Ever heard of Journey, from 2012? It's this game where you walk to this mountain in the distance, and like the name suggests, the emphasis is on the journey, not the destination. One of that game's major driving points is something called "seamless multiplayer"- where other players just show up in your world. They just appear over the horizon, and play with you. Not a bad idea, right? Well, combine that with a beautiful, (kinda) low-poly open-world with combat ripped straight from Dark Souls, and you have this nice-looking upcoming game: Ashen. Now, at the time of writing this, I had only found out about this game two days ago. But since then, I've been hooked. It has all the things I love- Unique, fun mechanics, nice, simple art that focuses on beautiful environments, exciting and fun combat, an open world, an interesting story, the list goes on and on. The game seems amazing, and it's slated for a 2018 release. Some of the new mechanics seemed to have changed over the years. It was first announced sometime during 2015, and there, the multiplayer seems to be straight out of Journey. Fast forward to a developer interview during E3 2018, the mechanic seems to have changed to where other players role-play the npc's. I'm a big fan of D&D and other tabletop games like it, so this seems genius. But I'm still hesitant. It's gonna be pretty difficult to pull of this ambitious mechanic, and if it crashes and burns, we might never see it in another game for a while. But, if it succeeds, it has the potential to start a whole new genre of games- Probably not though. I do love the ideas behind Ashen, and as a lover of narrative-driven games with good stories, I plan at taking another look at Ashen's story when I get my hands on it. I read up a bit on it, and it seems to have a pretty awesome premise- We'll just have to see how it holds up after release. Until then, you can check Ashen out at www.ashen-game.com/, and I encourage you to do so. I can't wait for it to come out. Image reference: BagoGames. “E3 2015: Ashen Announcement Trailer.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 15 June 2015, www.flickr.com/photos/bagogames/18218224303.
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AuthorHi! I'm Thomas MacDougall, a sophomore at DSA. Here you can check out my thoughts and recent activities. Please note that the views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools. Archives
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