“As a designer, designing puzzles is a very challenging thing,” said Bret Robbins, founder and overall lead of Ascendant Studios. Immortal Avim Operation. The game – and as a “Doctor Strange-esque magical first-person shooter” – contains puzzles; tricky brain teasers where you’ll need to use your skills and abilities to progress. This is something we’ve seen in games like Doom and Doom Eternal, as well as in the combat sandboxes of the Halo games: smart ways to extrapolate FPS tools that let you think about the world or the battlefield in a much deeper way than CoD.
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“I have a lot of respect for games that do their puzzle design in a really good way,” Robbins continued. “We spent a lot of time on the puzzles in Aveum. It really had a huge impact on how you approach level design – they tend to be very dependent on how you build areas, so it wasn’t an easy task to put that into the level . You have to design your levels with that in mind.”
Robbins went on to explain that the game has some “very unique mechanics that come from your spellcasting abilities,” and gave us a brief look at the kind of tricks we can expect to tackle once the game is in our hands. The funniest example is the “beam splitting” puzzle, where you need to refract light to hit specific targets and open up new passages as you move through levels.
But Robbins realizes — especially in an FPS game first and foremost — that puzzles can be a tough sell for some players. “[Mechanics like the light refraction] It’s really fun to design, but I think the puzzles are hard because they can be difficult for some players to stop,” he said. “You hit a wall, you scratch your head and get frustrated, and that can be a bad experience. “
Ascendant Studios’ solution? Leave the hard stuff on the fringes, in optional areas the player can choose to tackle. “They’re off the beaten path,” Robbins told us. “If you want to explore, if you want some tougher challenges, they’re definitely there for you. If you just want to enjoy the story, enjoy the combat and keep going…you’ll have some puzzles, but they’re light Some. That’s how we walked that line.”
It seems like a good compromise, and one that doesn’t hinder the flow of the game too much for players who just want to jump in and implement all their craziest wizard-based spellcasting fantasies. However, if you’re the type of player who cared deeply about a daily brain workout in an era without any Dr. Kawashima, don’t worry: Robbins has his team completely untethered in Aveum’s darker, shadowier fantasy world. .
“Of course, some of our designers put in some difficult puzzles in the far corners of the game, and some went crazy. So they’re going to sit there and wait for someone, if they like that kind of thing.”
Given that Robbin describes Avuem’s setup as having a “hub-and-spoke architecture,” with several large non-linear areas all connected to a more central main area, this optional challenge level sounds accessible and even for those who think Multi-step, difficult puzzles are not for them. “[The areas] You grow as the game progresses, and you can explore them at your own pace,” Robbins explained. Many, and so on. This is not an open world game. I’m not interested in making open world games. It’s a much more curated movie experience than this. “
Immortals of Aveum launches on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S on July 20, 2023.
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