Lords Of The Fallen News

If you've been playing Lords of the Fallen yourself, or followed any coverage about the game since its release, you'll be immediately familiar with one particular complaint that most players and reviewers have with the game.

It has to do with the number of enemies the game throws at you at every corner, and its tendency to add in bosses you've previously fought into the mix with standard mobs. This is something I called out in our review of Lords of the Fallen, and it's an issue so widely discussed that you could see it getting changed with patches.

That's not going to be the case, however.

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My time with Lords of the Fallen started out very positive, but it was disheartening to see my opinion on it turn the more of it I played. It’s a game with some genuinely brilliant ideas, and a high-level vision of how to set itself apart from other Souls-likes. But that vision did not seem to have been shared by everyone on the team.

Lords of the Fallen is a Souls-like. If you played any of those before, you immediately expect a few basic features. Combat is stamina-based; heavier weapons/attacks use up more of it than lighter ones. Your rolls and dodges rely on the same stamina pool, and you’re given ranged options in the form of throwables, weapons like bows, and magic spells.

Wither damage is one mechanic that’s not very common among those games. Blocking does not negate damage entirely, but instead turns the portion of it received to what the game calls Wither, represented by a grey colour on your health bar. You can regain that lost health by simply landing attacks on your opponent, but take one hit, and you lose it all.

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Lords of the Fallen hasn’t had the smoothest launch. Though it previewed well, got a lot of credit for how beautiful it looks, and received a good selection of scores when the review embargo lifted, CI Games’ loyal take on the Soulslike genre has come under fire from some sectors of the internet. There were performance issues on every platform, but Xbox users had it worst, thanks to the fact the game shipped with an outdated build.

Initially, developer HexWorks put out a statement to let players know that the Xbox version will be updated "to bring it to parity with other platforms." But, as we’ve been reporting on this game, we’ve seen a couple of comments on our articles saying that players were ‘eager to get refunds’ for the Xbox version. I reached out to CI Games to ask what’s being done to keep Xbox players, in particular, on-side after this launch-period fumble.

“Since the launch of Lords of the Fallen last Friday, our incredibly dedicated team at HexWorks has worked hand-in-hand with Microsoft to release three substantial patches for the Xbox Series X/S version,” said Ryan Hill, CI Games’ senior brand director, in a statement to VG247. “As a result of these rapid actions by the team, both performance and graphical quality have vastly improved. These patches also feature a number of general gameplay and quality of life updates.”

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As a Souls-like, Lords of the Fallen's animations will be judged harshly by players in the saturated genre. Boss animations in particular tend to get the most attention, because of the amount of work that goes into them, as well as their relevance for players going through the game.

Hexworks developed the game mostly remotely, and that included the period when everyone in the world had to work from home. But animators seemingly were the most creative at navigating that new reality.

Phil R. is a 3D character animator responsible for animating the bosses in Lords of the Fallen, and mocapping various animations for creatures in the game. On LinkedIn, the veteran animator shared a clip of some of the mocapping work they did for the action RPG.

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Lords of the Fallen has officially been out for a few days, and the initial reception from players has been fairly negative. Although there's a lot to like about Hexworks' first project, not least just how next-gen it looks, the main problem everyone seems to be running into is just how poorly it runs.

Performance woes affect PC, PS5, as well as Xbox Series X/S - though the extent to which they do on each platform varies.

On Steam, the PC version started out with a Mostly Negative user review rating, though it has since gone up to Mixed, so things have evened out a bit. Performance problems, and even crashes, have been all over player complaints on the Steam forums and elsewhere.

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