This is how Endava’s creative team helped a fledgling studio bring vivid detail to their AAA game release.
At the height of the pandemic in 2021, a California game studio was busy imagining a world far removed from the turbulence of the one beyond their doors.
Ascendant Studios was set up by Electronic Arts (EA) veterans who had cut their teeth bringing iconic titles like Call of Duty and Halo to life. Now its team were working on their own debut, the AAA first-person magical shooter, Immortals of Aveum.
To do justice to the ambitious scale of their vision for the game, Ascendant wanted to draw on a large talent pool of creative expertise. They enlisted a team from Endava to support a broad array of development activity.
Our team of developers, designers, project managers and VFX artists played an integral part in most core parts of production of Immortals. Working on one of the first projects built in Unreal Engine 5.1, our team worked to perfect areas from UI implementation and graphics rendering optimisation to NPC animation.
Our team helped design and implement the game’s Walk and Talk system, which leads players in lifelike motion through quests and across the game’s extensive map.
Our UI experts helped ensure exemplarily smooth playability through their work on crafting the skill tree and save menus.
Ascendant gave our artists and designers ownership of specific levels, integrating them into the studio’s culture to ensure that the production team could speak with one voice.
We helped Immortals set new standards for graphical realism through our work to perfect the details of in-game objects and materials originally provided by third-party vendors.
Our effects specialists mixed their renegade inventiveness with deep technical prowess to craft exhilarating combat scenes.
After months of frenetic production work, a fully realised, opulently detailed game was ready for release. Published by EA and hotly anticipated as one of the year’s most high-profile pieces of new IP, Immortals of Aveum was released on consoles and PC on 22nd August 2023.
Critics lavished particular praise on the game’s ‘beautifully designed world’ and ‘lushly detailed environments’ in a string of four and five-star reviews.
Spencer Hunt, Ascendant’s Chief Operating Officer said:
“Immortals of Aveum was an incredibly ambitious project for our new studio and we realised early on that we would need exceptional co-development partners to accelerate design, tech-art, and engineering.
Endava’s technical, creative and passionate team supported us in developing key features, delivering on our level design goals and helping realise our visual target. Ultimately, we were able to exceed our expectations for the game and achieve the goals we set forth in creating one of the first titles released in Unreal Engine 5.
Endava stepped up to the plate and seamlessly integrated with our team, with very few distinctions between our staff and theirs. As our longest lasting co-dev partner, they proved essential to completing Immortals and we are very appreciative of their contribution.”