Lords of the Fallen 2 Team Downsized

Lords of the Fallen is a Souls-like action-RPG developed by Deck13 Interactive and CI Games. After releasing Lords of the Fallen, Deck13 moved on to The Surge, a sci-fi RPG that has recently been released. CI Games, however, continued work on the Lords of the Fallen IP and has been busy with the game’s sequel. And now, according to Eurogamer, that sequel is further away than was originally planned – the game’s executive producer, Tomasz Gop was laid off after working on the game for two years, along with a general reduction in scope, team size, and budget.

Here’s a bit on that from Eurogamer’s interview with CI Games’ CEO, Marek Tyminski:

“We have really high ambitions for our games in the future but it doesn’t mean that they have to be the scale of the current blockbusters,” added Tyminski.

“The market is really changing, because you see some major releases, the real blockbusters, doing great numbers, but then you have games that are called triple-A but in fact they’re not triple-A by today’s standards – maybe they were by three year’s ago standards – and they are suffering by not really selling as many units as anyone projected.

“Definitely Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 is one of them but there are several examples, even lately – without me telling you which games I’m talking about there are definitely several examples. So the market is changing, it’s consolidating among the largest releases.

“Considering that,” he went on, “I don’t see CI Games being able to, in the near future, raise even more the production budget and marketing budget and really being able to compete at that blockbuster level. But definitely the studio’s ambitions, and the people who are working for CI, we definitely want to make great games.”

Lords of the Fallen 2 is still on the cards but it sounds like there’s a lot to do and not a lot of people to do it. “We have a very small team working on Lords of the Fallen sequel,” Tyminski said.

CI Games is currently looking for partners like Deck 13, the German studio that co-developed Lords of the Fallen 1 – and more recently released The Surge – to get production up and running.

Nonetheless, Tyminski was optimistic the game could arrive within two years.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a couple of years away,” he said. “We’ve been working quite a lot on Lords of the Fallen 2, we really did a lot. It’s really finding the best teams who can work on that game together, and when we have that setting, we pretty much know what we want to do.”