The rebirth of Lords of the Fallen continues.

2014’s Fallen King

In 2014, Lords of the Fallen was released. On the Wikipedia page for “Soulslike” (Souls-like games), it ranks at the top of all games except for a few titles produced by FromSoftware itself.

However, because of the game’s partial imitation of the Dark Souls series and the production team’s obsessive pursuit of difficulty, this game, which was the first to start the era of Souls-like games, also opened the magic box of “Souls-like games are full of feces”.

Nine years later, a newly reorganized production team, HEXWORKS, brought out a brand new Fallen Lords. The game’s Chinese name is differentiated by only one point, while the English name is the exact same “Lords of the Fallen”, once again abandoning its poorly received predecessor in favor of the same name, a clear sign of their determination to make a clean break for this IP.

But whether it’s the content of the game where the protagonist saves the world along the way, or the mixed reviews from players outside the game, the road to the rebirth of Lords of the Fallen still faces many challenges.

HEXWORKS, brought out a brand new Fallen Lords

Prior to its release, gamers had high expectations for Lords of the Fallen because its goodness was visible to players through the previews.

The map-based framework of the two worlds of the table is undoubtedly the most central setting of this game and the biggest feature of the game. This setting is not unique to Lords of the Fallen, except that the enhancement of the game’s explorability as well as the harshness of the map’s design is entirely conceivable when it comes to combining it with a four-way 3D Galactic City-esque map, and placing it in a crisis-ridden atmosphere of exploration.

In this regard, Lords of the Fallen’s map designers can safely and proudly say that they’ve done it all.

The maps for each level in the game are still the usual Souls-esque boxy design, with paths, trails and shortcuts stringing a level together, allowing the player to gradually expand the safe zone towards the boss room as they explore. Only on the scale of the game as a whole, instead of the conservative level-by-level boxed-in design that most games of its kind would reference, Lords of the Fallen focuses on the full-map connectivity that players remember most from the first generation of Dark Souls.

What’s wonderful about this type of map is that it doesn’t just connect the entrances and exits of each map one after the other, but allows two neighboring maps to connect and form a whole with more or less shortcuts.

When the player has not yet finished exploring this map, they will find the name of the larger map floating in the screen as they walk, unknowingly intruding on another map.

Perhaps the new shortcut opened is not commonly used, but it opens a door that “can’t be opened from this side”, and the self-satisfaction of saying “Oh, so this is where it leads” is the splash of the fulfillment of the moment’s exploration as it gushes out.

On top of that, the dual-world setting adds another dimension to the already excellent map design.

Although the setting is two worlds, it doesn’t allow for the scale of exploration to be crudely multiplied by two; in general, there’s more to the inner “shadow world” than the surface world, and a platform that was previously invisible, a ladder that wasn’t in the surface world, or a river that was previously underwater can become a necessary pathway for the player to continue onward. The path that must be traveled.

The Shadow Realm can be thought of as a large “hidden wall” area that can only be seen with props in key places. Its contribution to the explorable scale is very limited, but it adds a lot of fun to the exploration of the map in terms of connecting mechanisms, hiding shortcuts, and hiding props.

This, coupled with Shadow Realm’s unique hell-painted landscapes, runs through all of the maps with very different styles, and unifies each mini-map’s painting style from the landscape. Although this also, to a certain extent, reduces the recognizability of the map, the twofold map landscape also brings a lot of inconvenience to the player to recognize the way. From the point of view of exploration design alone, Lords of the Fallen can be ranked even in FromSoftware’s own works.

But Lords of the Fallen isn’t just a harmless tourist simulator. The aggressive design language is evident in their map design, but also in the combat that more players care about.

The first boss of Lords of the Fallen

The system carefully teaches the player a wide range of operations in the first ten minutes of the game, but only a few of them will be used regularly during the game’s progression.

