Immortals of Aveum is a magic first-person shooter in development by a team of former Call of Duty, BioShock, and Halo devs. The team seeks to fill a niche that has largely gone unnoticed since the release of games like Hexen, as players become a Triarch named Jak capable of casting three forms of magic. Players find themselves embroiled in the Everwar, where nations fight for control over magic. By Jak's time, the war has whittled down into two still-standing nations: Lucium and Rasharn.
Rasharn is led by Sandrakk, a Tyrant who seeks to recreate the world how he envisions it, and he's supported by a powerful magic user known only as The Hand. To get to these two, though, Jak will have to fight through the armies of Rasharn and its elite group of Magni - The Order of Masks in Immortals of Aveum. Game ZXC recently spoke with senior art director Dave Bogan and lead combat designer Jason Warnke about these villains. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Let's start with armor design. What all went into the design of the Rasharnian Army like The Hand and Sandrakk?
Bogan: Sandrakk's armor took a long time to design, and we were just never happy with it for a long, long time. We started off doing some freelance concept art over in Ukraine, and my initial kind of inspiration for Sandrakk and his armor was going to be my dad's 1986 Yamaha Virago motorcycle. It had all this sick chrome all over it and the gas tank was like a high gloss black and mahogany color with these little golden pinstripe things.
Right from the get-go, we wanted the Lucian faction to be utilitarian, kind of gritty with no frills. With the Rasharnians, we wanted something high class, almost like an armored peacock or something. Those motorbike designs started us off, and of course, it turned into chromatic flame armor, which was really weird. One of our character artists, who was also a concept artist at the time, decided to go for another revision and he locked the design down over a couple of weeks.
So, I don't really know what it ended up looking like, but it's a kind mish-mash of old-world medieval armor with a nice sci-fi twist and simplified shape language, like the grill of a Rolls-Royce on Sandrakk's face.
One thing about Sandrakk and The Hand's armor is they're part of an elite group of Magni, the Order of the Masks, and they have an iridescent quality to this armor. If you look at the armor, it's got this oily kind of rainbow-colored sheen to it, which is really cool. That was always the case from the get-go for the Order of the Masks characters. They were going to be these highly detailed, high-class, fancy-looking lethal peacocks.
Warnke: Touching on some of the gameplay elements of this too, I don't know if you remember, Dave, but Sandrakk used to be a full green character. A lot of the early discussions Dave, I, and a couple of other people like Brett had was on how we're going to build out all of our systems to put a lot of weight on the silhouette and the color choices. These imply to you what the character is going to be good at, so you can counter it with Simon Says-ish style gameplay. I see blue, I kind of want to use Blue.
We're not very pigeonholed in that though, you can use whatever colors you want at the end of the day. If you want to go red, just go red, and you can figure it out from there. At least the color choices help you now, you know that blue is going to snipe you.
The Hand of Sandrakk, I think you saw her in the playtest, she's blue. That tells you she's going to show up with blue, hit you with the blue rails, and do all the blue stuff. Sandrakk was originally a green character before going full Triarch, which is pretty cool.
Bogan: Yeah, Jak needed someone to match his level.
Warnke: No one matches Jak's confidence and his wit.
Bogan: That's true, that's true. The Hand's mask is probably one of my favorites though, because, of course, every concept ends up with 20 thumbnails on a sheet of paper. But that one in the whole group of thumbnails just stood out to me. I've realized why I like it so much. It's because I used to watch this Japanese cartoon called Starvengers when I was a kid. And of course, it's about big giant robots.
Q: As a whole, what can you tell me about the Order of Masks?
Warnke: They're competing elite forces with the Order of Immortals. You have the Immortals who are on your side, the good side, and they're the group of people fighting against the Rasharnian army. You know, there's a whole conversation to be had about the Everwar and how war tactics have evolved over thousands of years. In the current state of the war, the Elite are Magni who do strike missions. The Elite Order of Masks does the same thing for the Rasharnian army, so you go up against a couple of them. They have some really tough fights.
Bogan: We can tell you that they're each unique and they have their own unique fighting styles, which is pretty awesome.
Q: Can you give any indication of how many mini-bosses or characters besides Sandrakk and The Hand make up the Order of the Masks?
Warnke: We don't have like numbers, but there are a lot. We show a number of them in the game. You don't get to meet all of the Immortals in this game. You don't get to meet all of the Order of the Masks in this game, but you get to fight quite a few of them.
Q: So why are they called the Order of the Masks? Is there any special emphasis on 'Masks'?
