Ashes of Orion preview: six hours in a dead empire
A salvage ship, a crew that argues and the best opening to a role-playing game this year.
Black Lantern Games has worked on Ashes of Orion for six years. Last week, the studio let us play the first six hours on a PC in its office in Rotterdam. We left with sore eyes, four pages of notes and a strong wish to keep playing.
This is a preview, not a review. The game was unfinished, and some of what we saw will change before the release in November.
The idea
You are the captain of a salvage ship at the edge of a dead empire. Two hundred years ago, the Orion Compact ruled 40 star systems. Then its capital burned, and nobody knows why. You make your living in the wreckage.
The game has three layers. You fly the ship between planets and stations. You walk on those planets and stations with a crew of up to three. And you make choices in conversations that change who will work with you, who will shoot at you and which doors will open.
None of this is new. What is new is how well the layers connect. In our session we found a distress signal in space, flew to it, boarded a broken freighter on foot, and talked the last survivor out of blowing up the reactor. The survivor then joined the crew and, two hours later, recognised a symbol on a wall that opened a side story. The game never showed a loading screen between the ship and the freighter.
The crew
We met five of the nine crew members. Each has a job on the ship and a skill on the ground.
- Tavi Okonkwo, engineer: repairs the ship in flight and opens locked doors on foot
- Sister Anneke, medic: a former monk of a church that worshipped the old empire
- Roux, pilot: fast, rude and the source of most of the jokes
- Unit Seven, a mining robot that is learning to lie
- Dray Halloran, soldier: knows more about the fire at the capital than he says
The writing is sharp. Crew members talk to each other while you walk, and they disagree. When we chose to sell medicine to a station instead of giving it away, Anneke did not speak to us for an hour of play. Later she gave a short, cold explanation, and the choice appeared in a list in the ship's log with her name beside it.
Fighting
Ground fights happen in real time, and you can pause at any moment to give orders. Each crew member has four skills, and skills combine. Tavi can overload a door panel to stun enemies, and Dray's heavy rifle does double damage to stunned targets. We found 11 such pairs in six hours.
Fights in space are less good right now. The Meridian turns slowly, and the three fights we had were decided by who had more shield power, not by how we flew. The studio told us this is the part of the game that is changing most before launch.
The ship fights are about 70 percent of where we want them. The ground game is done. We are spending the last months on the space above it.
Pieter van Dam, lead designer at Black Lantern Games
Planets
There are 14 planets you can land on. The studio has been clear that these are hand-built areas, not endless generated worlds. Each has one large map of roughly four square kilometres.
We saw two. Kessra is a desert moon with a buried city, and sandstorms that hide you from patrols. Wend is a flooded forest world where the water level changes with three moons, and paths open and close every 20 minutes.
Both were dense. In 90 minutes on Kessra we found three side stories, a hidden workshop and a merchant who sells only to people who arrive on foot.
How it ran
The preview build ran at 4K and 60 frames per second on a very powerful PC, with two crashes in six hours. We did not see the console version. The studio says it aims for 60 frames per second on console in a performance mode, and we will test that claim in our review.
| What we saw | State |
|---|---|
| Story and writing | Finished, and very good |
| Ground combat | Finished |
| Ship combat | Needs work |
| Performance on PC | Good, two crashes |
| Console version | Not shown |
What we still want to know
Six hours is a small part of a game that the studio says is 50 hours long. We do not know if the story holds up. We do not know if the late planets are as dense as the first two. And the ship combat needs to get better.
But the first six hours were the best opening to a role-playing game that we have played this year. We thought about the crew on the train home. That does not happen often.
