Video game development is a complicated process, with triple-a titles often the product of hundreds of people collaborating to make a single product. Because of that, things can go wrong, resulting in bugs and issues being ironed out before a game launches. However, those bugs can be entertaining from time to time, and sometimes even help inspire new games entirely. Such is the case with Immortals Fenyx Rising, an upcoming title from Ubisoft.
In an interview, Immortals Fenyx Rising Game Director Scott Phillips revealed that an Assassin's Creed Odyssey bug helped inspire the idea for Immortals. "While we were developing Assassin's Creed Odyssey, I think the first, time for me, that I had a hint of what Immortals Fenyx Rising could become, was actually a bug," Phillips tells us, "As the player, you were on your ship and your ship crew was normally humans, but in this case, all the humans got turned into cyclopses, so you had a ship full of cyclopses. And it sort of, for me, kicked off this feeling of, 'Hey, that's pretty cool. We have this whole depth of knowledge that we built about Ancient Greek history, but we also have this little bit of mythology. Maybe we could go a lot deeper into this mythology.' So, after Assassin's Creed Odyssey, we got the opportunity to develop a much deeper game going into Ancient Greek mythology, and that's where Immortals Fenyx Rising comes from."
Immortals Fenyx Rising is heavily influenced by Greek mythology, but it takes a light-hearted and fantastical approach. It's easy to see how the cyclops bug would help move things in that direction, as it's a mixture of absurd and entertaining, something the game clearly incorporates into its structure. With banter between Zeus and Prometheus being common in the game, Immortals is a fair bit different than anything else that Ubisoft has done recently.
The Assassin's Creed Odyssey inspirations don't stop there, of course. Immortals features combat heavily inspired Odyssey, coupled with other elements that lend it a slight sense of familiarity. However, it's an interesting origin for the game, though not one as far out there as some might expect. Game bugs have inspired new titles for years, perhaps most famously Devil May Cry, which was inspired by a bug in Onimusha: Warlords.
Immortals Fenyx Rising launches in December, and with its open-world, non-linear nature, there are likely to be plenty of nods to other games and Easter eggs scattered around for players to find. Ubisoft has incorporated elements of its other games in new titles before, and while Immortals doesn't exactly fit in with some of the other games in Ubisoft's lineup tonally, it seems safe to assume that players will find at least some references in it.
The recent Ubisoft Forward event revealed a number of new details about its upcoming games, including new information about Immortals itself. The company has a full roster of games for current-gen and next-gen consoles, putting it in a solid position for the coming months. Of course, that all depends on how well it sticks the landing for the new games. In the meantime, fans will just have to wait to learn more.
Immortals Fenyx Rising is in development for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.