Masks and Amber: An IMMORTAL design blog

Greetings, dear friends!

Welcome to our first Developer Blog of 2025. It’s been a hot minute since we last talked about the design decisions that go into Gates of Pyre, so we are taking this opportunity between playtests to give you an update on our fifth (and sixth) immortals.

Before we do so, I should probably go over the Immortal system, its history, and why we believe it can make a significant contribution to the RTS genre. Let’s get into it.

The History

As many of you know, SunSpear originated in the StarCraft II modding scene. Taking the lessons we had learned from StarBow, the Community PTR mod: OneGoal, and TheCore, we set about trying to build a game that combined the strengths of real-time strategy with the advantages of the rising MOBA genre. All of us had played DOTA and LoL extensively and in those games, we saw many lessons that could be applied to RTS. Specifically, MOBAs had a face that casual and midcore players could associate with (both emotionally and with a particular play-style within the game’s ecosystem.) Additionally, the kits provided by MOBA heroes/champions formed an intricate matrix of combinations, allowing for elaborate team compositions and deep strategy that only grew with the addition of new characters.

Of course, RTS wasn’t unaware of this “innovation.” WarCraft III put leveling hero characters as the centerpieces of a player’s army. However, in our experimentation we found that the design pressures exerted by permanent hero units are extreme and ultimately demand an enormous amount of content be built around them in order to deliver the fantasy alongside satisfying and fair gameplay. We tried many ways of porting hero units into a modern big army context, but none of them worked. It was only when we began approaching these heroes as a commander (like the gods of Age of Mythology), that things started to click. Commander abilities let the player intervene in a dramatic and memorable fashion without taking the focus away from smashing armies together. At least, that was the theory; with a mechanic that touches so many parts of an RTS, the devil was always in the details. So, we had to test. Mind you, this was years before Legacy of the Void brought us top-bar abilities, we had to hack that stuff in! Looking back, I believe R&D around this Immortal system was our second biggest time investment (behind finding the balance between accessibility and depth of play.)

This resulted in our SCII mod “Vanguard” featuring a growing number of commanders leading their various factions into battle. In a nod to League, we gave commanders signature passives and special researches for their troops. Ultimately, this was expanded to commanders getting their own special unit, a “vanguard,” as a part of their kit. Once we began work on Gates of Pyre in the Unreal Engine, we found that expanding this from just a single unit to two units really made each Immortal feel distinct. Sure, it was more time-intensive and costly, but the jump in quality, mechanical differentiation, and thematic resonance was well worth it.

Advantages of the Immortal System:

1. With a slew of unique abilities and two unique units, each immortal feels like a “choose your own expansion pack.”
2. The Immortal system gets almost all of the juice of MOBA abilities with very little of the readability and onboarding issues.
3. Once a faction is built, new Immortals can keep things fresh for relatively little cost.
4. Given that the new content is limited to two units, three to five abilities, and a passive, there is tons of design space along with enough levers to fine-tune balance on an immortal to immortal basis.
5. Immortals give the game wider appeal, providing players with characters that they could care about. You aren’t just a faceless commander, you are a leader of your chosen nation.
6. For the IP and setting, Immortals help expand monolithic factions into more nuanced and interesting civilizations, by embodying various philosophies, ideologies, and religious concepts each with their own distinct interests. The factions felt more like real forces in a world rather than a set of game pieces or a sports team.

Challenges Faced:

1. MOBA heroes have very specific roles and archetypes that they were built within, which don’t always translate neatly into a game built around large army battles.
2. Immortal abilities had to walk a careful line between feeling powerful without invalidating player agency. Finding the sweet spot was often tricky. Ajari’s “Salvation” ability treads close to this line.
3. For an Immortal to shine, you need to have most, if not all of the faction mapped out before you can build on “top” of it. This means there are difficulties designing Immortals in parallel with a faction.
4. Immortals are more resource-intensive to make than a MOBA hero. Each Immortal along with its two unique units take more work to make than a single hero in a MOBA between animations and voice acting.
5. To feel impactful, Immortals needed to show up early and often on the battlefield. This effort is still ongoing and you will likely see more of it later this year.

It will not come as a surprise that overcoming these challenges took a great deal of time and we had to reinvent our workflow to account for them. We had to examine and ultimately abandon a few of our sacred cows. If we could go back, there are a number of things we would do differently, but the core vision for Immortals and vanguards would stay the same.

The Anatomy of an Immortal:

When a faction is built out, we populate it with at least three Immortals to ensure we are covering a good spread of themes, resonant personalities, a diversity of shape-language, distinct play-styles, and difficulties.

Ideally, with each faction, we want an easy, intermediate, and advanced Immortal (with regards to their initial difficulty to play, or skill floor). Additionally, we want each Immortal to focus on a particular aspect of what a faction “wants” to do, such as charging the enemy, skirmishing around objectives, or relying on combined arms to win the day. Orzum for example, wants to claim and hold important positions with a combination of large men in armor and his various abilities (including but not limited to your opponent’s natural), whereas Ajari really wants you to steamroll your opponent via casting an army of the faithful into the fires of battle, then using your abilities to save them from certain death.

In some cases, an Immortal will play with something that the faction normally doesn’t interact with. Q’rath for example, does not use stealth as a general rule. Say, that brings us to the reason you actually read this article…

Immortals #5 and #6:

While Jora: The Iron Republic is still under construction, we are in the late stages of building out our fifth and sixth Immortals: one for the Q’rath Empire and one for the Aru Root Witches. Each of these characters round out their respective rosters and subvert their factions’ assumed play patterns. Here is what you can expect (and some trivia):

1. The Aru Immortal offers a slower positional play-style and combines a number of fan favorite mechanics and unit designs from famous RTS titles, mixed together with a few new ideas.
2. The Q’rath Immortal features subtly, stealth, and mind games as core parts of their war doctrine. Their units are more nimble and less durable than what Q’rath players have come to expect. Xol will have competition.
3. The Aru Immortal’s core design elements went all the way back to our very first draft for the Aru faction back in 2018!
4. The Q’rath Immortal was one of our first truly “top-down” designs where we weren’t just trying to fill out the faction’s design space, but actively looking for crazy ways to make players feel like they were this sadistic, inquisit-[THIS INFORMATION HAS BEEN EXPUNGED BY THE IMPERIAL MINISTRY OF VIGILANCE]
5. The Aru Immortal shows a more “tender” side of the Root Witches. If you like gardening, and meandering fables, this Prophet is right up your alley.
6. The Q’rath Immortal taught us to be less prescriptive in our approach to design and “just follow the cool.” This resulted in something we had never tested before: a “dummy-ultimate.”
7. The Aru Immortal has a summon that the playtesters have thoughtfully named “Steve.”
8. Both Immortals have more “playful” personalities than their peers. Expect black humor, ponderous stories, and the occasional eye-watering pun.
9. The dialogue and interactions these guys have may be some of the better writing I have done so far for Immortal.
10. A pulled unit will be making its triumphant return as a vanguard for one of the Immortals

So… When are they coming out?

Wouldn’t you like to know? 🙂

In all seriousness, we are hoping sooner rather than later. Immortal #5 is just waiting on a few key components, including some voice acting and a few animations.

There is significantly more work to be done on Immortal #6. We will update you as we get into striking distance.

Outro

Thanks for joining us on this brief foray into Immortal design! We are excited to share the fruits of our labor with you in the not-so-distant future! (And don’t worry, Skirmish mode vs A.I. is on our to-do list)

Much love
Dylan & the SunSpear Team