Warnke: So, the Lucians are more militaristic, more utilitarian, so a lot of their armor is about utility and function. The Rasharnians, though, have a whole pension for passion and arts and extravagance. They hide their identities and hide their faces during battle behind masks. The Order of the Masks is slightly literal, but there's a whole lore behind it. Their identity becomes the masks they wear, and the way their enemies see them is by that title and that mask.
Bogan: From my standpoint, Bret was talking about this group of characters having masks, and when he mentioned the name Order of the Masks, I was just like 'oh my god, I get to design a group of characters with super cool masks." I had all these images in my head like Stormtroopers, Boba Fett, Darth Vader, Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, and all these really cool images from my childhood.
Not just my childhood, but I'm always jonesing to try to design something so cool it becomes memorable. You know, if you can nail the design and it becomes memorable, you've done a good job there.
Warnke: There's something compelling about masks like playing Skyrim for the first time and finding a dragon mask, like I want that physically in my hand. I want to hold that thing, it's so cool.
Bogan: And, of course, one of our key pillar words for the gameplay and for the art, in general, was to be unpredictable. When we say the word fantasy, our minds go to something like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, so how can we come up with a recipe that was different, timeless, and have its own world? Aveum is a planet somewhere, we don't know where it is, but it's not Earth. We started mixing visuals of medieval and sci-fi together, being a little uninhibited in that way. You know, two parts there, one part here, one part there makes a little recipe that helps give it a fresh new look, I suppose.
Q: On the topic of masks, what can you tell me about The Hand's and Sandrakk's?
Bogan: I mean, I can tell you that a real head couldn't fit inside those things. There's obviously some magic involved. If you watch when the characters take their helmets off, you know, they dissolve away. We've talked about magic metals a lot in the game, and that's just part of the lore and the existence of the world I guess.
Q: You mentioned how Sandrakk was originally a full green character, but he's a full Triarch in the game now. How does Sandrakk being a Triarch affect or relate to Jak in terms of gameplay and magic use?
Warnke: Sandrakk is the most powerful Magnus in the world at the moment, and when you fight him, you'll feel it. it is bad. It's not even subtle.
Bogan: It is a badass boss battle. I can't wait for you guys to see this, just the arena that they're in. It's bonkers, it's amazing.
Warnke: Designing Sandrakk's boss fights has been a lot of fun. I've been doing boss fights for most of my career, and I feel like this was a chance to stretch those muscles a little bit and do something really fun. I don't want to go too deep into it, I really want you to play it, and I want to watch you play it, but the player learns a lot about the magic systems in the game. Sandrakk puts you to the test.
Bogan: It's not an easy fight. I'm also sure Jason won't feel this way, but I was so heads-down building stuff so this fight came out of nowhere. I didn't get to see the build-up, and all of a sudden, it was there.
Warnke: It definitely took me some time, though. A good boss battle takes about a year to make, like each one fight. Actually, the element of the way that you fight against normal enemies, mini-bosses, and bosses, it's all very intentional. Our combat team takes a really keen approach to how we develop each fight because we want the combat question to be different. When you're fighting troops, it's the broad strokes, how do you deal with groups? Mini-bosses and bosses ask a particular question to the player, and you can approach them in different ways. We want some freedom on how you engage in combat. There's not just one answer for every combat question because we want you to also express yourself, like which type of magic do you like.
One of the coolest things about this project was being able to challenge all the natural stuff that first-person shooters do. Do we want a B button to crouch? Are we a cover shooter? No, we want blink, we want mobility to take your cover with you, so I'm going to add a shield instead. That's really fun. The shield, the blink, the mobility of the characters, big animations, big attacks, and the sheer number of ways of responding is very fun for us. We wrote a lot of that stuff into the combat systems.
Bogan: Yeah, I think the overall direction and vision for the game has pretty much not changed since I read a design document from Bret five years ago. The great thing about this is we didn't spend a year or two on the project and get to a point saying, "Oh, we're going to make a third-person parkour game, now we're making an RPG." The very core of it has never changed, and I think that allowed us a lot of time to explore. Okay, we know this about the game, but let's try a bunch of different stuff, all kinds of spells, all kinds of tactics.
Sometimes on the day we decide to take something out, everyone's like "no, there's so much potential!" But it allowed us to hone in and work on the things that feel good. Some of the underdeveloped ideas just got cut away, so we could focus on making the combat as solid as it is.
Warnke: It's also really nice because we were able to get to a point where we understood what our game was and just cranked out a lot of characters, a lot of enemies, a lot of enemy variations, and a lot of different gameplay. Touching on a little bit of the cross-development between Dave and myself, the silhouette is so important, right?
