Imagine walking into the offices of CD Projekt RED every morning as the guy who led The Witcher 2 to victory. Now imagine leaving those offices to start all over again somewhere else. Who does that?
Tomasz Gop does that. He’s joined Sniper: Ghost Warrior types City Interactive as executive producer of Lords of the Fallen, a “challenging” new action RPG. I’m never quite sure what somebody means when they say ARPG – Diablo, Dead Island or Dark Alliance – so let’s delve into the trailer and work it out.
Nuke-hammers! Don’t know about you, though, but I’m still none the wiser on the genre. Better reach for some of CI Games’ own words, which include “Dark Souls”, “Borderlands” and “Tekken”.
“It’s a challenging game, action RPG, which means a lot of advanced combat,” Gop told Eurogamer in June. “When you walk through a location, and you have to fight 10 enemies, that takes around an hour.
“When you fight in Mortal Kombat, when you fight in Tekken, that’s why it takes so long – Dark Souls is probably a strong reference as well. But we’ve done a lot of things differently. For example, we have a skill tree. I would call Borderlands here, because we’re gonna have something like action skills in the game, so classes, stuff like this.
“I would say Dark Souls, I would say Borderlands in terms of the experience of developing your character.”
It’ll be a third-person direct control affair, then, with an “advanced” combat system and robust set of a skill trees. And here the spectre of Geralt raises his grey head: players will find a world whose Gods have failed it, and a people divided between accepting and resisting an “unstoppable supernatural force”. We’ll have to navigate that landscape and make a series of decisions that will alter the world, the character, and the plot’s rudder.
“Our team is building Lords of the Fallen specifically for players who enjoy taking on huge challenges, where the odds are stacked against them,” said Gop in a new statement. “From the very beginning, Lords of the Fallen will intrigue and satisfy players’ hunger to explore each corner of a brand new world, freely customize and build their own character and take down some of the most epic enemies ever seen.”
Lords of the Fallen can be sat on your PC by the end of 2014 if you want it to be, which in the scheme of things is dead soon. Are your interests suitably piqued?