Preview: Immortals of Aveum Looks To Scrach That Magic Shooter Itch, Releases On July 20th

mmorpg.com:

I remember growing up loving old spell-slinging shooters like Hexen and Heretic . I would play these for hours, even though they weren’t the deepest games from a story standpoint. There was something inherently satisfying about taking the role of a mage and fighting against the denizens of evil with spells and magical items.

Interestingly enough, the vibes I’m getting from Electronic Arts and Ascendant Studios’ upcoming Immortals of Aveum are those same vibes. A first-person magic-slinging shooter, Immortals of Aveum takes players on a journey in the role of Jak, a Battlemage.

In a preview event last week, Ascendant Studios lifted the cloche on the upcoming first-person shooter, giving us a deeper look at the world, its lore, and some gameplay. Ascendant Studios is made up of industry veterans that have decades of experience working on some of the biggest titles in games, including its Game Director and CEO Bret Robbins who has worked on titles from Call of Duty, Dead Space and more (going all the way back to Gex even). 

The premise began, according to Robbins, as a simple question. While working on Call of Duty , Robbins was reviewing some work on the game with what he called a “very typical level.” The scene had soldiers fighting in an urban area, a helicopter in the distance, which got Robbins thinking: ‘What if instead of a helicopter, it was a dragon?’

The idea for Immortals of Aveum jumped off from there, with the studio creating a full single-player, first-person magic shooter set in the world of Aveum. Aveum is a world dominated by magic, the landscape of Aveum crisscrossed with floating rivers of magic called Leylines. The world of Aveum has been engulfed in a thousand years war called the Everwar over