As if a massive open-world campaign full of side activities like cooking, crafting, and dungeon delving weren't enough content, Asgard's Wrath 2 will also host an endlessly replayable rogue-lite dungeon-crawling mode called Uncharted Rifts. Players can access the Rifts fairly early on in their campaign, and it's looking to be an entire game's worth of content on its own. The Uncharted Rifts features several progression systems, is tied to the player's core game progression, and has procedurally generated challenges that bring something new to the table with each run.
In an exclusive interview with Game ZXC, Asgard's Wrath 2 Senior Game Producer Mari Kyle went into detail about all things Uncharted Rifts, including the run-based and meta progression systems, the various types of rooms and challenges found within, and the myriad ways that players can build toward their preferred playstyles. Overall, the depth of features available in the Uncharted Rifts rivals those of some dedicated virtual reality rogue-lite RPGs.
Asgard's Wrath 2's Rogue-Lite Mode is Tailored to Your Character
The Uncharted Rifts are a true dungeon-crawling experience brought to VR. Each Rift is comprised of procedurally generated rooms filled with traps and agility-based challenges, as well as combat-oriented rooms that will test players' skills as one of the four playable character loadouts. At the end of the run, players will also be faced with tough encounters in the form of massive boss fights against key opponents from the core game, or they may have to fend off a horde of enemies in one final onslaught.
We have agility rooms where your whole objective is to go through and time these jumps and grapple to locations really quickly in order to get through them.
We have trap rooms that are full of spinning saws and fire arrows that are shooting at you that do crazy damage, and things like swinging saws. So getting through all those is one of the room layouts. There are also a bunch of combat rooms where you'll find all kinds of setups like a billion bees or a bunch of desert raider-type warriors. Then, we also have these timed challenge rooms as well, so you have to get through either combat or agility within a certain time limit.
Mari Kyle also mentioned that the Rifts have been thoughtfully designed so that the challenges are uniquely tailored to the toolset that the player is equipped with. This allows for a more interesting set of obstacles for each character, while also ensuring that players won't be forced to stick with the meta builds that outperform other characters. Instead, players can opt for the playstyle they enjoy most and be faced with appropriately balanced encounters.
Asgard's Wrath 2's Rogue-Lite Mode Offers Tons of Ways to Get Stronger
A sense of progression is critical for motivating players to push as far as they can, and Asgard's Wrath 2's rogue-lite mode achieves this with several rewarding progression systems that help players grow in power both during each run and overall with some meta-progression. Relics are the immediate power boost players can earn during their run, and players can also earn skill points as they delve deeper which can be spent to further tailor their build.
So just like in normal roguelites, there's a ton of customization you can do while you're within your run, and then there's a little bit of stuff that you could do outside of it as well. When you're in your run, you'll pick up a ton of these things called Relics, which are things that will add a passive or non-passive boost to your weapons, whether they're elemental boosts so that your sword is on fire every time you're hitting something, or it's passive and there's a percentage chance that you'll get more rewards after you kill this creature.
Additionally, players can buy Revelations with currency found in the Rifts. These Revelations are persistent between runs and can be upgraded to higher tiers for enhanced benefits. A few examples Kyle gave were a Revelation that gives players an additional layer of damage protection as well as a Revelation that heals players at the start of each room if they're low on health. Players will also be able to find crafting materials in the Rifts that can be sent back to the core game, so if they're invested in the open world they'll still have a good reason to visit the Rifts. Although Asgard's Wrath 2's campaign is sizeable enough, there's no doubt that players will likely end up spending just as much time climbing their way up the Uncharted Rift leaderboards.
Asgard's Wrath 2 is set to release in Winter 2023 on Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3.