One of the problems with working on a Call of Duty game is what's the silhouette difference between a dude with a sniper rifle and a dude with a rocket launcher. It's that tiny little ball over the end of that long stick they're holding, you know, and their pose. You can't really do a whole lot with that. With Immortals, we got to do some really interesting stuff with characters, enemies, and stalwarts. I know there are a lot of eye-rolling staples in fantasy where you always have the big dude that you fight, but also, it's really fun to fight the big dude.
Every single Monster Hunter since the first one, it's a small hero versus a giant monster. It is a very cool thing. We have quite a wide variety of core military elements, like what's your basic rifleman look like in a fantasy game, what's your basic infantry, and then also what the fuck is that thing? We wanted to have a couple of those moments in the game. I think we were successful.
Bogan: Yeah, piggybacking on what Jason was saying about silhouetting, Call of Duty is a great example because you're dealing with just humans and the costuming isn't that varied. You know, it's a military uniform. Some of them have a longer coat, some are short, and color-wise, it's a pretty drab, contained area to work in.
It's a real challenge for those guys to get the gameplay to read, and as Jason was saying, you have to exaggerate weapons or depend on the animated poses of those characters to get the read that you need.
Warnke: It's also what are you trying to tell the player about the situation you're in. It's mostly who their squad is, so you put a little carrot over their head so they're more unique looking, and then, the guys over there, they all have guns so just deal with that. There's not a lot of difference. Every once in a while, you have the rocket launcher guy on top of a street sign or roof, and they're still up against the sky so that sells well enough.
For us, we have a bunch of melee enemies, a bunch of projectile enemies, and a bunch of caster-type enemies to sell. The helmets, the armor, the weapons Dave and his team put together for these enemies and the animations from our animation team were just phenomenal. It really helps sell the behavior of those characters, immediately from a long distance. You can tell when someone is a caster, when there's this VFX, and so on.
Bogan: I thought it was going to be much easier than it was, but we kept trying to push the shapes on the armor more and more, like we're trying to ride this fine line of not getting too exaggerated to the point where the characters are starting to feel like toys. We want them to feel grounded. One of our early pillars was to make something gritty and believable.
We were always trying to push our designs more and make them mature. That's probably not the best word for it, but kind of a modern mature tone to the game. We didn't go at that too hard, as we did start to get very colorful at the end or at some point in the project. We took that and ran with it. I would say it was hard to push it. It's very easy to push it and get different silhouettes, but to get it while trying to adhere to that mentality and tone is not easy.
Warnke: I would love to debate with you the practicality of a swordsman's helmet, like the hammerhead shark.
Bogan: He would knock his own head off sometimes for sure.
Warnke: Go in for the swing and bonk!
Bogan: On the thumbnails, I remember those days clearly. There was a page of thumbnails with a bunch of swordman designs on there, and the Hammerhead, that's the helmet you're going to remember. The same way with the archer, it almost looks like a shovelhead or something weird.
Warnke: I'm so excited about cosplay someday.
Bogan: Oh my god, I cannot wait. That is going to be amazing.
Q: So what can you tell about the Hand's relationship with Rasharn and Sandrakk?
Warnke: Well, she's the most elite member of his Order of Masks. She's the one who is most feared by the Lucian army and she's an absolute badass. You'll learn more about her story when you play.
Bogan: She's got wicked hair.
Warnke: Her sigil is also one of the coolest sigils in the game.
Q: To wrap up, is there anything you'd like to add about Immortals' villains that we didn't get to touch on?
Warnke: You've seen a small fraction of the game, and there's a lot of variety out there, a lot of ways to play it, and a lot of exploration in both the world and the combat. I hope people get to experience the game in a way that feels right for them the first time, and then come back and play it again in a different way to feel how the game can change depending on how you spec out your character and what spells you focus on.
Bogan: Yeah, I think there's a good variety in terms of creatures versus Magni versus something we call Constructs. Those are basically the major classes of enemies, I guess, and then you've got the bosses outside of that who are just bombastic. I would say there's a good visual variety and a gameplay variety. We're excited for you to try all of it.
Warnke: One thing I would love people to know, it's like when you buy a product, you want the game to be perfect when you buy it. We've put so much focus and effort into tuning, trying to make things just as perfect as possible. I hope people see and appreciate the work we've put into it when they finally play it.
Bogan: I think people are going to love it. We've been playing in it for five years and we love it, so yeah.
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Immortals of Aveum launches July 20 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
