Lords of the Fallen is a "challenging" PC and next-gen consoles action RPG

[wraggster]

Lords of the Fallen will be "a challenging game" - an RPG a bit like Dark Souls but for PC, PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox.CI Games, the company behind Sniper: Ghost Warrior, is in charge, although it's a separate team doing the honours - most of the work is being done by experienced German studio Deck 13.Promisingly, Lords of the Fallen will have been in development for two years come September. "It's a hardcore game, so we spent a lot of time prototyping it," executive producer Tomasz Gop - once the face of The Witcher 1 & 2 - told me at Polish event Digital Dragons.The aim is to get it out at some point next year."It's a challenging game, action RPG, which means a lot of advanced combat," he explained. "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."Yes that means trial and error-style gaming, yes that means skill-based gaming and yes that means the game will be hard.It sounds like the next Xbox will be always-online"What do I think? Very brave, so to speak, decision from Microsoft. Still, the question is whether or not somebody had to do it sooner or later. I'm not personally worried about it myself because as a player it's doable at my home. Even looking at countries like Poland ... there are people who do not have internet, but probably most of them know that it wouldn't even make sense in their case to own a current-gen console, because without the internet you have like half of it [the experience].
"I don't expect it to be that big of a deal, personally. Still, I'm not [an] advisor on that - if it was up to me I probably wouldn't do it so early."

"Yes. Yes. Yes, yes," Gop emphatically stated on that latter point. But harder than Dark Souls? He's not sure, apparently it's a game that needs to be played to be understood. "It's one of these games that feels way better than it looks," he said, "not that it's going to look bad".Not at all; working on a multi-platform PC and next-gen console project has been "way better" than a PC and current-gen project, he said. "It's way more comfortable." And the new machines can achieve more. "The specs are pretty much known," he said. "It's gonna have a lot of things the previous generation didn't have: all those eye-candy elements like DX11, tessellation, anti-aliasing," and at no cost to gameplay."I can't talk too much about the next-gen Xbox," he added, "but I don't think a lot of people [are] going to be surprised. I don't think it's going to be huge news what's inside, no - seriously."He could talk about what 8GB of GDDR5 RAM in PS4 meant for Lords of the Fallen, though. "Way more richer detail on all of the assets," he said. "For example, I couldn't even imagine making a tessellated game on the current generation of consoles. It might even be one of the biggest gaps. And on the next ones [consoles] it's going to be standard, in my opinion. And you just can see more on the screen right now, because it's gonna fit and the memory's gonna be fast."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-22-lords-of-the-fallen-is-a-challenging-pc-and-next-gen-consoles-action-rpg