The Ascent vs Borderlands 4

• Perspective: First-Person
• Multiplayer: 4-Player Online Co-op, 2-Player Split-Screen
• Setting: Planet Kairos
• Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2
• Unique Feature: A truly seamless open world with a completely overhauled movement system (grappling hook, gliding) and unprecedented depth in character and gear customization.

• Co-Op Teammates: The game supports 4-player local couch co-op and online multiplayer, allowing friends to synergize their cyberware abilities to dominate the battlefield.
  Other Players
• The Cyberdeck: Your constant companion. With a press of a button, it hacks nearby doors, ATMs for money, and turrets to turn them against your enemies.
  Digital Hacking Tool

• Co-op Teammates: The game is built from the ground up for four-player co-op. Teammates can revive each other, combine their Action Skills for devastating effects, and trade loot. A new teleport feature allows players to instantly group up.
  Human (Player)
• Echo 4: A new robot companion that provides a navigation line to objectives, replacing the traditional mini-map for exploration. It can also scan the environment for loot and enemies.
  Robot

• Cyberdeck Upgrades: Crucial modules hidden throughout the arcology. Finding them levels up your hacking device, granting access to high-tier loot chests and heavily encrypted doors.
• Orphan Skill Points: Physical skill points hidden in the environment independent of leveling up, rewarding players who explore every corner of the map.
• Datapads: Glowing lore terminals scattered across desks and corpses that provide deep background information on the alien species and mega-corporations of Veles.

• Cyberpunk
• Dystopia
• Megacorporations
• Twin-Stick Shooter
• Sci-Fi Action
• Arcology
• Rebellion

• Sci-Fi
• Looter-Shooter
• Action RPG
• Dark Humor
• Co-op
• Space Western
• Procedural Generation
• Cel-Shading
• Revolution

• The Dominator: Assault Rifle
  A rapid-fire ballistic weapon perfect for shredding crowds of unarmored gang members and low-level mutants in the slums.
• EBR Enforcer: Energy Burst-Rifle
  A highly accurate energy weapon that melts through the heavily armored corporate security forces and robotic enemies encountered in the upper tiers.
• Guillotine: Heavy Melee Sword
  Introduced in the Cyber Heist DLC, this massive, brutal blade completely shifts the dynamic of the game into a close-quarters hack-and-slash experience.

• Procedurally Generated Guns: Varies (Pistols, SMGs, Shotguns, Assault Rifles, etc.)
  Over 30 billion guns with randomized parts, stats, and elemental effects. The new 'Licensed Part' system allows for traits from different manufacturers (Jakobs, Maliwan, Tediore) to appear on any weapon.
• Ordinance: Heavy Weapons, Grenades, Throwing Weapons
  A new, dedicated gear slot for ordinance. These items operate on cooldowns or charges instead of consuming ammo, encouraging more frequent use.

• Habber Dash Jacket: Standard, low-tier street clothing providing minimal physical defense but high mobility, worn by common workers in the Warrens.
• CorpSec Riot Gear: Heavy, bulky tactical armor looted from corporate security forces, providing massive physical and energy defense at the cost of evasion speed.
• Cyber Warrior Armor: A premium cosmetic/tactical set offering a striking, neon-infused Samurai aesthetic, providing excellent balanced defense for endgame content.

• Energy Shields: The classic Borderlands shield type. Absorbs burst damage and begins a fast recharge after a short delay of not taking damage.
• Armor Shields: A new shield type designed for brawlers. Armor regenerates segments constantly, even while in combat, but is more vulnerable to corrosive damage.
• Firmware System: A new gear set system. Equipping multiple non-weapon gear pieces with the same Firmware provides powerful set bonuses. Firmware can be transferred between items.

• Cybernetic Tattoos: Extensive character creation options allow players to cover their avatar in glowing neon circuitry and gang tattoos.
• Transmog System: A heavily requested feature added post-launch, allowing players to equip high-stat, ugly armor but change its visual appearance to any cool outfit they have previously looted.
• Animated Weapon Skins: Purchasable or unlocked weapon paints that feature moving digital patterns, making your firearms glow brightly in the dark industrial slums.

• Cosmetic Customization: A deep customization system is expected, allowing players to unlock and equip a wide variety of heads, body skins, color schemes, and emotes for their Vault Hunters to personalize their appearance.

