Project: Ascenders

TL;DR

An ambitious pay-to-win ARPG with a player-driven economy and lots of DeFi.

Topics covered

• Visuals

• Website design

• Team

• Idea

• State

• Investors

• What am I doing

Visuals

Clean, bright, colourful. Grandma will think you are playing Fortnite. The demo’s visual style is not particularly memorable, but that has room for change as development progresses. The character drawings indicate a more unique design we can look forward to.

Website Design

The button to open the menu is on the right side of the screen, but the menu opens on the left side. Confusing and unergonomic.

The website fails to properly scale for different screen sizes.

Apart from these minor drawbacks, the website is clean, structured, and effective at delivering the message.

The reason I am analysing the website is because it provides an insight on how the team thinks about functional design, interfaces and user experience.

Team

Jackson Poon - CEO

Worked at three different law firms between 2013 and 2018. In 2018 transitioned to a crypto VC firm and in parallel worked at a crypto tech company that both develops code and invests in DeFi. In the role of General Counsel at the two firms firms. Both ventures stop in June 2020.

In 2021 founds Paramount Digital - a VC firm. At the same time founds Legendary Foundry Games, which is the creator of the game Ascenders. Then, Paramount Digital invests in Legendary Foundry Games. Good to see commitment, but at the same time it raises some amount of suspicion because investing in your own company with another company you own is not a common thing for founders to do.

All of his employment has been in Hong Kong. Legendary Foundry Games is listed as a remote workplace with employees in the Netherlands, Ireland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, but only three people mentioned.

Past employment shows that Jackson Poon has not worked in the gaming industry or any related sectors. He comes from the law and investment side, which suggests the game might have excessive focus on tokenomics relative to the game itself. On top of that, Legendary Foundry Games is the first company he is the CEO of, which is a big challenge on its own. Not looking ideal so far.

In an interview he says he is the ‘external person’ in the team dealing with investments and partnerships. Also explicitly states he has never built a game before. Not much can be found about him on social media.

Will Davis - Head of Development

Worked in the audio industry for both gaming and entertainment companies from 1996 until 2002 when he started consulting for game audio at an unmentioned company, indicating it might have been freelance.

Four years later Will Davis was appointed head of department at Codemasters - a large game development and publishing company. In the time he worked there around 30 games were published.

In 2008 he became voice director at Electronic Arts which is where Will Davis gets the right to say he has made 200+ games because Electronic Arts is a powerhouse when it comes to developing and publishing games. Seeing this, saying you made 200 games carries less weight because it was all squeezed in a two-year period. That would be about a game every two days. There is no time to do deep work on a new game every two days. But still commendable.

Then he was senior director at Ubisoft. Another powerhouse. The franchise Will Davis points out himself he worked on is Ghost Recon - a tactical shooter.

In 2011 he started working as a consultant, likely freelance, and continues doing so in parallel with the following roles.

2013-2018 Studied game architecture and design management at a university. After that he was head of production until 2021 at Neobards - a gaming development studio in Taiwan. Games released during his tenure include Resident Evil 3, the remake, and Resident Evil Resistance - an online co-op extension of Resident Evil 3.

Will Davis comes from the audio industry and worked his way into senior roles at large gaming companies. He then went back to university to study even more game design, which shows he is willing to learn and open to new ideas even after having a successful career. That is definitely a good mentality to have in web3. Will has worked at multiple places both in Europe and Asia, giving him an outlook on the differences between Western and Eastern gamers not many have.

Chris Rothwell - Design Director

The only somewhat reliable information I was able to find was that Chris was a level designer for Grand Theft Auto games from 1999 until 2008.

He says he worked at Capcom at some point. This is possibly where Chris met Will, because Capcom is the developer and publisher of Resident Evil, which Will worked on while at Neobard.

Chris is definitely not bragging about his career on the internet. It was not easy to find him.

The rest of the team is not public, but I found chat messages from the team in September 2022 saying they have around 40 people in an office in the Netherlands. It is good to hear most of them are in one spot as that improves communication. They occasionally publish short text-based interviews with team members, but all use a nickname or a first name at best and the information provided there is not enough to find the person. I would like to know who the people working on the game actually are.

