The new Lords from the Fallen takes are designed for Elden Ring Items' massive souls-like success
"Back in the day, soul-sikes were popular. Now they're mainstream."
Important questions first: what is the deal with Lords from the Fallen's name? The first one, you'll remember, arrived on the scene the best part of the decade ago in 2014, but it was also called Lords from the Fallen - which new one isn't a remake. Or maybe it's.
Talking to Cezar Virtosu, HexWorks' Creative Director, out at GDC, I realized there is a bit more for this one. You'll probably know Lords from the Fallen (2023) was, up to just last week's big tech reveal in the Unreal showcase, originally called The Lords from the Fallen, a confusingly close name towards the original but a minimum of one that's marginally different. Now, developer HexWorks has dropped the "The" - before that there is another name too. The first plan was, Virtosu tells me, to refer to it as Lords from the Fallen: the Dark Crusade, "because this really is about the Dark Crusade, you will see it in promotions - but that felt like I was possibly making DLC."
So, he explained, then your studio dropped the subtitle and added the "The", then realized the confusion and, also, the studio actually was "utterly rebooting it - this really is Unreal [Engine] 5, none from the previous tech, none from the previous paradigms, it might only be Lords from the Fallen. It sounds meandering, but it is been a vacation to arrive here!"
Here are Lords from Fallen's fancy technical showcase, running in Unreal 5.
That's reinforced by a lot of our conversations, actually. Lords from the Fallen (2023) has been around full-time production for approximately three years - starting right because the pandemic hit, with predictably big challenges coming with this - as well as in that time it is also undergone a number of revisions. That's because this time around, its development takes place in tandem with regular bouts of community feedback - partly as a response towards the lukewarm reception of the 2014 game, which still sits in the dreaded "Mixed" user reviews average on Steam today.
This has resulted in some of Lords from the Fallen's biggest changes in the original. For one, its main character, Harkyn, is finished, substituted for the typical FromSoftware-style character creator that, as was demonstrated in my experience in a lengthy, hands-off look in the game, includes all of the usual quirks: body shapes, sliders, weird haircuts, big screens of numbers, the remainder. There's a wider selection of classes - a few standouts we had were the Black Feather Ranger and also the Pyromancer - and there is more difficulty, complexity, and scale.
With this type of strong focus on community input, though, comes the chance of losing a cohesive vision that begins with the developer. Virtosu explained how HexWorks has dealt with this - the secret is to say to yourself, "We will concentrate on these three things being perfect, which we call the 'crown system'. We have melee, bosses, and Umbra. Golden crowns. Underneath may be the other [feedback], we cannot concentrate on everything.
"Feedback will require you places… and when you see feedback that attacks your main pillars, that isn't something you need to regard, since the goal would be to pick something and over-deliver, rather than trying to [ensure] everybody can eat well."
Umbra, incidentally, is Lords from the Fallen's big twist, a core feature that can take what is otherwise a game title that looks just like a straight shot in a next-gen Dark Souls and grants it some personality of its own. In brief, Umbra is a second world that exists in tandem using the main one, visible seemingly all the time when you lift up your magic lantern, its blue glow peeling back one layer to show another, and letting you step between worlds.
It's an amazing thing in motion, feeling such as the type of mechanic that actually could only work on this fidelity - Lords from the Fallen is lavishly detailed - using the extra oomph of current-gen hardware. In the blue haze from the Umbra dimension, new routes appear, like branching paths, secret platforms, mechanisms for opening locked doors, and exploration, Virtosu tells me, has turned into a central part of Lords from the Fallen's open-but-with-gates world.
But most importantly, in Umbra world situations are effectively just even Dark Soulsier than before. Enemies tend to be more vicious, there is a winking eye within the corner from the UI that gradually opens the greater cowardly you're - by running from enemies, for example - presumably killing you outright should you constantly flee. And the environment, naturally, is plastered with gaping skulls and jumbo clumps of cartilage, those secret paths often produced from vast, hellish spinal cords stretching out from newly revealed platforms.
It's also closely associated with Lords from the Fallen's unique undertake death: you will find save points this time around, and you will place them wherever you want yourself. The catch, since that sounds rather easy, is the fact that enemies can destroy them, which they're very costly to place, and thus their use turns into a question of terrain mastery and ingenuity. Dying, meanwhile, goes into the Ubra realm where you will have a chance to fight the right path back out - or try to escape to a location that'll provide you with back instead, assuming you are able to avoid opening that eye - while dying in Umbra takes you all of the way to your previous save.
Despite that twist, though, Lords from the Fallen is maybe the nearest game I've seen to Dark Souls that hasn't originated from FromSoftware itself. Stylistically, thematically, even within the very literal sense, it's even within the wall-of-numbers RPG menus and delightfully freakish bosses, including one, backward-walking monstrosity motion-captured with a Canadian contortionist on all fours. There will be challenges here for HexWorks, not just in stepping out from the vast shadow cast this past year by Elden Ring, but to prevent a sense of derivativeness that comes from adhering so closely to its recipe.
"When we started," Virtosu said, "the golden standard was Dark Souls 3. The Dark Souls paradigms were Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne… we'd Nioh and we'd The Surge, and we'd examples. We had to complete our own thing." At this point, he explained, they asked themselves, "what would be the place where people want innovation, 3 years down the line? The combat must be orthodox and correct, I think this really is a place where we are able to innovate safely - thankfully we didn't choose mounted combat!"
"We chose our things and that we launched [development]," he explained, "now Elden Ring came striking the industry such as the first of the angry god - I mean we expected greatness, we didn't expect excellence. We braced for impact, we had the flail and all of the weapons with all of the same things," he joked, "they had the flying girl, we'd the flying girl. [But] we can't course correct to deal with something - you can't say we have to be better than Dark Souls. We can only do our very own thing, and over-deliver there.
"We were incredibly grateful to elden ring items for the reason that, back in the day, soul-sikes were popular. Now they're mainstream. And we think that with our niche and also the current gameplay, there's a place for Lords from the Fallen to thrive."
From my perspective, at least in the purely hands-off one for the time being, it appears like there'll be lots of space for it. Lords from the Fallen look big, both within the scale of their world and also the potential scale of their audience. It looks just like a big, challenging, fiercely detailed, and crucially, inventive undertaking of a dark fantasy RPG. Those things tend to complete pretty well.
