technology stack, and the team behind Ascenders.
Who’s building Ascenders?
The core team combines experienced, director-level AAA game devs with crypto professionals who know how to scale a project. CEO Jackson Poon is a serial entrepreneur, qualified lawyer, and longtime crypto investor. At the same time, Head of Global Development Will Davis is a 35-year game development veteran who previously held director positions at Ubisoft & EA. He has delivered over 200 games, including notable titles such as Ghost Recon, Aliens vs. Predator, GRiD, DiRT, & Driver.
Design Director Chris Rothwell has over 20 years of experience shipping award-winning AAA games such as the Grand Theft Auto series, including being one of the four designers on GTA3 and leading GTA: San Andreas.
Triple-A standards
The game world feels like a AAA standard game, with varied terrains and lots to find and explore. Each area has unique challenges, resources, quests, culture, dungeons, and gameplay. Some landscapes are familiar, and others are genuinely alien and full of supernatural creatures. Exploration is rewarding, while collaboration and trading with other players are essential. The Ascenders team also states that they will add new terrains and regular world events that change the map and bring new stories and challenges.
What is Ascenders?
Ascenders are attempting to combine a “Zelda: Breath of the Wild” overworld with an “Eve: Online” MMO economy, with four key elements making up the game.
- Explorer: Ascenders has rich open-world environment players can freely explore to discover new lands, hidden dungeons, and rare resources.
- Fighter: 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!
- Builder: Buildings are 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 many structures to choose from but limited space to build. Players must observe the market and decide what to make wisely.
- Decentralized Economy: Players have complete control over the supply and demand and can find and trade resources from around the overworld to craft new items. All items are player minted and player distributed, with player-designed specializations.
Ascenders tokenomics
The game will employ a variety of tokens to support the economy. Notably, neither the AGC token nor NFTs are live at the time of writing, so make sure not to fall for any scam tokens posing as the real deal and stay up to date by following their official Twitter channel. Currently, players are competing for the top spots on the leaderboard, and the top 100 players will be eligible for an airdrop of the soon-to-be-released AGC token.
- Glow Gems are utility tokens used as an in-game currency for actions such as building, item minting, crafting upgrades, buying items from marketplaces, etc. These have an uncapped supply.
- Ascenders Governance Council ($AGC) are governance tokens used by players to participate in votes on important game decisions. Supply of AGC will be capped, while staking AGC will bring players rewards.
- Land Parcels are an ownable piece of the massive Ascenders world and vary significantly in size, from modest estates to sprawling lands. Furthermore, players can merge adjacent lands to create larger areas. Land Parcel owners collect a passive resource income and can also erect buildings on land they own.
- Game Items are NFT tokens are created by players when they craft resources into items. These NFTs can be upgraded and sold on marketplaces.
Use already owned NFTs to mint an Ascenders hero NFT
Ascenders strongly believe NFT interoperability is key to the future of crypto gaming, and players can use external NFTs to mint an Ascenders hero NFT. The new playable hero retains the name of the origin NFT and has its value and rarity traits. Moreover, all game items are player-made NFTs with item value derived from their scarcity, utility, and uniquely to Ascenders — work.
As in most mainstream games, in Ascenders, players level up their in-game items then use resources to upgrade them. Ascenders use an emerging blockchain method to boost the NFTs, even on 3rd party stores. Players can find items, spend time and resources to upgrade them, and then sell the now more valuable commodity at a profit.
The Ascenders Combat Challenge is live and runs until the end of April 2022. Those interested can download the game for their Mac or PC desktop computer.
The above does not constitute investment advice. The information given here is purely for informational purposes only. Please exercise due diligence and do your research. The writer holds positions in various cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, and RADAR.