The composition of the known team appears to be Jackson as the money and communications person due to his background and the fact that he is the one appearing in interviews. With Will and Chris as the experienced game developers. Applying appropriate priorities and task delegation that can form a good synergy.

Idea

Ascenders is advertised as an action role playing game with a player-driven economy.

In the whitepaper they state: ‘What would a console game look like, if it was built entirely around DeFi?’

While it is a cool and interesting concept, that is not what I want to hear when I am looking for a game to play. This shows the potentially excessive focus on tokenomics. Which is not necessarily bad, depending on your taste. But definitely something to keep in mind. They are even planning to have lending, derivatives, vote delegation, a two token system and a third non-crypto currency. I am happy to see that games are using the tools that a blockchain provides, however, I worry whether the tools are being used because they add to the gameplay or because the tools simply are available.

While the game is said to have a player-driven economy, it is planned for the DAO to balance the economy by, for example, offering bounties for sacrificing specific resources. Furthermore, they want progressive decentralisation. Even though it sounds good and is one of the popular catchphrases of numerous web3 projects, this is a gaming startup. Startups need quick decision-making and a strong sense of identity to distinguish themselves from the crowd. Decentralised governance is slow and cumbersome. But it can be fun and attractive in moderation and can be viewed as another part of the gameplay which gives people a sense of ownership but without pushing all of the load of running a business onto the community. If the progressive decentralisation is done too progressively it can stall the project. Therefore I view the DAO as a potentially fun and powerful element that must be implemented with great care, if at all.

Games that are purely based on open markets can quickly become dull for people who want something more than just resource collection and marketplaces. Thankfully, Ascenders is planning to have a story based campaign, which should help players connect with the game world and provide entertainment beyond the thrills of open markets. Another benefit of having a story campaign is making it easier to kickstart the game - the first players who arrive instantly have something to work towards and do not have to rely on other players to provide them with experiences.

A novel idea I found interesting is giving land to in-game competition winners as a mechanism for introducing new land and resources. Another one is integrating third-party guild tokens to gate access to guild-owned properties.

From the whitepaper it is possible to infer that the game has pay-to-win attributes due to gear being freely tradable, which is explicitly confirmed by the founder stating in an interview that 'life is pay to win', 'games have been under-monetised' and 'as long as people are entertained' pay to win is acceptable. 'People have different time value for money.' 'I don't see a problem with it.'

While this sounds repulsive and unacceptable to many gamers in the West, we have to keep in mind that the game is not solely targeting a Western audience. In the East, pay-to-win is common and accepted, therefore Ascenders does have a shot at capturing an Eastern audience and cannot be disregarded for embracing pay-to-win. On the contrary, I would like to congratulate the team on being open about it from the get go.

Overall, I like their ambition - they are taking enough risks so that if it all clicks, they have the next big game that is truly web3.

Here is the whitepaper if you would like to dive deeper.

State

As of publishing this article, there are no tradable tokens. There is a playable demo and whitelists are periodically being handed out.

Even after having seen the demo footage, I was still pleasantly surprised when I got to play it. The controls were intuitive and simple, the gameplay was smooth, fast-paced, and satisfying. There were some rare sound overlap issues, but other than that, the demo was free from any obvious bugs and even offered multiple different game modes and biomes, where the player could look for hidden Easter bunny eggs or be a robot and fight against humans.

Investors

Ascenders raised $6.4M back in March 2022, which is a decent, but not a huge amount of money to start making a game, however, a caveat is that one of the leading investors is 3 Arrows Capital who went bust last year. That might cause some complications depending on how the deal was structured, however, due to the large number of other investors in the deal, I would assume Ascenders will not have too difficult of a time to manage that. The team have stated that ‘the situation with 3AC has not financially impacted us nor affect the progress of the project.'

3 Arrows Capital has since been removed from their investors list on the main website.

What am I doing

I am following the development process and looking out for whitelist opportunities. I have not yet decided whether I am going to invest because I do not have to make that decision now. I am being cautious especially about the pay-to-win aspect, because to date, such web3 games have not been welcomed with open arms.

PS

I Invite you to recommend projects for me to take a look at in the comments. Priority will be given to games with a public team and a whitepaper, but without any released tokens.

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All opinions expressed by Timeroutes are solely their own opinions. This research is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Timeroutes or related entities may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this research.