Following the flop of the fantasy FPS Immortals of Aveum, a “core workforce” from developer Ascendant Studios has discovered a brand new house at Absurd Ventures, the studio launched in 2021 by Rockstar Video games co-founder Dan Houser.
The previous Ascendant workforce will type a brand new studio known as Absurd Marin, headed up by Ascendant Studios founder and director Bret Robbins. An Absurd Ventures rep stated the studio is at the moment made up of “about 20 builders from the core workforce behind Immortals of Aveum,” and can proceed to develop as improvement on its new sport progresses.
“Bret has put collectively a extremely gifted, passionate workforce,” Houser stated. “We’re very excited to have them be part of forces with us as we start to work collectively on certainly one of our authentic new titles.”
Absurd Ventures revealed in November 2023 that it’s engaged on “two universes,” an “audio fiction sequence” known as A Higher Paradise, and American Caper, which is predicted to debut its “first story” someday in 2024. Absurd Marin will apparently be doing one thing new: The announcement says it is engaged on “a separate story-driven action-adventure title set in one other, as-yet-unannounced Absurd universe.”
It is not clear the place this leaves Ascendant Studios. Lower than a month after the discharge of Immortals of Aveum, Ascendant laid off practically half its workers, after which earlier this yr, only a week after saying it was “exhausting at work on our subsequent challenge,” many of the the rest had been placed on furlough. The Ascendant web site continues to be up, however there’s been no exercise on the studio’s Twitter feed since August 13—previous to which it was moderately lively, tweeting a minimum of as soon as per week or so. It appears probably that Ascendant is gone for good: I’ve reached out to the studio to substantiate, but when that’s actually the case I reckon I am not more likely to get a solution.
