Petroglyph Releasing Rise Of Immortals This Spring

Developer Petroglyph Games has announced Rise of Immortals, a free-to-play, "multiplayer online battle arena" game designed for both core and casual players, which will ship for PC this spring. The company is already taking applications for the title's upcoming beta. Rise of Immortals is set in the same world as Guardians of Graxia, Petroglyph's fantasy-based board/card-based game released for PC last October, but it takes place 300 years after the events in that title. It takes a different action-strategy approach, too, offering Defense of the Ancients-style (DotA) gameplay. The Las Vegas-based studio points out that the new title adds social features to the Defense of the Ancients formula, such as persistent character progression for players' Immortals (the game will launch with 12 Immortals, with more planned afterward), as well as persistent skill trees for customizing and upgrading Immortals. Rise of Immortals will also feature a social hub in which users can show off customized Immortals, chat, browse leaderboards, shop, manage friend and guild lists, and more. The meat of the game, though, will be in its cooperative Player-vs-Environment and Player-vs-Player (up to 5 vs 5) scenarios. The new title's announcement comes just a month after publisher UTV True Games took over the development of Mytheon from Petroglyph. UTV previously filed a lawsuit against the developer for failing to complete and launch Mytheon by November 2009 as initially agreed, or by the rescheduled date of February 2010. "Many people at Petroglyph are huge fans of MOBA [multiplayer online battle arena] gameplay, so developing Rise of Immortals was truly a passion project for the studio," says Petroglyph's Steve Wetherill, executive producer for the game. He adds, "We recognize that there can be a high barrier to entry in current MOBA games on the market, and we wanted to expand the genre with a title that offers new features that will appeal both to current fans, as well as those who are new to this type of game."