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Why Immortals of Aveum Failed | Sacred Symbols+, Episode 341

Please welcome Atari's Senior Producer Jason Polansky back to Sacred Symbols+. Today, Jason returns to chat with me (Colin) about a topic near-and-dear to my heart: The magic FPS Immortals of Aveum. Just a couple of weeks ago, Jason messaged me that he too played the game, and was wondering if I wanted to chat about it. I said yes, of course, because I knew that -- with a learned and experienced industry professional like Jason -- we could skip all the nonsense and get into the nitty-gritty of what went wrong with this title. This isn't a review nor spoilercast; it's an analysis of where products like Immortals of Aveum even fit into our modern ecosystem, if they do at all. What did EA learn from its failure? How about Ascendant? And, perhaps most importantly, what can the rest of the industry glean from this commercial dud? You'd expect the first non-Epic Unreal Engine 5 game to draw some interest, but, well... 2023 is a different sort of year. And we both agree that we ain't seen nothing yet.

Comments

Logan Byford

I didn't realize Immortals of Aveum was the first non-Epic Unreal Engine 5 game. I thought that would be Layers of Fear or Remnant 2.

Benito

My whole friends circle is big into games. They read the news, play a buncha new releases. None of them knew what this game was. Some of them even watched the reveal trailer with me and they still didn't remember it. Something about the title and artstyle of this game made it blend in to even the most hardcore gamers, let alone the average consumer.

JusticeSoulTuna

Great discussion gents. You can definitely see how this game fell out of the currect gaming zeitgeist, and it was also flanked by several heavy hitters (Armroed Core VI, Baldur's Gate, Lies of P and now Spider-Man 2) so it stood no chance, sadly. And only being an 'okay' game isn't enough of a justification for people to try it, which is a shame.

The Lazy Indian Gamer

Fascinating discussion. I do think we are going to see a lot more games like Immortals of Aveum. I work as an indie game developer and the tools available for game devs are getting exponentially more accessible. With the advent of generative AI tools for gamedev, this is only going to skyrocket and you are going to see a lot more small-team indie or even solo developers, students even, put out insanely good looking games. Some of these are definitely going to look good but not play well or have depth.

Guybrush Threepwood

was not too interested in Immortals but this is one of the most interesting PLUS episodes I've heard. I need to go back and search for the other appearance by Jason. i especially found his comment about "7/10 games" interesting where he was asking if its really that significantly different for a 7/10 game to have a $10M budget vs a $50M budget if the end result is 7/10 both times.