The Ascent features a deep ARPG progression system. Players level up to earn Skill Points, which are invested into attributes like Tactical Sense, Weapon Handling, Aiming, and Evasion. The game's defining feature is its 'Cyberware' system. Players can install active augmentations (such as launching a barrage of homing missiles or summoning an explosive spider mech) and passive modules (like increasing maximum health or adding dodge-roll evasion). Additionally, the 'Cyberdeck' acts as a hacking tool that players must continually upgrade to slice open high-level corporate doors, ATMs, and hostile automated turrets.

Character progression is deeper than ever. Each of the four new Vault Hunters has three massive skill trees with over 50 levels of progression. A new endgame system called 'Specializations' replaces Badass Ranks, offering meaningful gameplay perks instead of small stat increases. SDU upgrades for inventory and ammo are also available.

Veles is designed vertically, separated into distinct 'Tiers' that represent the socio-economic status of its inhabitants. 'The Warrens' and 'Deepstink' are the lowest tiers, characterized by claustrophobic slums, raw sewage, and heavy industrial machinery. The mid-tiers feature bustling commercial hubs, neon-soaked nightclubs, and dense residential blocks. The absolute pinnacle, 'The Pinnacle', is where the corporate elite reside in clean, opulent, sunlit luxury. Exploring the map involves seamlessly riding massive elevators and traversing open urban battlegrounds filled with countless interactive NPCs, alien races, and destructible cover.

The game features a single, massive, seamless open-world planet called Kairos. This is a significant evolution from the zone-based maps of previous titles, eliminating loading screens between regions and allowing for greater freedom of exploration with a completely overhauled movement system.

• The Inter-Tier Transit Train: Public Transport
  The immersive fast-travel network players use to move between the massive horizontal districts of the arcology.
• The Arcology Elevator: Vertical Transport
  Massive, city-sized freight elevators required to travel between the socio-economic Tiers of Veles, bridging the gap between the slums and the corporate luxury zones.

• Ferals: Mutated Humanoids
  Rabid, heavily mutated creatures that hunt in massive packs in the dark, industrial depths of 'Deepstink', requiring heavy crowd-control weapons to suppress.
• Mechanical Spiders: Robotics
  Corporate defense drones that scurry across the ceilings and floors, harassing the player with energy blasts and self-destruct mechanisms.

• The Indent: Player Avatar
  An enslaved corporate worker who must utilize extreme violence and cybernetic enhancements to survive the collapse of their mega-corporate owners.
• Poone: Syndicate Boss
  The stressed, foul-mouthed leader of your home district who acts as your primary early-game quest giver, trying desperately to keep his turf from being overrun.
• Kira: Corporate Handler
  A highly capable, mysterious operative who takes an interest in your lethal efficiency, guiding you through the complex espionage of the upper tiers.

• Amon, the Forgeknight: Playable Vault Hunter
  A 'sci-fi Viking' class who can forge weapons with cybernetic drones and specializes in melee and elemental damage (cryo, fire, shock).
• Vex, the Siren: Playable Vault Hunter
  One of the six mystical and powerful Sirens of the Borderlands universe, with a new set of abilities.
• Rafa, the Exo-Soldier: Playable Vault Hunter
  A heavily-armed soldier class, likely focused on gunplay and explosives.
• Harlow, the Gravitar: Playable Vault Hunter
  A class likely focused on gravity manipulation, crowd control, and area-of-effect abilities.

• Mutual Dependencies: Early Campaign
  Fight through rival turf in the deep slums to restart the district's primary water supply, establishing your value to the local crime boss.
• Data Miner: Corporate Espionage
  A massive mid-game raid on a high-tech corporate facility requiring heavy hacking, culminating in a brutal boss fight against a heavily armed mechanical spider.
• Unhandled Exception: Story Finale
  The climactic final campaign mission requiring players to defend a central hacking terminal against endless waves of the most elite corporate security forces in the game.

• Main Story Quests
  A cinematic campaign that follows the new Vault Hunters as they join a revolution to overthrow the tyrannical Timekeeper on the prison planet of Kairos.
• Side Quests
  A massive number of optional missions featuring the series' signature humor and eccentric characters. These provide XP, powerful loot, and SDU tokens.
• Dynamic World Events
  Repeatable, randomly appearing objectives like Airship Wrecks, Coliseums, and Meteor Events that offer tiered rewards based on performance.
• Rift Champions
  Randomly spawning open-world bosses that provide a significant challenge and a high chance for high-quality, world-drop legendary loot.

The Ascent features both single-player and up to 4-player cooperative multiplayer. Uniquely for a modern game, it fully supports 'couch co-op' (local multiplayer on a shared screen) as well as online co-op. Playing with a squad fundamentally changes the combat dynamic, allowing players to synergize their cyberware—such as one player acting as a heavy tank with energy shields while others use sniper rifles and hacking abilities to control the battlefield. Enemy health and spawns scale dynamically based on the player count.

