Immortals of Aveum is Ascendant Studios’ debut game under the EA Originals banner, and it promises to mix magic, monsters, and sci-fi in one compelling and story-driven package. In the game, players will fill the role of the main character Jak as he works to stop the Everwar alongside an elite cast of battlemages. Judging by its pre-release material, Immortals of Aveum seems like an ambitious and gorgeous title, and there's still plenty to be shown.
Game Rant sat down with game director and CEO Bret Robbins to find out more about Immortals of Aveum, learn about his brand-new studio Ascendant Studios, how working with EA has influenced the game, and what the future holds for Ascendant. With a career spanning Gex, The Lord of the Rings, Call of Duty, and Dead Space, it was fascinating to discover how those influences made it into the final product and how Immortals of Aveum plans to build on top of that. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: I'll start off by asking where the idea of Immortals of Aveum came from. What was the spark?
The spark really came from my time working on Call of Duty, actually. I had just I had been thinking a lot about a fantasy shooter or magic shooter, and being in that sort of shooter world for nine years, looking around and just going like, “Well, why isn't anyone making something like this in a fantasy genre?” and not hearing about any game like that coming out. No game like that had been made for something like 15 or 20 years. I just got really excited about that idea.
What we ended up making with Immortals is not a fantasy Call of Duty. It's something quite a bit different, but that sort of spark of a fast-paced, cinematic shooter set in a fantasy world where you're using magic instead of guns just really grabbed me during that time. I had a good friend who was also an investor, and he got really excited about it too. So five years ago, in 2018, we founded the company, and it was off to the races.
Q: Immortals of Aveum is super unique because I feel like it mixes spaceships and dragons, and you don't see that too often. It's always one or the other. So what would you say are the game's biggest influences in world-building and story?
I think what happened was that I had a period after I left Sledgehammer where I was able to really sit, write, and think about the world, the game, the pillars, the combat system, and the storyline. I wrote for about four months, just thinking about all those things. I can't point to direct influences other than that I took a lot of different things and kind of put them in a blender, and what came out was Immortals.
It's hard to avoid something like Star Wars. It's in all of our DNA at this point, especially when I was growing up. There's some of that, there's maybe some of Doom, some of BioShock, some of Call of Duty, some of God of War. There was just a lot, and there were a lot of different pieces. This was also my first real opportunity to run my own studio and make my own game, so I think I wanted to put in a little bit of everything–you don't get that opportunity very often. It's quite a mix of different things, of different pieces, which ultimately makes it its own unique thing.
Q: Immortals is a first-person fantasy shooter, and I feel like a lot of these magic-based shooter games typically go for a third-person viewpoint. The last time we really saw a focused first-person magic shooter, at least in the mainstream, was Hexen and, more recently, Amid Evil. So do you think Immortals of Aveum is kind of building on top of the legacy of those old-school magic FPS games that used to be really popular?
Yeah, it’s funny. When I started to think about this game and started to pitch it to my friends, peers, or investors, Hexen would come up a lot because that's really the last time something like this at a big scale had been done. I personally don't entirely remember those games all that well, so I can't say they were a huge influence. I did try to bring in all the modern sensibilities of a premiere, awesome, and triple-A game into a fantasy magic shooter, so the combat system is very intuitive. I think it'll be familiar to shooter players, but we got a lot of new things on top of it to make it unique.
The structure of the game and the world is somewhat similar to something like God of War, where there are hub levels and then very linear cinematic bespoke levels. There are Metroidvania areas, where I can get a new ability and go back to a previous area and unlock something new. So things that we've seen over the years, that I personally really like in games. Big moments like out of something like Call of Duty, which I worked on for a long time, that's in there as well. Just sort of bringing in modern sensibilities of games and trying to do it in a great way. A lot of those elements are in there.
Q: Speaking about Call of Duty, one of the big things about it is that it always feels good to shoot. How does Immortals of Aveum translate that tactile shooting into a magic system?
It was really important for us to get the shooting to feel great because, you're right, a lot of times magic can feel soft; it can feel unresponsive. It doesn't have the relatability that an assault rifle or shotgun has. You're inventing something new. Certainly, when we started the early days of prototyping, we went down some roads that were a little more esoteric and a little more complicated. And you know, it didn't just feel that great off the controller, and I made a pretty deliberate decision in almost a year just to say, 'look, we have got to focus on making this a great feeling shooter first.' Once we do that, all these other crazy ideas we have, we can layer on top of it, but that core needs to be really, really strong. And that meant making the spells feel great.
There are some gun equivalent spells in there, but there's also stuff that is different and new. We had to find our own rhythm as to how they were going to feel really impactful, and there are so many elements to that: the VFX, the sound, the feedback on the controller, and the way the enemies react to it and everything. We had to get all that right. We spent a good chunk of time as a team doing that, and when we came out the other side of that, I felt, 'wow, we've really got we've got something really strong here.' The foundation is solid. We could build a whole game around this. And that's what we ended up doing. I was really happy when we started doing some more intensive focus testing on the game that just the feel of the spells was coming back really positively. They feel great, and that was really important to us.
