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"
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"
"No one bought it"
Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅
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.
Big "no one understands my art" vibes coming off that dev. You made a mediocre game for an outrageous amount and released it in one of the heaviest gaming release years in recent memory. Sorry, this year a new IP with a 74% on metacritic doesn't cut it. They say EA dropped 40mil on the advertising for it, but this is litterally the first I've heard about it, and frankly I'm the target audience for this game. I bet this shit was shoved down the throats of Fortnight and Valorant players via tiktok.
The issue is not the genre "single player (shooter)" itself, but that these big companies just churn out the same generic bullshit and then act surprised when no-one plays it.
AAA studios just don't have the balls anymore to take a risk and develop something unique. And this is their downfall.
Titanfall 2, Metro Exodus, Ghostwire Tokyo, Doom (to name a few) are all excellent first person shooters. All of them have something unique about them that makes them worthwhile.
I think EA makes games like this to reinforce THEIR notion that single player games are dead so they can use that as leverage to make more "games as a service". If they made things people actually wanted to play, they'd find that single player (yes even shooter) games are still just as popular as they ever were and poorly thought out, poorly executed, and poorly marketed games still suck.
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.
I tried the demo, it has a lot of problems outside of it being a AAA single player shooter. The "magic" system is just reskinned guns, the story is nonsensical at times, and the movement is stiff and slow. It's like they never play tested the game and just said it was done one day. That's not even mentioning the almost ten minute walk around the city at the beginning doing nothing but following what I will assume is a non critical character to the plot.
I play a lot of single player shooters. One thing they all have in common is that I know they exist, which I'm thinking could potentially be part of the problem with this one. Based on reactions in this thread it seems like a lot of people are in the same position I'm in, where the first they hear of the game is when it's being pronounced a flop. I'm getting big The Producers vibes.
Someone stole $40 million of EA's money and didn't advertise another horrible cashgrab?
"I'm not even mad, I'm.. impressed!"
I'm very into shooters and this was a hard pass because it looked like a generic and boring Call of Duty re-skin and I'm not into that game.
Maybe the problem is not the current AAA or shooters landscape. Maybe it is more about the quality and the fun your games are.
I would love an AAA single player shooter. If it is done well and fun. So no chance EA could do it
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!!!!".
This is exactly what AAA gaming is. Some guys in suits dictate projects to make money. There's no passion behind them. They can't do anything unique or interesting because it may not make money. They just make safe games, and they're generic and boring as hell.
This is the first time I've ever even heard of it.
Not at that price point, of course. Ultrakill has a sub 2 million USD budget, its one of the most critically praised games on Steam, and its not even finished yet. I can't look up Steamcharts at work but I have good reason to believe its more than made back its production budget.
Live service games are starting to turn into a very expensive scam and if you can't make a good single player game, you need to cut costs somewhere. AAA production budgets are just too huge and the product isn't good.
If you don't have a vision, don't try to turn money into more money by making a game. Everyone loses. Dumping money on assets doesn't make your trope copy/paste any better than the other million cheap Chinese clones on an app store.
Also EA has to understand more and more people have experienced their garbage launches and will skip their gold plated launch prices because of the risk you end up buying a lemon that is subsequently abandoned.
Making sure the gameplay loop is interesting and the game performs properly is important. Focussing on all the latest engine features that requires people to have top tier hardware is only good for marketing. Marketing then eats up a tremendous amount of budget without adding anything to the offer they make.
Maybe if you market it at all so that I've actually fucking heard of it that'll help?
Most notable thing about this game was it was one of the first to launch with FSR3 frame generation. Other than that I think I’d have completely forgotten about it.
Unlike many people in this thread, I actually have heard of the game. The makers of a podcast I follow loved it, and had the head of the studio on their show for a pretty frank interview, too. When I learned that there was a free demo, I decided I would give the game a try some time.
And in light of the overwhelming negativity in this thread, I did so last night. And what can I say? I spent an hour and change going through the prologue, the training and the first battle sequence, and I really enjoyed it. Movement and
shootingslinging magic are great fun, with a diversity of spells available pretty much from the get-go. Just shoot, or throw a massive armor-breaking spell at a wave of enemies, or use a lash to pull a remote enemy close and whack them. I wouldn't have know what to expect from the 'CoD with magic' premise but it's really enjoyable so far.The voice acting is very good, and while the facial animations are a bit uncanny valley, I am enjoying the snarky dialogues and matching facial expressions. Gina Torres has presence, and the rest of the cast so far blends in fine.
I will definitely spend some more time with the demo, and if it doesn't annoy me too much, I might just buy this. And that seems to be the feedback the devs got from many people - once players actually get their hands on it, they actually enjoy it. According ton the studio head, sales have picked up towards Christmas, and they've been getting a lot of conversions from the free demo.
Or maybe EA is just a garbage corporation that aren't actually good at making video games?
I had to look up a video to realise this wasn't the "I guess that's something I do now" game.
Looks like a confusing mess of a game tbh. When a game's failure is blamed on it being released close to fucking Starfield, you know it never had much going for it.
It was flawed from the start, clearly people that love COD and magic aren't that big of an intersection, also like people said already the magic acted more like guns and they had a pretty dumb system of calling it by their colors.
Still looked fun though, but I would never pay the asking price for it.
"(...) AAA (...) was a truly awful idea"
ftfy dev"potential customer hears about product for the first time after it's announced a flop"
I mean, a single player FPS... Oh it's an EA game we are talking about! NEVERMIND.
Whenever I saw that game it looked like a generic, soulless, made-by-committee shooter… All footage had strong tech demo vibes. The only thing I can remember about it is „the guns looked kinda weird.“
I've been hearing rumblings of people complaining about current game advertisement cycles being too long. Immortals, is a great example of one too short. Announced at Summer Game Fest and released in August(?). We don't need long Ad campaigns for old brands but if you want to market a new IP as Triple A you have to put in the work to reach unplugged gamers, and it barely reached plugged in gamers.
a streamer i enjoy played it and it wasn’t even fun to watch honestly
Even the name is so generic, It is no duprise that it flopped
