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.
The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution.
Apparently, $40 million doesn’t buy you much in today’s market, because I’ve literally never heard of this game until now.
It was actually quite fun! I rented it off Gamefly and enjoyed it for about 30-40 hours. It’s basically an action-adventure shooter like Metroid. It’s a decent game, not groundbreaking, but definitely doesn’t deserve the hate people give it.
It has Denuvo, and runs like crap even on $1500 hardware.
I don’t know what kind of sales they expected when they don’t test it on lower spec PCs.
We should expect more of that with the upcoming UE5 titles. The devs that have devoted to releasing those seem to have very hard time optimising - they’ll likely expect us all to just own 4090s and still run their game with DLSS ultra performance or other fake frames.
STALKER 2 will have the janky soul we expect from the series, but this mostly, mostly due to engine choice and apparent attempts to visually impress the player. Or the investors.
