The sleeper hit from Deck13 Interactive CI Games is getting a sequel. CI Games has confirmed that Lords of the Fallen 2 is coming for home consoles and PC but it won't be arriving until 2017. Also, Deck13 won't be returning to helm the development of the title.
Eurogamer is reporting that Lords of the Fallen has managed to sell around 900,000 copies across the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and the PC. The success of the game has prompted CI Games to start exploring ways to bring the sequel to life.
They don't give a reason why, but it's mentioned that Deck13 Interactive won't have any part of front-lining the development for the sequel of Lords of the Fallen. Instead, it's mentioned that multiple partners will be stepping in help out. CI Games' CEO Marek Tyminski commented about the upcoming game,telling Eurogamer...
We are not working with Deck 13 right now, we are starting the project, we start from the concepting, but we definitely will be working with a lot of partners.We had our internal team, we were responsible for keeping the vision, and responsible for many critical decisions on the project. And obviously we're also responsible as a publisher, for marketing and all that stuff. But a lot of big production was outsourced
It's interesting that we're seeing the publisher basically step forward and say that they have other developers who will be taking over the project. It reminds me of when producers have the rights to a film and fire the director and crew to bring on a new team to bring the film to life the way they envisioned it.
However, Lords of the Fallen, to be a brand new IP, garnered quite a bit of positive feedback and a lot fair reviews. Of course, it was oftentimes compared to Dark Souls by fans but most people appreciated the hard-nosed approach to the dungeon crawling experience with an interesting combat system and a varied selection of unique weapons.
But according to Tyminski, Deck13 and CI felt it best to part ways, stating...
We have spoken about certain things we could probably do after the release of Lords of the Fallen but at the end of the day we came to the conclusion, both sides, that it won't happen, and as far as I know they have another project, and I wish them luck. We have very clear thinking on how we want to make Lords of the Fallen 2 and we have a very good idea.
He mentions that they learned not to give any concrete release dates too early so instead of talking about release dates Tyminiski just makes it known that the game will arrive in 2017.
I do find it a little suspect that a game can go from its conceptual design phase to a full fledged product within the span of just two years, especially after the original developers have parted ways from the project.
When reusing assets or copying over certain design prototypes it would make sense that a sequel could get churned out so quickly, but according to Tyminiski they're changing up how they're doing the production for the sequel of Lords of the Fallen to supposedly make production “more efficient”.
The CEO of Deck13 also mentioned that at one point they had a hundred Chinese artist working on the original Lords of the Fallen, and the outsourcing was one way to speed up the development...
At a certain moment of time, in China, we had more than 100 artists working on Lords of the Fallen. So what you see right now from Lords of the Fallen, a lot of that was created in China. It's a great experience and we learn a lot - what went well, what went really not so well - and we will be keeping that model for the future, including for Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3.
So apparently they'll continue to have the Chinese procure art assets for them while they contract another development studio to actually design the game. It's an interesting way to go about development.
I just hope that next Lords of the Fallen game is a proper successor to the original. It has a lot of potential if the brand is handled properly, so we'll see what CI Games has in store for gamers when 2017 rolls around.
