Getting the battlefield magic of Immortals of Aveum right took ‘almost two years’
Whenever a new franchise hits the triple-A gaming calendar, I always have a chicken-or-the-egg question regarding its origins: Did this begin as a story, or did someone have a gameplay concept to which they later fit a story?
Despite the stylish, heavy action gameplay shown so far — and again in a new trailer on Thursday — Immortals of Aveumbegan as a story, Ascendant Studios founder Bret Robbins told Polygon this week. Last year, Robbins pinpointed the game’s origins to a stray thought he had while working on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfarea decade ago: What if we just swapped all of these guns and helicopters for wands and dragons?
But, he said this week, that gameplay vision wasn’t the end; it was a means to make a truly creative statement, more sophisticated than throwing bolts of magical energy with your right hand and shielding an attack with the left.
“I’m used to having a split brain, when it comes to ‘OK, I’m developing some of the gameplay mechanics and I’m also developing the world, and they just inform each other,’” Robbins said. Five years after it was chartered, the studio has more than 100 developers and is almost ready to deliver its first work, Immortals of Aveum, published under Electronic Arts’ EA Originals label.
Related
“But I knew that what was most important with this franchise, and this game, was creating a compelling world that we can revisit over and over again,” Robbins said. “People want to spend a lot of time with it, and so I think that was the real driver.”
Fifteen years ago, Robbins was creative director on Dead Space, an all-new intellectual property with a huge, largely implied canon that would eventually serve two sequels and a couple of spinoffs. Despite that game’s critical success,
Read more on polygon.com