When I first encountered the first boss of Lords of the Fallen, I tried two common melee playstyles in Souls games, the bounce-back and the roll, only to be met with two diametrically opposed views of difficulty.

The game’s shields are varied, but most of them have less than 50% physical defense, meaning you’ll still take more than 50% damage if you defend with a shield. It’s just that this damage is represented as Void Blood, which can be knocked out by attacking the enemy after blocking, and then lost when attacked again, similar to the blood bar mechanic in Curse of the Bloodborne.

The problem, however, is that a bounce back in Lords of the Fallen, even if it’s successful, still deducts the same amount of Void Blood as a block. Whereas enemy soldiers in the game have a visible frame slot, a successful bounce back does not cause a hard hit on the enemy nor can it interrupt its combo until it pops the empty frame slot, and the execution damage after popping a hard hit isn’t very high either. This results in a very low payoff for the risky move of bouncing back, and the risk of being cut down in one hit after bouncing an opponent’s set of combos to empty the entire Void Blood.

In contrast, there is the game’s overused evasion.

Lords of the Fallen categorizes evasive maneuvers into light, medium, and heavy based on the weight system of the equipment, but even the medium-weighted evasive maneuvers I used still outclassed all similar games I’ve experienced.

The extra-long evasive distance, the extremely short back-and-forth rocking motion, the continuous-press second dodging that you can use in the newbie tutorial, and the generous invincibility frame time all made it seem as if I’d entered a different game after I’d just tried out the bullet counter. The protagonist’s roll performance is so over-modeled that there are times when it feels like you’ve made a mistake in the timing of your button presses, but you still manage to dodge through it without any surprises.

In addition, the monsters in the game are designed to be quite “scientific”, there is no extremely counter-intuitive moves, and the frequency of the enemy soldiers’ fast and slow knives is set to be quite restrained, so there are fewer battles of wits with the computer, and a single roll can cope with the majority of the enemy’s moves, so that the challenge of the game’s bosses is not that difficult.

Large bosses with hard-to-see attack fronts are much harder in comparison.

Perhaps in an effort to maintain the high difficulty standards of Souls-like games, the production team gave limited challenge to the bosses and put the difficulty in the small groups of monsters on the path of exploration. The stacking of monsters in the game is the most criticized issue in Lords of the Fallen after its release.

Early on in the game, due to the limited variety of monsters in my opinion this issue wasn’t really highlighted, and with my years of experience with Souls-like games it still smoothed out slowly and efficiently. It was only in the mid-game that the intensity of the smaller monsters began to rise, no longer just a simple slash or two, while the number of monsters faced skyrocketed.

Coupled with the mid-game monsters also began to become more varied, fire-breathing, jumping cleave, wheel windmill, the face of different moves need to deal with more complex, and often fight to fight to take the road and escape.

At this time, the number of long-range monsters straight up also reflected, no matter where you escape to there are always a few shots of fireballs from nowhere to chase over. If the player is killed and enters the Shadow Realm, there will be more Shadow Realm monsters waiting for us, as well as the sneak attack of the blue fireballs.

It was at this moment that I finally realized the deep understanding of the production team, who claimed to be “grandsons of Miyazaki Hidetaka”, of the famous suffering sanctuary of the “Twin Bows of the King’s Castle”.

With such an intense array of monsters, the most important thing a panicked player would want to see is a life-saving archive point. The reason why players complained about the game’s severe stacking of monsters may be precisely because the game has too few effective archive points.

The reason why I say effective save points is because there are two types of save points in the game. One type has a fixed location, just like in other games, while the other is a temporary save point, which the player can use consumable items in a specific area to summon a save point. There are a lot of these specific areas, you can see one every few minutes, but the problem is that it can only exist at the same time, the old point will disappear when the new point is summoned, but the number of consumable props is extremely limited.