The Ascent launched on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S (including Day One on Xbox Game Pass) on July 29, 2021, and later expanded to PS4 and PS5. The base game is sold standalone, but Curve Games also released the 'Cyber Edition' bundle, which packages the base game with the 'Cyber Heist' story DLC and several cosmetic/weapon packs, including the 'Cyber Warrior Pack' and the 'CyberSec Pack'. These premium packs offer unique Samurai-inspired armor sets, animated weapon skins, and tactical grenades.

Neon Giant provided excellent post-launch support. The major expansion, 'Cyber Heist' (released August 2022), takes place immediately after the main campaign. It introduces new overworld locations, new main and side missions, and highly requested melee weapons like the Rock Crusher and Guillotine. Additionally, several cosmetic DLCs ('CyberSec Pack', 'Cyber Warrior Pack') were added, alongside free game updates that introduced a highly requested Transmogrification system (allowing players to change their armor's appearance without losing stats) and a New Game+ mode.

• Q: Does The Ascent support local couch co-op?
  A: Yes! It is one of the few modern ARPGs to fully support up to 4-player local shared-screen co-op, as well as online multiplayer.
• Q: Is it a looter shooter like Destiny?
  A: No. While you do collect armor and weapons, it is a traditional ARPG. Weapons have fixed stats (which you can upgrade), meaning you aren't constantly grinding for randomized 'God Rolls'.
• Q: Is there a New Game Plus mode?
  A: Yes. A post-launch update added NG+, allowing you to restart the campaign with all your high-level gear and cyberware against significantly tougher enemies.
• Q: Do I have to play the DLC?
  A: The 'Cyber Heist' DLC is entirely optional but provides an extended endgame story, new locations, and highly requested melee weapons that change the combat dynamic.

• Q: What is new about the world in Borderlands 4?
  A: It is set on a single, massive, and completely seamless open-world planet called Kairos. This is a first for the series, eliminating loading screens between zones.
• Q: How is movement different?
  A: The game has a completely new movement system with a double jump, glide, dash, wall climb, and a grappling hook, allowing for much more verticality and freedom than previous games.
• Q: How deep is the character customization?
  A: It is significantly deeper. Each of the four new Vault Hunters has three massive skill trees with over 80 passive abilities, inspired by the complexity of ARPGs like Path of Exile. A new endgame 'Specialization' system also adds meaningful choices beyond max level.
• Q: What is the new 'Licensed Part' system?
  A: It's a new loot feature where weapons can randomly drop with signature traits from different manufacturers. For example, a Maliwan SMG might have the Jakobs ricochet effect, creating a huge number of new weapon combinations.

Despite being developed by an incredibly small indie team of 11 people at Neon Giant, The Ascent boasts 'AAA' visual fidelity. The game is played from a classic isometric perspective, but the camera seamlessly shifts and pans to showcase the breathtaking scale of the arcology. The environmental detail is staggering, with hundreds of physics objects, volumetric smoke, and neon signs reflecting in rain-slicked puddles. The implementation of Ray Traced reflections and shadows on PC is considered some of the best in the industry, making the grimy, futuristic city look hyper-realistic.

The auditory experience is a standout feature, headlined by a pulsating, heavy synthwave soundtrack composed by Paweł Błaszczak (known for his work on Dying Light and The Witcher). The music dynamically shifts from brooding, atmospheric synthesizer hums during exploration to aggressive, high-tempo club beats during massive firefights. The weapon sound design is incredibly punchy, and the diverse alien languages spoken by the ambient crowds make the arcology feel like a true melting pot.

The UI embraces the cyberpunk aesthetic with sleek, red-and-cyan holographic menus. In combat, the HUD displays a health bar, energy meter (for augmentations), and a tactical charge meter. One of the best UI features is the 'Waypoint' system; pressing a button projects a glowing digital line on the ground guiding the player to their next objective, seamlessly integrating navigation into the world without cluttering the screen with permanent mini-maps.

The game offers standard accessibility settings including text scaling, subtitle backgrounds, and UI color adjustments. It also includes highly customizable aim-assist settings, which is incredibly helpful for players using gamepads in a fast-paced twin-stick shooter. Difficulty can be adjusted at any time, allowing players to scale back enemy damage if a particular boss fight proves too punishing.

