Bret Robbins, CEO of Ascendant Studios, insists that Immortals of Aveum is not the same thing as Call of Duty: WW2, despite having developed the idea while working on that game.
Robbins stated at a hands-off Immortals of Aveum preview event that developing a magical shooter “was the initial concept and motivation,” but “very fast, the game evolved into something different: we are not fantasy Call of Duty, we are our own game.”
We spent a lot of time considering how magic might differ from using conventional weapons while making decisions, he continued. “One reason is because I did not want to create a typical cover-shooter. I did not imagine that you would be hiding behind a bush and shooting your wand over it in the fantasy I was trying to conjure. Instead, I wished for the player to have the feeling of a gunslinger—basically, someone who could enter a situation and instantly be a badass.” Feeling badass while participating in the fierce Everwar for control of Aveum’s ley lines as a tattooed battlemage named Jak sounds about right.
Kevin Boyle, the executive producer, elaborated on this. “From a narrative standpoint, this is a story that could not be told with a modern setting, aside from the game’s mechanics. The world-building and war develop throughout the game’s course are quite unique to Aveum, “Therefore it is safe to assume that there will not be any black ops troops in camouflage here, he said.
The battle system in Immortals may have been influenced in some ways by Robbins’ work on some of the best Call of Duty games, and Robbins acknowledges that “the controls and the spells will feel similar,” but he set out to make something wholly original. He went on to explain how Immortals of Aveum goes beyond the bounds of a straightforward looter-shooter: “We have a lot of world exploration, a lot of puzzles and puzzle mechanisms, and a lot of supplementary stuff.”
