Immortals of Aveum magic shooter gets first trailer at The Game Awards

The Game Awards is full of world premieres but it’s rare that one of them looks quite so different as Aveum ImmortalsIt does it right away. The game’s first trailer appeared during the show on Thursday night and revealed a sprawling fantasy battlefield with enough explosions, effects, and combat to make a Call of Duty game blush. None of these trailers can answer the question about what this game is.

This will help you get a better understanding Aveum Immortals, Polygon spoke with the game’s director, Bret Robbins, ahead of The Game Awards to talk about the idea behind the game, how he started Ascendant Studios just to develop this game, how the game will play, its world, and why it’s not quite like any other shooter out there.

Ascendant Studios’ first-ever game, released in association with Electronic Arts. Aveum ImmortalsThe single-player first-person magic-shooter is for one-player only. This game combines Call of Duty’s fast-paced combat and spell casting with a vast, original fantasy universe. Robbins explains that Robbins was the original inventor of Inmortals is one he’s had for years, especially during his time as the creative director of three Call of Duty games. But it’s the uniqueness of the idea that’s helped it stick with him.

“I remember in particular, one time I was reviewing a level that we were working on, and it was a very standard Call of Duty level,” Robbins told Polygon. “And I remember thinking it’d be cool if instead of a helicopter that was a dragon, and if instead of RPG rounds blowing up walls, it was fireballs. An assault rifle was not what I wanted, so instead I had a battle magick who cast these spells. It’s a fantasy version. Where’s that game?”

This “where’s that game” idea stuck with Robbins for the next several years. Robbins continued to work on the idea even though he had left Sledgehammer Games (Call of Duty) studio. Aveum ImmortalsHe shook his head. He eventually decided, “I want to play that game. I want to make that game.”

Image by Ascendant Studios/EA Games

So, in 2018, Robbins founded Ascendant Games, where he’s been working on Aveum ImmortalsIts development team has been in place since then. Robbins and Ascendant opted to publish with EA because Robbins worked previously with them as the creative leader. Dead Space — the last original IP he worked on before Aveum Immortals — and would give the studio complete creative control over its new game.

Robbins believes that Robbins is responsible for a lot of Aveum Immortals’s overall design flowed straight out of that original battle mage premise. Robbins’ team worked hard to create a magical experience that felt like battle mage to players. Robbins uses the phrase “Battle Mage” to describe Robbins as an enchanter who uses magic projectiles to solve large-scale problems. In games, mage classes are slower and have limited mobility. Robbins, however, insists that Ascendant’s creation is more of an RPG shooter than fantasy game.

“I think there’s been some difficulty in people trying to make magic into something that feels like a shooter,” Robbins said. “What we’re making is a first-person magic shooter. […]We think that we have figured out how to make this feel good, familiar and enjoyable for shooters. But also bring in some new elements. You’re not seeing the standard weapons that are used in a shooter, you’re seeing something new, and that to me is really exciting.”

Of course, to develop a new fantasy IP, you’ve also got to create an original fantasy world, and Robbins and his team of writers has been hard at work on that front too. And while he couldn’t give away too many specifics about the world, Robbins did give us a few hints about it, and most importantly described Aveum Immortals’s primary weapon: The Sigil.

We see the camera explore the Sigil at the beginning. Aveum Immortals’s premiere trailer. According to Robbins, it’s how battle mages focus their magic and how players will fire their spells. “Instead of having an assault rifle or a magic wand or something, you have the sigil and it can change the shape it has and you can find different types of Sigils,” he explained. “We really wanted to showcase that as something unique to the game.”

Image by Ascendant Studios/Electronic Arts

As for the second part of the teaser, after the doors open and the chaos erupts, Robbins says that’s designed to serve a couple of purposes. For one thing, it gives viewers a brief glimpse of Aveum — the name of the game’s world — and the bright fantasy landscape and crackling magic and warfare they can expect. But it also helps differentiate the game from the shooters that he’s already compared it to. Instead of the corridors found in Call of Duty, Dead Space and other shooters like it, Aveum Immortals’s scale is, as Robbins puts it, “epic.”

It remains to be seen if that means players will be slinging spells around a Lord of the Rings-sized battle or not, but the grandeur and chaos of the teaser’s final battle is already pretty promising.

Aveum Immortals doesn’t have a firm release date just yet, but is set for sometime in 2023 and will be released on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.