Lords of the Fallen Interview

There’s an interview with Lords of the Fallen creative director Jan Klose up on Wired, in which we hear more about the public’s comparisons to Dark Souls, the size of the game world, its influences, and more. Here are a couple of questions and their answers to whet your appetite:

What would you say is the biggest difference between Lords of the Fallen and its peers?

We have a story that you can experience. In a nutshell, there was a huge battle 8,000 years ago. Humankind fought and defeated their own god and, in an attempt to break free, this god smashed his hand through the earth. The stories go that you can see the fingers of the god on the horizon, as this great mountain range. That’s a legend for the people in this world. After thousands of years, creatures of old reappear, attack people and take over the cities. People have no idea how to fight these monsters. As a measure of last resort they take prisoners from their cells and the hero from our story, Harkyn, is one of these prisoners, the worst of them all.

People get their sins tattooed on their faces and this guy’s face is covered! So he did a lot of bad stuff and it’s up to players what to do with the freedom he was given. He can follow the dark side and do bad things, or he can try to redeem himself. He’ll never be a jolly fellow and he’ll stay a dark character but you can shape this as you play. The story’s not thrown at you with cutscenes though — you have to come to the story, it doesn’t come to you. You can understand and connect the dots through audio notes and people you can talk to. There’s even storytelling in the environment. When you go into a room, you can piece together what happened before you got there by seeing what’s lying around, what’s on fire, if someone died there. So there is a story there, one with a spectacular ending, but it’s up to the player to shape that ending in one way or another. There’s one story, one hero, but you can customise him.

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Why do you think the genre of difficult action RPG has exploded recently?

We think there’s a lot of space regarding difficult but not punishing action RPGs. There are a lot of gamers who like this kind of thing but they feel that the difficulty is just too much and they need to keep replaying things for a day or so, or they make the wrong decision in the game and need to redo forty hours of gameplay. Some people love it but there are lots of people who get frustrated by that. Myself included!

We’d like to do something that’s not really punishing when you fail. You will fail but you should learn why you failed and have some different tactics to try. You will know how to do it and you won’t need to replay hours of gameplay to have that experience. It’s an immersive experience where you need total focus to play it, but you’re not punished for slip ups.