Lords of the Fallen Previews

Some new previews for Lords of the Fallen have popped out today, and we’ve rounded them up here so that you can get the latest information on City Interactive and Deck13’s action-RPG.

Polygon:

As I continued fighting through the castle, putting my experience with the Souls games to use to make short work of enemies, I came across a large crystal. Gop asked me to stop here and examine it. If much of the intro of Lords of the Fallen is about being gentler than Souls games, these “shards” as he called them are where the game can get considerably harder.

“These shards are always in the main path of the player, and when you see them for the first time, they’re inactive,” Gop said. “Each one is bound to a boss. When you’ve defeated a boss, you know that one shard somewhere in the world has activated. It becomes a portal that takes you to another dimension.”

These portals will put players into difficult challenges, such as arena battles or tweaked boss encounters. Succeeding will earn you some of the best treasure in the game. “We wanted to put in a lot of optional content, and we wanted to encourage exploration and going back to cleared areas,” Gop said.

As Gop continued showing me the game, it became clear that this is a major theme of Lords of the Fallen: Main path content that is very challenging but able to be cleared by most gamers, backed up by optional challenges that are incredibly tough for those who really want to prove themselves.

Take the game’s unique approach to boss fights. After half an hour of hacking my way through the castle, I found a key and opened the way to Lords of the Fallen’s introductory boss: the First Warden. This large, heavily armored foe wielded a giant flaming sword, often bringing it crashing down in a move that shot a wave of energy across the battlefield.

One interesting element of boss battles in Lords of the Fallen is that they occur in phases. A boss’ life bar will be separated by lines in the case of the First Warden, his is separated into fourths. Each time I took down a fourth of his health, he threw off a piece of his armor. This served as both a visual sign of my progress through the fight and a hint that he was about to begin employing new attacks. In his final phase, he tossed away his shield altogether, rushing me down with non-stop, aggressive sword swings.

Videogamer.com talks about the resolution of the console versions (all the rage in gaming debates, lately):

Gop discussed the differences between the two versions in a new gameplay walkthrough, explaining that the two games were “pretty much similar,” but “probably the resolution [on Xbox One] is like 900p instead of 1080p on PlayStation 4. But apart from that there’s nothing different I would say.”

Earlier this year, Gop revealed that developer City Interactive had been striving to achieve 1080p on both consoles, but the resolution was proving “slightly tougher” to hit on Xbox One.

Finally, there are no less than three video previews, one from GameInformer, one from Eurogamer: