Immortals of Aveum is coming out next month, and from the gameplay footage shown, it looks pretty spectacular. The latest in the EA originals catalogue is using the latest Unreal Engine, making it look like a true next-generation game, with amazing particle effects, organic textures and facial animations. You can check out the details below straight from the developer -
From the start of development, the team here at Ascendant Studios wanted Immortals of Aveum™ to be a truly next-generation (now current generation) experience on a technical level—something that pushes our development craft further than we’ve gone before as a team. We’re proud to be releasing one of the first AAA games on Unreal Engine 5.1, an engine that provides us with the tools and technology to make something we feel is truly special and hope players do too.
If you follow the more technical side of game development and what it can do for visual fidelity and gameplay, you’ve no doubt seen some of the incredible work the team at Epic Games has done with their UE5 tech demos. However, Immortals of Aveum is one of the first examples to bring this technology into a fully featured playable experience. Lighting, video effects, physics, and more have all been tuned to provide a breathtaking experience designed to bring the player on a cinematic journey through Aveum.
In every location you visit, whether it’s the ruins left in the wake of the Everwar or a bustling settlement filled with life, we’re working to provide a level of detail that gives the feel of real, lived-in locations—even though they’re set in a fantasy world. And we’re using some really powerful new tools that UE5 provides to make that happen.
Nanite is one example: This micro polygon geometry system intelligently adjusts the level of detail of any in-game object depending on how close you are to it. So, if you have a thing that’s far enough away that you couldn’t make out fine details on it even if they were there, Nanite will make the object physically less complex—on the fly!—so that the game doesn’t waste resources rendering it fully.
“In any other game,” says our Chief Technology Officer Mark Maratea, “you might see what looks like a big craggy wall, but it’s flat with a craggy texture and maybe some shader trickery. We don’t have to do that; we build an object with all of that detail, and Nanite determines whether that detail shows up based on your distance.”
That means that those resources that are saved by not having lots of detail on things that are far away can be spent on closer things, making the nearby environment incredibly detailed. “In some games,” Mark says, “you look at the cinematics and say, ‘That looks amazing!’ And then you see the gameplay and you say, ‘That does not look the same!’ That’s typical; we’ve lived with that for a long time in video games. But in our game, the quality is super-close. You’re watching an in-game cinematic and then the camera flies into Jack’s head and you assume first-person control—and everything looks the same. The visual fidelity is one-to-one, with only some changes to the depth of field, motion blur, and other cinematic cutscene effects. Everything is in real-time.”
Immortals of Aveum is out on August 22nd for PC, Xbox Series X/S and PS5.
