Lord of the Fallen 2 was announced six years ago, just after the launch of the first game. It was, perhaps, a little bit premature, as it's now on its third studio. Today, publisher CI Games announced that it has a new developer at the helm.
The first Lords of the Fallen was developed by Deck13 and CI Games, but for the sequel the latter set out alone. By 2017, the team had been downsized and the game's scope had been reduced. CI Games was concerned it had become too ambitious, and it was also struggling because of the poor reception of Sniper Ghost Warrior 3.
The following year, another developer was brought in, Defiant Studios, to start from scratch. At the time, CI Games' CEO Marek Tymiński said that the company was "impressed with their game concept, production expertise, and the pedigree of their developers." A year later, Defiant's contract was terminated, apparently due to the quality of the vertical slice it had produced.
"The quality of the work was lower than expected by the company," CI Games said in a press release, "as precisely described in the agreement, despite three calls to improve the quality of this stage of work."
For the fourth year in a row, there's been a significant change. Now Hexworks is developing the RPG, but this time it's a studio that's been opened by CI Games. Hexworks opened in March with a new team, though CI Games has been keeping it quiet until now, and will focus exclusively on action-RPGs like Lords of the Fallen 2.
While details on the sequel, which seems to have been started from scratch for the third time, are slim, it's apparently going to lean into the dark fantasy more and generally try to be more like Dark Souls. Well, it seemed to go all right for Mortal Shell.
CI Games also recently raised 5.7 million Euros from investors, which could help it avoid getting into the situation it found itself in back in 2017.
It's been a tough and meandering road for a sequel to a game that was just fine. It's a decent if derivative action-RPG that had some big performance issues at launch. Check out Tyler's Lords of the Fallen review to see how he got on.
