Ascendant signs with EA for debut title

Ascendant Studios has signed with Electronic Arts for its first game, Immortals of Aveum.

The developer was formed back in 2018 by veterans of Activision’s Sledgehammer Games, one of the outfits responsible with helming Call of Duty. Ironically, that venture was set up by alums of EA’s Visceral Games, the studio responsible for the Dead Space franchise.

Ascendant’s first game is Immortals of Aveum, a single player fantasy title. Though it is in a different genre, the creation of Dead Space as an IP has influenced how the developer is making this new franchise.

“I’ve gone back to the thinking about what it was like on Dead Space,” Ascendant CEO and game director Bret Robbins told GamesIndustry.biz.

“When you have that blank page, you want to set down certain parameters and rules on what you want to do and what you don’t want to do. Call of Duty is a great franchise, but it had a clear design that you were working with. I went from that to suddenly being able to do whatever I wanted, and that is both enormously liberating and daunting. It reminded me a lot of those days on Dead Space. So we needed to put certain guideposts down, or we would get lost.”

Though founded by veterans of Sledgehammer, Ascendant has attracted a number of Telltale alums after that studio’s implosion in 2018. The developer has also hired a number of ex-FunPlus staff.