With this setup, the distance between many of the archive points becomes too long. Players will often run out of supplies halfway through a patient push, and then run out of food to die impatiently, and then repeat the previous action with an anxious mood, until they lose patience with a series of monsters parkour finally died in vain in the hustle and bustle of artillery fire, and naturally, they will be impressed by the endless monsters behind them.

So did the production team really not take into account the stacking of monsters in the game? I’m sure there’s no way they didn’t notice. It’s just that their vision of the game and gameplay was most likely skewed, and that’s why players are now wailing.

Beyond the normal class

After going through the one-week process, one can see that Lords of the Fallen goes far beyond the normal class of Souls’ very strong RPG attributes and characteristics of a Diablo-type treasure swiping game.

Whether it is the game’s rich variety of weapons, each monster will drop a full set of clothing, or each piece of clothing can be modulated by their own color, all make the game’s “warm” sense. Weapons can all be embedded with gems of different characteristics, and with pendants, rings, lanterns, long-range weapons and props, there are many ways to play with the performance of the protagonist, which makes the protagonist’s BUILD possibilities in theory.

In terms of projectiles alone, there are a variety of spells, physicals, and aids that are augmented by the panel.

During my personal playthrough, I actually found a solution to the stacked monster problem. In a map dominated by fire-attribute monsters, there was a huge sword hidden that could make every attack come with a Ring of Fire attack, and when the monsters gathered, using it to clear the monsters would be a lot more efficient than a normal force-sensitive huge sword. But I ended up not using it.

On the one hand, it’s because in this map, its extra fire attribute attack power doesn’t work well, and it’s not versatile in other usage scenarios, so the advantage doesn’t come into play against a single enemy. On the other hand, it’s because mid-game point-washing props are still a luxury item, and for players who are still struggling to make ends meet, they just can’t pull out a specific BUILD for every situation and target their battles.

Just because a solution exists to a problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I think the production team in the face of the problem of stacking monsters, must be the late game can frequently change the occupation, or online with more occupations with the situation taken into account, more to the RPG perspective to look at is still a class of souls game of the one-week experience, so did not go to modify these problems.

Carrying monster piles hard through blood-returning spells and blood-returning casts is also a solution, but it’s too much of an extravagance

The production team’s RPG-like mindset can also be seen in the distribution of many of the monsters and the move set.

Many of the game’s bosses, while having patterned moves, have a lot of wide-range AOEs and a lot of ranged attacks. While their moves are easy to dodge, many attack opportunities often need to be sacrificed for safety. The pace of the battle is often interrupted, and it always feels like this isn’t a boss designed for 1 player.Compared to a slow action game like Dark Souls, Lord of the Fallen’s boss design has some shades of the multiplayer bosses in MMOs instead.

From the game at first glance extremely stunning table dual world map design, can see this reorganization of the newborn production team want to do a good job “Lord of the Fallen” ambition, want to make in the class souls based on the high pursuit of their own new things. But perhaps it’s because of their radical design direction that the final product is misaligned with players’ comfort zones and high expectations.

The production team did not choose to use the safest way, towards the direction of the “Souls canned food” to set the formula to repeat the already proven to be the most secure path of the Souls game, but to try their own way. This spirit deserves to be recognized, but of course the risk of widening the gap between strengths and weaknesses is a risk they need to take on their own.

It’s just that, unlike nine years ago or the Purgatory in the game’s background, this time around, gamers are expecting more from Lords of the Fallen, and naturally, there will be more disappointment. The game currently has a poor reputation, but it’s not without redeeming qualities, and gamers who are willing to listen are always welcome.

Just a few days into the game’s release, the game released five patches in a row, which contained a large number of gameplay tweaks in addition to some hardware-related performance optimizations. Many of these tweaks were preceded by the phrase “after listening to the community’s feedback” - it seems that the production team didn’t stick to their stubbornness, but rather intended to take a low profile in the face of today’s word-of-mouth problems.

The game’s release isn’t the end of Lords of the Fallen’s rebirth, which is clearly still ongoing.