this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea" (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. ๐Ÿ˜…

And I mean, that's maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except "OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!!". Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:

  • Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
  • Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
  • The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
  • The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn't lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.

Can't really say I'm surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'll go counter-current here and say that it was a fun game. IGN review sells it really well, and I had fun while playing it. I'd say the main problem of the game was releasing in a year already full of big-name releases, and a marketing campaign that was too quiet - I'm honestly surprised it cost $40 million, because I only heard of the game by pure chance.

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Yeah I will say, it's painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it's not a bad game per se. It's just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.

The worst offense to me though is how there's no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That's the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Just FYI, the term triple-A doesn't refer directly to the quality of the game. It simply means it was made by a larger, well-established company.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The terms have changed a bit over time, but generally "AAA" now means (in the industry) a large studio makes a game with a large marketing budget. If you think of those games that are published by EA, but made by one of their smaller studios and has a smaller marketing budget, that's "AA".

Much like "alpha" and "beta", the meanings are changing so quickly it's hard to keep up with what the industry means and what players mean.

I'm so old when I started in games "alpha" meant a feature complete game with a few crash bugs, and beta meant no (25% repro, or whatever the studio chose) crash bugs and all assets added and working.

Now it's basically "alpha" means a demo, and "beta" means they're buying time for GM release.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Regarding the alpha/beta point, increase in internet availability and rolling updates probably made all the work in that shift. In the old days if you published a raw product it would take a hell of an effort to amend it. Now it's just a matter of a user not plugging the internet off for some time ยฏ\_(ใƒ„)_/ยฏ

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

This started happening when studios got bigger and marketing controlled release dates. By the 2010s or so, the actual devs had zero say. So some idiot owner would promise a game in 18 months, half the ideas would be removed due to time, and a rushed product went out.

"Games as a service" was just corporate speak for how to streamline putting out a game with less components and then adding them over time.

Unfortunately it worked, and players bought in.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I agree 100%. The magic was not magic. It was just different looking guns. Which made the game seem more dull to me. Even if it was an okay shooter.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Is there "ammo"? I know there's like a reload/recharge system isn't there?