Immortals of Aveum blends hallmarks of the FPS genre with a magical fantasy world to create a wholly unique experience. The title marks the first release from Ascendant Studios, which is made up of industry veterans from franchises like Call of Duty, and is set to be published by EA Originals. Slated to release this summer, Immortals of Aveum aims to offer a cinematic story and layered magic mechanics that players will hone over the course of the game.
In Immortals of Aveum, players will assume the role of protagonist Jak, a rare Triarch Magnus who can wield all three types of magic known to Aveum, blue, red, and green. Because of this power, Jak is recruited by the Immortals, a team of skilled fighters that work to protect the world from the Rasharnians. Led by the evil Sandrakk, the kingdom of Rasharn has battled for decades in the Everwar against the Immortal-led domain of Lucium for control of Aveum's ley lines, sources of strong magical power that sprawl across the world.
Screen Rant sat down with Bret Robbins, founder and CEO of Ascendant Studios and director of Immortals of Aveum, to discuss the game's unique magical FPS mechanics, creating the world of Aveum, and the challenges of starting a new IP from the ground up.
Screen Rant: Can you talk about what inspired the lore of this game in the first place? The inclusion of things like ley lines is very interesting.
Bret Robbins: The inspiration sort of came from 100 different places, there wasn't one movie or book that I was really into and wanting to draw from. I've been a big fantasy fan for a long time, science fiction, comic books, so it came from a lot of different places. I had an opportunity when I started the project where I was able just to sit and write by myself for about four months. There's a little cafe down the street here in San Rafael where I would go with my laptop and just sit and think about the world and about the game design, the story and the characters, and I think I just put a lot of things in a blender and what got spit out was Aveum it.
Ley lines - I couldn't tell you where that idea came from, a lot of things just kind of sprung out. There was a bit of a creative explosion, because I had been working for nine years on Call of Duty, and on that type of franchise, even though I love those games and I really enjoyed working on him, you're in a fairly small design box. You're working generally on a very modern, realistic type of shooter. So the fact that I was able to have magic as a core pillar really allowed me to do anything, so there's a lot of ideas that got put on the page.
How was Jak himself developed? What made him right to carry the game as the protagonist?
Bret Robbins: Well, I wanted someone who had sort of a humble origin. He had a sheltered upbringing, he grew up in a slum city, he was a street kid, he's an orphan, so it's very humble origins. And by doing that, he doesn't know a lot about the world, and the player doesn't know a lot about the world. So as he's going through his journey of getting out into the wider world and becoming a soldier in the Everwar, the player is able to experience that as well, so that was really important.
I also really liked the idea of him being a Triarch, this Magnus that can control all three colors of magic, because spell comboing and the ability to use all these different spells in different ways was going to be a key pillar of the combat system. So that was important for him to have that ability. But mostly, I just wanted someone who had a really interesting arc, he goes on quite a journey and he has a lot of struggles, and he makes even bad decisions. I wanted him to be a complex character.
In developing the three systems of magic, how did you settle on the three that are within the game, and how did you work to make them all feel distinct?
Bret Robbins: There was a lot of experimentation, a lot of prototyping early in the project. We definitely went down some roads where things got a little too crazy and weird and we had to pull back a bit. It's easy to sort of over design something and make it too complicated. At the end of the day, we wanted it to be an accessible shooter and to be familiar to players, and then bring a lot of new things to the table. But we didn't want a huge barrier as far as picking up the controller or starting to play the game. So we made some rules; when you're working with a blank page, it's very liberating and freeing, but it can also be daunting, because you can do anything. And if you don't apply some rules to the world and to the magic, it could all become a lot of nonsense very quickly. So I had to establish rules, we spent a lot of time on the world building, and that led to what the magic would become and how it would be different.
Can you give an example of one of the crazier things that had to be scrapped because it just couldn't work in the game?
Bret Robbins: Well, I wanted to have spell comboing as a core pillar of the game, and we really did achieve that with your left hand and right hand casting and the way that certain spells synergize with each other. But very early on, we took that a little more literally, where you were really mixing and matching magic together in strange ways. It was really interesting and fun, and I actually still want to bring some of those concepts to the franchise at some point. But if you're like, in the middle of combat and basically trying to create a recipe in your head while you're fighting, it can be a little complicated and a little confusing, so we pulled back a bit on that.
Can you talk about the process of deg the actual world and incorporating environmental storytelling into that?
Bret Robbins: Yeah, the world creation was a lot of fun, it was something that we spent a lot of time on. We have some great concept artists who have really brought the world to life, we have amazing artists on the team. I wanted to have the world always be surprising. It was an opportunity to do some stranger and wilder levels, because it's a world of magic. So I think the main intention was to keep the player interested, keep them surprised, keep them entertained. Every area you go to is a little bit different, we all wanted a lot of variety in the game. But it all still had to feel like a real place, we had to ground it, and we have really great artists that have managed to do that.
What was the balancing act like of keeping that shooter feel but also differentiating itself within the genre? That must have been a tricky line to walk for you guys.
Bret Robbins: It was. As I mentioned, we did some experimentation that really didn't work out, or we went too far in one direction or another. I think about a year and a half or so into the project, I really decided to focus on making it an accessible shooter first and then we layer on all the interesting things we wanted to do. But at the end of the day, it had to feel great; the combat needed to feel great and accessible and intuitive, so we spent a lot of time on that. Once that felt solid, we were able to put in some of our stranger ideas, our more interesting abilities and everything. Some of the spells do feel similar to guns, but we always wanted to put a little twist on them, something that made them their own and made it feel magical. I won't say it was easy to do. I think at the end of the day, we've hit on something that's great and that is going to feel both familiar but also be new to people.
