The cutting edge technology that powers Immortals of Aveum

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The developers of Ascendant Studios reveal what Unreal Engine 5.1 brings to the world of Aveum.

From the very beginning of development, the Ascendant Studios team wanted Immortals of Aveum to be truly a next-generation (now current-generation) experience on a technical level, something that would push our development craft further than we have done before as a team. We’re proud to release one of the first AAA games on Unreal Engine 5.1, an engine that gives us the tools and technology to make something we think is truly special, and we hope players will too.

If you follow the more technical side of game development and what it can do for visual fidelity and gameplay, you’ve no doubt seen some of the amazing work the team at Epic Games has done with their UE5 tech demos. Immortals of Aveum however is one of the first examples to take this technology and bring it into a full playable experience. Lighting, VFX, physics, and more have been fine-tuned to deliver a breathtaking experience designed to take the player on a cinematic journey through Aveum.

In every place you visit, whether it’s the ruins left in Everwar’s wake or a bustling settlement teeming with life, we’re working to provide a level of detail that gives the feel of real, lived-in places, even if set in a fantasy world. . And we’re using some really powerful new tools provided by UE5 to make that happen.

Nanite is one example: this micropolygonal geometry system intelligently adjusts the level of detail of any in-game object depending on how close you are to it. So if you have an object far enough away that you can’t make out its details even if they were there, Nanite will actually make the object physically less complex on the fly! So that the game doesn’t waste resources to make it completely.

In any other game, says our Chief Technology Officer Mark Maratea, you might see what looks like a big craggy wall, but is actually flat with a craggy texture and perhaps some shader trickery. We don’t have to; we actually build an object with all that detail, and Nanite determines if that detail shows up based on your distance.

This means that those resources that are saved by not having much detail about things far away can be spent on things closer, making the near environment incredibly detailed. In some games, Mark says, you watch cutscenes and say: That’s great! And then you see the gameplay and you’re like, It doesn’t look the same! This is typical; we’ve lived with this for a long time in video games. But in our game, the quality is very close. You’re watching an in-game cutscene and then the camera flies into Jack’s head and you take control in first person and everything looks the same. Visual fidelity is one-to-one, with only a few tweaks to depth of field, motion blur, and other cinematic effects. Everything is in real time.

UE5 is also equipped with a fantastic global lighting and reflections system called Lumen, which provides moving and changing lighting in real time. The light not only hits the characters and surroundings and casts shadows, says Senior Art Director Dave Bogan, but it also bounces off them, picking up the color and allowing it to show up in nearby static and dynamic objects. Lumen does this efficiently enough that you can add more lights and support volumetrics to really make the ambiance lush and atmospheric.

Take our Library layer to the Oremen Sky Islands, says Mark. When you step outside, the sun is just above the horizon line on these floating islands. And as you walk, it interacts with everything. It is as if you were in Rome at sunset, in the Colosseum, with the light filtering through the remaining walls and, depending on where you are, you are either completely in shadow or in sunlight, and it is reflected off all the rocks and the rubble around you in that whole area. it’s like that.

When the lighting looks weird in a game, Dave says, either there’s a lack of shadows, or the light doesn’t bounce right where you’d expect it to appear, which breaks the player’s immersion, if only for one moment. This technology helps us overcome it.

(8k image using Lumens Global Illumination System)

And then there’s World Partition, Unreal Engine 5’s method of loading segments of the environment as you move through it. This allows for some really huge play areas. Our levels are huge, says Mark. We have a large variety of tier sizes, some large and open and some more focused. A couple of our levels equal 25 or 30 kilometers in length! This is just the playable space! To be clear though, they weren’t an open world game. We like playing those games, but it doesn’t fit the vision we have or the story we want to tell.

So what World Partition does, Dave says, is it divides those huge levels into smaller sections that can be beamed in and out of memory as the player traverses them. This allows us to maximize the visual fidelity surrounding the player at all times, and also allows us to build levels to sizes that were previously not possible without doing game-breaking loads.

And unlike the open world games you’re used to, Mark says, all of our levels are meticulously designed with all this bespoke art, made possible by Lumen and Nanite. So covering that ground would be quite a walk indeed! And you’ll find all kinds of environmental storytelling that add to the feeling that this is a lived-in world.

And it’s a world that you will be able to manipulate on your own. On your travels through the Aveum you’ll encounter structures and statues that reach for the sky, and they’re not just for show; with the power of your sigil, you’ll be able to reform the world around you to create new paths to traverse and new ways to explore. Giant statues made of ancient stone will move with life under the guidance of your hand. The overgrowth that wrapped itself around the mountains eons ago will unravel and reach your will.

One might assume that this size, scope, and beauty would require some serious processing power. You would be right. You can see in other fantasy games where they backpedaled on some details because it wasn’t practical, says Mark. We have chosen not to be practical. But to do all this we had to make the hard decision not to support older video cards and the previous generation of consoles. But there is much more game to play.

So what does this mean in practice? We wanted to create an accessible game on the latest generation hardware, while offering PC enthusiasts an experience that leveraged the beauty of Unreal Engine 5.1. As a point of reference, here are our recommendations for running the game with the minimum settings aimed at 1080p/60fps and with the recommended settings at 1440p/60fps. However, we will continue to optimize the game until launch, so that may change. If they do, be sure to clarify that.

PC specifications

MINIMUM

ADVISED

Operating system

Windows 10 (64-bit) or later

Processor: Intel

Core i7-9700

Core i7-12700

Processor – AMD

Ryzen 7 3700X

Ryzen75700X

RAM

16GB (dual channel)

GPU-Nvidia

GeForce RTX 2080 Super (8GB)

GeForce RTX 3080Ti (12GB)

GPU-AMD

Radeon RX 5700XT (8GB)

Radeon RX 6800XT (16GB)

DirectX

Version 12.1 or later

Warehousing

110GB (SSD strongly recommended)

Performance expectation

1080p @ 60fps, medium-low settings

1440p @ 60fps, medium-high settings

All versions of the game require a 64-bit processor and operating system (Windows 10 or later), DirectX 12.1 or later, and 110GB of storage space. We also strongly recommend playing on an SSD.

Our goal with implementing this technology in Immortals of Aveum is to achieve an end result that we hope players will enjoy for years to come. On PC, Mark says, our texture pool and visual quality fluctuate based on your video card. So if you’re using a 4090, it feels like you’re playing movies. And if upgraded graphics cards or consoles come with more memory, it will be much easier to recompile the game to take advantage of the new power.

And we couldn’t have done it without Unreal Engine 5. Some of the ideas that the team would have pitched there, Mark says, we simply wouldn’t have been able to do, because we didn’t have the technology. Hey, let’s do a walking mech level of 400 feet, in the ocean, and we can have the mech be attacked by airships, and you’re fighting inside the mech, and you’re fighting on top of the mech, and maybe you almost fall from the mech at some point? And it’d be like, how could we ever make that a reality? But that level is in the game. And we hope players think it’s great.

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