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.
If I had to guess, texture quality and graphical fidelity is really high, plus this was one of the first games to run in UE5. A mix of extreme amounts of manhours invested into graphics coupled with slow progress due to having to get used to everything.
And rampant corruption at EA, I bet. 40 million marketing my ass, the game barely had any marketing!
Wait, didn’t EA had their in-house engine Frostbite? They botched Mass Effect Andromeda because they moved from UE to frostbite (not the only reason) .
Yeah and for a while it was mandated to be used for ~everything IIRC but after years of struggling to retain programmers and designers they finally relented on that mandate.
Also Unreal Engine has 24/7 support from the engineers at epic through Unreal Development Network which costs quite a bit of money.