Inside Immortals of Aveum: the Digital Foundry tech interview

From a technological perspective, Ascendant Studios' Immortals of Aveum is a highly important game. Excluding Fortnite, created by Epic Games itself, it's the first triple-A game to ship with all of Unreal Engine 5's cutting-edge features in place. That's the microgeometry-based Nanite, capable of astonishing levels of detail, along with Lumen - a ray tracing-based global illumination solution plus virtual shadow maps. Prior to Fortnite, The Matrix Awakens was the only console-based UE5 release we saw with those features - looking amazing but with obvious performance concerns.

Not only is Ascendant using all UE5 features, it's also aiming for 60fps on consoles. It's a highly ambitious game then, but as yesterday's DF review revealed, GPU compute can only go so far, so image quality necessarily has to take a hit, with FSR 2.2.1 used to upscale from a base 720p resolution Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.

Going into the review process, we were highly motivated to find out more about what makes the game tick, so when EA offered us the opportunity to talk with the development team, we jumped at the chance. Alex Battaglia and Tom Morgan spoke with Ascendant Studios' Mark Maratea, Julia Lichtblau and Joe Hall - and here's that conversation.

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