Lords of the Fallen Preview
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Eurogamer has cranked out the latest preview of Lords of the Fallen, the ambitious action RPG from CI Games and Deck 13 that they not-so-succintly call a "next-gen Dark Souls". I'd wager that there are at least a few inspirations from The Witcher in here, too, given the fact that Tomasz Gop is involved:
Then there's gameplay. "For a lot of people who are just starting with Souls, trying to learn that is like learning a chess game: block, riposte, move away, riposte. Here it's faster," he says. "I used to recall Tekken a lot, a very tactical game, but it's extremely fast paced." There are combos, sneak attacks and you can even perform the fighting game staple of attack-cancelling. "Dark Souls would never have that," he smiles.
What about difficulty? The Souls games base entire marketing campaigns around it; it's what the series is known for: being hard and killing you, over and over. "We're not afraid of stating clearly that Lords is the game that presents you with a challenge and you actually have to practice your skills - you have to make your fingers work hard," answers Gop who, as if in answer to the question, dies in the blink of an eye during his demonstration. But Lords isn't going to be punishing as Souls.
There will be shortcut ways to defeat enemies, such as by leading them onto rickety boards boarding up a deep well. You're light enough to tread on them but the hulking brute in Gop's demonstration isn't. The trade off? You don't get to collect the goodies from your enemy when it dies.
Then there's death itself, wherein lurks Souls' omnipresent threat of losing all your progress - your souls that are your currency and experience - when you die. You can reclaim them if you can get back to your corpse without dying again, but that's obviously easier said than done.
Lords uses a similar technique but the XP by your corpse slowly depletes, so you need to hurry up. Lords eases the pain, though, by allowing you to bank XP at strategically placed floating shards around the map. Too easy? "When you don't bank your XP, when you don't die, the amount of XP that you get from the next opponent grows slightly," Gop explains. "There is a multiplier on top of that that you get. It's a risk-reward."
Lords will also be kinder with environmental deaths - things like falling off ledges. "We ditched that. Not completely, but it's not going to be quite often that you can just fall off. Because of that," he adds, "the game is going to be similarly challenging but not as difficult all-in-all."
You will start the game as a relative weakling, though, and eventually become powerful through spending XP on abilities and magic, and by acquiring a host of equipment - light and heavy - that significantly affects the way you fight. There are classes, there is lots of customisation - in that regard, the games are the same.
The entire experience of Lords won't be as long as in Souls, though - a series where 60-hour game saves are pretty common. Gop finished Lords recently in around 18 hours, but he doesn't expect you will. "I don't think anybody who tackles this game for the very first time could make it in that time. I don't think that's feasible. I would say closer to 30 hours for not even an average player, but a guy who likes challenging games."