• System requirements are strictly verified against the official Steam store page. The Ascent utilizes Unreal Engine 4, featuring highly dense, destructible cyberpunk environments and impressive, hardware-intensive Ray Tracing capabilities for reflections and shadows.
• Laptop Performance Note: The extreme environmental density and massive amount of particle effects from explosions and lasers will heavily tax mobile hardware. Maintaining high frame rates is crucial for a twin-stick shooter, so managing thermals to prevent GPU downclocking is vital.
• Laptop Consideration: G P U T G P: A minimal TGP of 60W is required for 1080p rendering (e.g., GTX 1650/RTX 3050 Mobile). To maintain 60 FPS on High settings with Ray Tracing enabled, an 85W+ TGP (RTX 3060 Mobile or higher) is heavily recommended.
• Laptop Consideration: Cooling Thermals: The densely populated arcology features hundreds of AI NPCs and complex physics calculations for destructible cover. A cooling pad is strongly recommended to prevent thermal throttling during massive 4-player co-op firefights.
• Laptop Consideration: C P U Power Limits: Set Windows power delivery to 'Performance'. Restricting the CPU power can cause severe micro-stutters when transitioning seamlessly between the massive tiers of the arcology.
• Laptop Consideration: M U X Switch Optimus: Highly recommended to reduce render latency during fast-paced twin-stick combat, ensuring aiming and dodging inputs are instantly registered.
• Optimization Detail: Upscaling Tech: Supports NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. Using upscaling is highly recommended to maintain 60+ FPS on mid-range hardware if playing with Ray Traced reflections turned on.
• Optimization Detail: Key Settings Impact: Ray Tracing (Reflections and Shadows), Volumetric Fog, and Post-Processing severely impact GPU overhead. Lowering these can yield substantial framerate improvements.
• Game Name: The Ascent

• SPECULATIVE PC SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS. As the game is a next-generation title built on Unreal Engine 5, these are hypothetical projections and do not represent official information.
• Laptop Performance Note: A future title like this would demand a high-performance gaming laptop. Actual performance would vary significantly based on the final game's optimization and the laptop's specific hardware configuration.
• Laptop Consideration: G P U T G P: Maximum TGP for the laptop's GPU would be essential to handle the advanced graphical features of Unreal Engine 5 and the chaotic, effects-heavy combat.
• Laptop Consideration: Cooling Thermals: Next-gen games will require laptops with cutting-edge cooling solutions to prevent thermal throttling and sustain performance during intense firefights.
• Laptop Consideration: C P U Power Limits: A powerful multi-core mobile CPU will be critical for handling the procedural gun generation system, complex enemy AI, and physics calculations.
• Laptop Consideration: M U X Switch Optimus: A MUX switch or NVIDIA Advanced Optimus would remain a critical feature for reducing latency and ensuring the best possible performance and responsiveness in a co-op shooter.
• Game Name: Borderlands 4

• Upscaling Tech: Supports NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. Using upscaling is highly recommended to maintain 60+ FPS on mid-range hardware if playing with Ray Traced reflections turned on.
• Key Settings Impact: Ray Tracing (Reflections and Shadows), Volumetric Fog, and Post-Processing severely impact GPU overhead. Lowering these can yield substantial framerate improvements.

• G P U T G P: A minimal TGP of 60W is required for 1080p rendering (e.g., GTX 1650/RTX 3050 Mobile). To maintain 60 FPS on High settings with Ray Tracing enabled, an 85W+ TGP (RTX 3060 Mobile or higher) is heavily recommended.
• Cooling Thermals: The densely populated arcology features hundreds of AI NPCs and complex physics calculations for destructible cover. A cooling pad is strongly recommended to prevent thermal throttling during massive 4-player co-op firefights.
• C P U Power Limits: Set Windows power delivery to 'Performance'. Restricting the CPU power can cause severe micro-stutters when transitioning seamlessly between the massive tiers of the arcology.
• M U X Switch Optimus: Highly recommended to reduce render latency during fast-paced twin-stick combat, ensuring aiming and dodging inputs are instantly registered.

• G P U T G P: Maximum TGP for the laptop's GPU would be essential to handle the advanced graphical features of Unreal Engine 5 and the chaotic, effects-heavy combat.
• Cooling Thermals: Next-gen games will require laptops with cutting-edge cooling solutions to prevent thermal throttling and sustain performance during intense firefights.
• C P U Power Limits: A powerful multi-core mobile CPU will be critical for handling the procedural gun generation system, complex enemy AI, and physics calculations.
• M U X Switch Optimus: A MUX switch or NVIDIA Advanced Optimus would remain a critical feature for reducing latency and ensuring the best possible performance and responsiveness in a co-op shooter.