I know there are the colors of magic, but then there's also additional special spells and abilities. Do you have any favorites, either in just color type or in some of those more special mechanics?
Bret Robbins: Yeah, I think the way that you're able to combo things together feels really good. I think something that just feels natural is the Lash spell, which can grab enemies from far away and pull them in, and when you combo that with your red magic blasts that are close-range, high- damage, almost like a shotgun, that just never gets old. Doing that - you can do it 1,000 times, it still feels good. And we have some other combos like that, that kind of one-two punch that really works well together. Like the Vortex spell that can pull a bunch of enemies into one area with a gravitational pull, and then you hit them with a Shatter spell that blows them all up with these huge magical spikes. You start to learn those rhythms, and you learn the spells that work really well against certain enemies, that sort of rock, paper, scissors design that I really like. There's a lot of that, as well, once you get more advanced in the combat.
Can you talk a little bit more about the differentiation of enemies that players will be facing in the game?
Bret Robbins: Sure, there's a big variety of enemies. A lot of them are human opponents that are part of the Rasharnian Army, which is the enemy army in the game. But there's also a lot of magical creatures, there's automatons, what we call constructs, which are magically-animated golems, there are elemental creatures that are beings of pure magic. When you're doing enemy design, you always start with, "What's the skill test? What's the thing that's going to make this a little bit different that's going to challenge the player in an interesting way?" I usually lead with the mechanics of combat and what's going to make this interesting or challenging for the player, and then you build some fiction and some design around that core idea.
And we have a long game, even if you're just kind of pushing through the main story it's well over 20 hours, so we had to keep things interesting and keep introducing cool enemies all along the way. I think some of the more awesome enemies are the other Magni that you fight, the blue, red and green Magni that you're really getting into wizard battles and things like that that just feel really interesting and feel really epic.
Without revealing too much, what are you most excited to see players react to once they get their hands on the game?
Bret Robbins: Well, it's hard to say what I'm most excited about, because there's a few things. The combat system is, I think, very compelling; it feels natural, but it's deep. When you add the gear and talent system on top of that, now you're talking about different builds that you can create, you can really customize your playstyle. I think there's a lot of experimentation there that people are going to enjoy. You're going to find certain spells you really like that you want to double down on. With all of that there's a lot of variety there that I'm excited about.
But I also spent a lot of time personally working on the story and the cinematics and the character development. I worked really closely with my lead writer Michael Kirkbride who is an amazing writer, and so I'm really excited about people experiencing the story. I think we're telling a really great story, and I want everyone to really enjoy that part of the game.
Can you talk a little bit more about that collaboration with the lead writer, how that whole development process works?
Bret Robbins: Well, it started with a rough story outline that I had created very early on. When I started the game and the company, I had a period of about four months where I was able just to sit and write and think about the game design and the world and the story and the characters. So we started with a story treatment, when Michael came on he and I worked every day on improving that, making it more interesting and making it better, really getting the character voices figured out you know. We were in the middle of COVID, so everything was remote, and we would just Slack each other every day. We'd just riff off of scenes and characters, we'd write dialogue on the fly, almost speaking in the character's voices and going back and forth, we'd be cracking each other up the whole time coming up with fun ideas; it was just a great, great process.
Maybe the fact that it was over Slack and we were remote was actually even a little better than if we were just sitting in a room together talking it through, because you're actually writing as you're doing it and writing live. And that process I thought really created some great results and some amazing scenes.
I know this game has been in development for several years, I'm curious about the biggest changes that you've seen in the narrative, or in the mechanics if there's more you have to say about those as well.
Bret Robbins: Certainly our early experiments with how the magic system would work changed a lot. I started with a lot of - let's call them interesting ideas. Some of them were kind of bizarre, and some of them were probably not that great. So we tried a lot of things, and we failed fast, and then tried other things that seemed to work better. Certainly some of the level designs went through a lot of iterations. We had early experiments on those too, and some of them didn't work, and we would scrap levels and try different takes on them.
I think the two most important things on a new project when making a new IP - one is clarity of vision, the fact that you need to have a strong vision out of the gate and do your best to stick to it. You have to know the things you need to throw away and the things you need to keep, but consistency of vision is really important. If you read the early design documents I wrote during that four month period before I had hired anyone, it's very much the game we ended up making, and I think that was to our benefit to have that strong vision from the start. But the other thing is to be able to fail fast and iterate, and have the time and the ability to try things and throw them out and try something else. And the first couple of years of the project was certainly that type of work that we were doing.
Is there anything else you want players to know about this game?
Bret Robbins: Well, it's a big game. If you want to experience a great story, you can play straight through and just have an awesome time. But if you're a player like me that's a completionist, there's a lot to explore and see in the world, both in of finding new areas, of getting a new ability, returning to a previous area, unlocking something new. But also in of the story, you can talk to characters throughout the game, find out more about them, more about the world, you can find lore that tells you more about the world. I wanted something that felt big and felt like there was a lot of the world to experience. And even though it's a big game, even if you play straight through, it's even better if you want to find every corner of the game.
Source: Immortals of Aveum/YouTube
Immortals of Aveum will release July 20 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam, the EA App, and Epic Games Store.