Q: I’m curious about the general structure of Immortals of Aveum. Is it a tighter narrative-focused game or more of a looter shooter with a focus on the endgame?
This is much more on the tighter, choreographed narratives side of things, where you're going through and you're living a story level by level. It's not a looter shooter, it's not an open-world game, it's a much more curated experience than that, and that's the kind of game that I've made largely in my career. I've made a lot of AAA single-player games, very narrative-focused, and it's what I definitely want to do with this game. So yeah, I really enjoy games where there is a great story and a great cinematic world that I'm experiencing that the designers and the artists have meticulously made to really immerse myself in. That's what we did on this one.
Q: On the more technical side of things, Immortals of Aveum is kind of like the first big Unreal Engine 5 game coming out this year. Is there any pressure that you feel you have to deliver on the spectacle of Unreal Engine 5?
I'm sure Epic feels a little pressure, but I don't know if I feel the pressure so much as I'm really proud of what we were able to do on the engine. The engine was really powerful. We are an early adopter of it, and that certainly came with some challenges. For me, it was an investment in the franchise. Not only is it making this game great, but it's also going to make all the future games great that the company does. It's certainly a very powerful engine that we want to keep developing with. It's a double-edged sword of being the first, it can be very challenging, but it can also be very rewarding if the results are great.
Q: Ascendant is working under the EA originals banner. What has that been like?
Yeah, our partnership with EA is a marketing and publishing partnership, so we funded the game, we own the IP, and we made the game. EA is helping us market the game, so their involvement has been entirely on the marketing side and publishing services, and they've been fantastic. They have helped us work on the campaign, and we've already delivered a couple of great trailers working with them. I'm really happy with how they've been a partner for us. They have done QA localization, focus testing, and all that kind of stuff. They really brought a lot of that to the table. EA has a huge reach, and the EA Originals label is really strong. They've had a lot of great success, so I'm really happy that we partnered with them.
Q: Recently, you guys launched an origin video. A big part of that video was about the studio working from home. In what ways did you overcome the challenges of shipping a triple-A game at this time and in a work-from-home setting? Is that something you want to commit to in the future, being a remote first or hybrid workspace?
Yeah, COVID changed everything for us. We had an office down the street here in San Rafael. We had about, at the time, 35 or 40 people. It was great. We all really enjoyed working together; it felt like a family. And then, we had to shut everything down at the end of March 2020. We had to really figure out how we were going to do this, how we're going to keep that creative spark alive. Slack was huge for that; everyone's had to kind of go through it the last few years. We did find there were some silver linings.
It was a very stressful time, but the way we ended up having to do, say, motion capture changed quite a bit. We suddenly couldn't have a bunch of people on stage running around together because of the pandemic. We had to innovate there and figure out ways that we could capture actors individually and then sort of marry their motions altogether. That ended up being actually very efficient, and the ways we ended up sort of creating our own cinematics, for example, was way more cost-effective and efficient than anything I had done previously.
The other thing that changed quite a bit was our hiring. We were a local Bay Area Studio, and I was largely hiring local talent. That was just kind of the way things were done. Once everyone was at home and it didn't matter so much where you were, we cast our net really wide across the country in Canada and into Europe, and our hiring accelerated–like really dramatically. We found really, really great people all over the country, all over the world, and that was huge for us. It made everything move faster.
As far as the future goes, we do have an office. I love our office. We have it for people that are local, and we sort of have a hybrid model; if you want to come in, you can come in. We'll see what, how, and where the future goes and what people prefer. We're all social creatures. I think a lot of us like to be around each other, and certainly, when you're making a game, there are benefits to being in the same room, being able to talk through things, play together live, and things like that. That is a little more difficult remotely. So, there are benefits to it, but also, more than half of my team is remote. I don't plan on changing that. I love the fact that people have that flexibility, so yeah, we'll see where the future goes.
Q: Speaking about the future, where do you feel like Ascendant goes after Immortals? Is the team still hungry for more stories in the universe, or are new ideas popping off already?
The new ideas are popping off quite a bit. Yeah, I think we're all really excited about the game and what we've created. I think we have something really special on our hands, and there is so much more to do in this world. I've never finished a game and not felt immediately like, “Okay, let's do that again, only better.” With Dead Space, I felt that way; usually with Call of Duty, I would feel that way. So you are always innovating. You're always thinking about how you can improve the process, improve the systems, and improve things that you're doing in the game. So yeah, I think there's a lot more to Aveum. There's a lot more that we want to do, and that I certainly want to do in that world. We’ll see.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
I would just say I'm really excited about the game coming out. I'm excited about people playing it, and I think people are gonna really like it. It's something different. We're taking a risk and creating a new IP, and I know that risk is going to pay off. I think it's an incredibly entertaining game, and I just want everyone to play it. So I'm looking forward to it coming up.
Immortals of Aveum launches July 20, 2023, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.