Lords of the Fallen Producer Blog and Q&A

The US PlayStation Blog is now housing a post written by Lords of the Fallen producer Tomasz Gop on the upcoming action-RPG, in which he explains some of the design decisions made with the title and provides some rather interesting new information. Here’s a snippet:

First things first: we decided that if there’s a main feature of Lords of the Fallen that will be complex and challenging, the rest should be more or less streamlined. I’m not trying to say that we dumbed down anything. Take books written by Dan Brown or Harlan Coben, for example; they’re not deprived of any intellectual value. They’ve been skillfully written for the mainstream audience, so. why not games?

Lords of the Fallen will try to tell a story without imposing it. You won’t have to remember that the Fallen God’s name is Adyr to face him. You won’t have to memorize the names of crucial NPCs to follow their plots. But I’m pretty sure some people will really want to; and that’s enough.

You can get going just from the old legend that speaks about humanity defeating its god thousands of years ago, and then taking up the belief that it can completely wipe evil out of human nature. You might dig deeper and find out that people decided to write down the codex of the most deadly sins and that anyone caught committing them will forever be marked with a tattoo on his or her face, but your game experience will not be hindered if you lack that information.

Most of the lore will be spread across the world in audio memoirs written by various inhabitants of our world. Most of the cinematics will focus on introducing players to the important enemies and combat events, while only the pivotal plot points and twists will feature movie-like scenes and camera-directed conversations. User interface and HUD will not be heavily ornamented, nor occupy unnecessary screen space.

He also took the time to answer some questions in the comments:

I love the look of this game, and your description of the gameplay systems are making me very happy. Any chance there will be some character customisation? Not just showing new armour or items on the character model but face, build etc? Skyrim has spoilt me for one character games 🙂 Can’t wait to see more.

The name, face, body and gender of our main character is set. We had to make a decision here because of storyline, and credibility we want to make it believable that Harkyn could actually wield all these weapons, wear all this armor, use that powerful magic, etc. It really had to be him.
Regarding the Skyrim thing I can assure you that there’s one thing Skyrim did really well and we’re truly looking up to. It’s the attractiveness of the fantasy (nothern harsh and wintery lands) that they nailed perfectly in our opinion. I think you will find similar moods in Lords too.

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I’m definitely interested. I just hope the challenge isn’t in Demon’s Souls/Dark Souls territory. If it is, I’ll be passing lol

Lords is a game for people who like challenge, no doubt about it. Now, having said that, if I REALLY HAD TO compare, I’d say it’s not gonna be as tough as Souls.
But that’s me, we have to agree that the real verdict will spawn from the reviews, user scores, and you guys your opinions. 🙂