Cyberpunk action RPG, The Ascent was unveiled back in May 2020 and finally launched on Steam and Xbox Game Pass across console, PC, and cloud a couple of days ago. Although the title has been fairly positively received so far, many have also noticed that the Game Pass for PC version is inferior compared to its Steam counterpart. However, a fix is in the works.
Multiple gamers across social media platforms have noted that the Game Pass version on PC lacks Nvidia"s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) capability and the graphical option for it is not even present in the configurations. In the same vein, ray-tracing does not work at all. Meanwhile, both of these features exist in working condition on Steam.
In a series of tweets from The Ascent"s development studio Neon Giant and signed by co-founder Tor Frick, the company has confirmed that a fix is in the works. Frick responded to multiple tweets saying that:
We are working on bringing them up to parity. [...] It is being looked at, with the intent of fixing it/bringing it to parity with steam across the board. [...] We are working with our partners on adressing (sic) this as soon as we can! Build processes are different for the two versions, not just a storefront swap.
It is interesting to note that the two build process are different and that the game is not just packaged in the same way for both storefronts, despite being on the same platform - that is PC.
No time frame for a potential fix has been given yet. It is also important to remember that The Ascent does not support ray-tracing at all on Xbox Series X|S, which means that if you do want to take advantage of the feature, the Steam version of the game running on PC hardware is your only option for now.