Lords of the Fallen 2 is coming, but three important figures in its development aren't coming along with it.
Publisher and developer CI Games has been teasing a new Lords of the Fallen game for a while, and finally revealed the sequel to the 2023 soulslike (which itself was a re-do of 2014's Lords of the Fallen) at Gamescom's Opening Night Live this week.
It appears that CI Games CEO Marek Tyminski recently altered the course of the game, because the creative director, art director, and executive producer of Lords of the Fallen 2023 all left the studio earlier this year, according to publicly available posts.
Former Lords of the Fallen creative director Cezar Virtosu said on LinkedIn that being out of a job was a "surreal feeling" and that leaving behind the Lords of the Fallen world has been the hardest part.
"After five years steeped in dark fantasy, it became more than just a project, it was an extension of myself," wrote Virtosu. "But like Mournstead, no kingdom lasts forever."
I met with Virtosu prior to the release of the 2023 Lords of the Fallen, and was struck by his passion for the world so much that I made his enthusiasm the focus of the article: "Lords of the Fallen's creative director showed me its 'horrible pains' and 'fingers of God' and I must see more."
Lords of the Fallen executive producer Saul Gascon and art director Alexandre Chaudret also left the company.
CI Games did not return a request for comment, though Tyminski took a shot at Gascon in June, complaining that the former development lead "would've killed game support in May 2024" instead of completing the LotF 2.0 update.
Gascon declined to comment. The three developers seem to be bound to secrecy for now.
In June, Tyminski named Nathan Richardsson as senior development director in charge of Lords of the Fallen 2 and another upcoming game. Richardsson previously worked at Directive Games, a developer with a Web3 and generative AI bent, and before that was a producer at Jagex, Behavior Interactive, Ubisoft, and EVE Online developer CCP.
Lords of the Fallen 2's game director is James Lowe, who comes from support studio Fishlabs and before that was an art director at Deck13, where he worked on The Surge, The Surge 2, and Atlas Fallen. Lowe spoke about what's planned for the sequel in a recent video, describing the game as "bolder, braver, and bloodier."
Meanwhile, Tyminski has been banging on about his "zero woke" policy for the past year, which has included altering Lords of the Fallen 2023 by making its character creation body types explicitly 'male' and 'female.'
"We made a promise to keep our games free of social and political agendas, and we're sticking to it," Tyminski wrote in that June post. (I'd say that altering LotF's body types was itself politically motivated, which Tyminski acknowledged with the comment that the "DEI agenda lost.")
The development of the 2023 Lords of the Fallen was also marked by major firings and course changes. It began the hands of Deck13, was then given to Defiant Studios, and was finally made by Hexworks under Gascon and Virtosu.
Tomasz Gop, producer of the original 2014 Lords of the Fallen, said that Deck13's progress on the second game may have been slow because CI Games was focusing its resources on Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, a commercial failure. Gop was let go and the LotF sequel went to Defiant Studios, but CI Games later ended that contract, claiming the studio had produced inferior work, which Defiant denied.
It was then that CI Games formed Hexworks, and despite all that messiness, the studio made a pretty good game with Lords of the Fallen 2023. Now its leads appear to have gotten the axe, too, and Hexworks has been folded into CI Games.
Lords of the Fallen 2 is coming in 2026, according to the trailer, and presumably has been in development for a while now under the direction of Gascon, Virtosu, and Chaudret.
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