Stardock announced that its new epic real-time strategy game, Ashes of the Singularity, is now available for Early Access on Steam today.
In Ashes of the Singularity, the player builds and commands massive armies to take control of entire worlds across the galaxy while defeating opponents with the same goal. Victory is achieved either through annihilating all enemies or by capturing and holding key resources that are spread across the planet.
“What makes Ashes of the Singularity special is just the sheer scale of the game,” said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock. “This isn’t a battle, it’s a war. Players are building and controlling thousands, potentially tens of thousands of units, fighting on several fronts simultaneously. The war rages across an entire planet and is part of a greater war spread across the galaxy.”
To accomplish this new level of scale, the game makes use of a new type of 3D engine called Nitrous. Developed by Oxide Games, Nitrous was designed specifically for modern, multi-core hardware requiring a 64-bit OS and DirectX 11 as a minimum. It is also the first engine to natively support DirectX 12.
“Ashes of the Singularity really shows off what is possible on modern hardware,” said Dan Baker, principal graphics architect at Oxide Games. “The rendering method we use in Nitrous is essentially the same as the techniques CGI in movies have used, except on modern hardware we can do it in real-time.”
Another notable feature of the game is its multi-core AI system, possibly the first in a real-time strategy game.
“Traditionally, real-time strategy games haven’t had very sophisticated AI,” said Wardell. “That’s because RTS’s normally have their AI running on one CPU core. In Ashes, the AI splits up all of its jobs across every core on the player’s machine. Even in Early Access, the AI provides enough of a challenge that we had to turn down the default difficulty to penalize the AI.”
While Ashes of the Singularity has a strong single-player game, the game also has plenty for multiplayer fans including ranked matchmaking, a persistent game universe, personal player metagaming features, and more.
“For the past year, we’ve been building up a multiplayer infrastructure, said Wardell. “To lead that effort, we brought in Adrian Luff, who’s had almost two decades of experience at Blizzard with Battle.net.
While the Early Access version is now available on Steam, Stardock cautions that it isn’t for everyone.
“We are still fairly early in development,” said Wardell. “Only people with very high end hardware who are experienced strategy game players should consider joining Early Access. There’s still lots of work to be done such as global player abilities and an additional playable race, as well as perfecting what is, after all, a very cutting edge engine. There will be bumps. We very much are looking for player input.”
Ashes of the Singularity can be purchased via Steam, http://store.steampowered.com/app/228880/. For more information, please visit www.ashesgame.com .
Early Access Launch Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6p5gVcRg0E