Lords of the Fallen - the reboot of a sequel to a souls clone that nobody remembers fondly

[Back me up!]

Lol they released some community sneedpost about performance and crashing.

Fextralife is the worst going all the way back to their inception. No matter the game, they're in such a rush to fill in their wiki it's often loaded with incorrect/incomplete information. It stays that way for months if not forever.

Its seems that once you set Reflection & Global Illumination quality above Medium the Raytracing kicks in and just tanks people game unless they have a decent 3/4000 Series card. Once I set those to medium most of the stuff worked pretty well.

Also there is a dude on 4chan claiming to be a dev that moving to Unreal 5 fucked them over:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1774og3/lords_of_the_fallen_dev_says_the_game_was/

Negatives:

• Development for the game started in 2018.
• Game was originally made for UE4, the vertical slices shown in gameplay presentations were real and it was how the game was intended to look.
• CiGames and HexWorks got too ambitious and decided to upgrade to UE5 in 2022. This is shown in their marketing campaign with Collector's Edition (Im assuming it's because the game was marketed as a AAA game)
• UE5 Upgrade severly muddled the development. Lots of things had to be downgraded and cut.
• No one in the team had the experience to work properly on UE5 as it was a new engine.
• CiGames and HexWorks knew the game was unoptimized and took opportunity of the Xbox slow certification approval to release it anyways.
• Developers asked for another year of development but HexGames didn't want to risk releasing close to Shadows of the Erdtree and had to appease investors.
• Developers had to run agaisnt time to get the game functional for release.
• The PVP/co-op was working but the UE5 transition broke everything.
• Hexworks is worried with refunds.

Some Positives:

• Development Team is working hard on fixing the game.
• There are Two Expansions Planned. One which you visit a dream realm called Morpheus and the other where it expands the world/map with two warring kingdoms (says it's mostly placeholder)
• The game seems to have surpassed 1 million units sold.
• A roadmap with QoL changes over the next few months is dropping soon.
• The dev ask people to go on the Discord for complaints and support as they are listening.

 

[Asian tech support]

Its seems that once you set Reflection & Global Illumination quality above Medium the Raytracing kicks in and just tanks people game unless they have a decent 3/4000 Series card. Once I set those to medium most of the stuff worked pretty well.

Yeh I went from like 40 to between 80-100 once I turned those down.

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

I played the original, this one's definitely a huge upgrade but it's still not great.
-Runs like shit as many have said, when making my character there's a slider for face and body shape, you control it with the joystick, it lagged.
-There's also an "unlock a class early!" dlc which is very gay.
-The combat is better, the umbral shit is not, after a while inside (which is required to complete every single zone) a very powerful enemy will attack you, you can't leave without either killing it or dying because the totems to exit don't work if enemies are near, and it will be on your ass always.
-The first real zone is nothing but ledges and narrow walkways with tons of ranged enemies and enemies hiding to shove you off ledges, it was worse than my first trip through blighttown, and it's much longer.
-They spread the "bonfires" out very far, but have a system where you can plant a seed in a flowerbed to make one yourself, these spots are pretty common, but you can only ever have one active at a time.
-The stats are fine, no weird shit, weapons are fine too, the grand swords (ultra greatswords) have really good tracking and will lunge you pretty far toward an enemy you have locked on so it feels pretty good.

Doesn't have denuvo so try before you buy, but I'm not buying it at 60 bucks.

 

[Sugriva]

I played for around 6 hours and the game sucks ass. It just doesn't feel good to play. The controls are clunky, the combat is floaty, stiff, and awkward. Nothing feels satisfying. Hits on enemies don't feel good, the sound of performing a perfect parry is dull, and the lamp mechanic, while cool in concept, is just too awkward and slow to use. It feels very amateur to me. It's a huge shame because the world looks awesome and it's a big open game with huge interconnected levels and it's very cool to explore.

Also yeah, it runs like complete ass.

 

[derpherp2]

People cannot stress just how laggy the game is. Like holy shit CP2077 pre-day1 was no issue but apparently loading different characters while picking a class in this game is too much.

 

[DOUBLE_WHEEL]

I played for around 6 hours and the game sucks ass.

Did you play the original? How's it play in comparison? Sounds like it plays the same.

 

[derpherp2]

No Body Type B allowed in the monastery

Did you play the original? How's it play in comparison? Sounds like it plays the same.

It's.... faster? I guess? But not fast enough. If you've played Elden ring the beginning area is like if you were already in halligtree, there's no bonfires anywhere, and you can actually take some hits.

 

[Asian tech support]

Alright I've cleared the swamp horseback knight boss. About 8 hours in. I've been playing a paladin strength/radiance build which has been doing fine so far. Here's what I've got:

• The combat isn't that bad and I like the mobility but too many attacks have insane forward momentum that makes playing unlocked play a royal pain. On top of that, some attacks have zero forward momentum that really should have some. It's weird. I wouldn't describe the combat as floaty - DS2 is floaty - but it's nowhere near as precise as the rest of the From catalogue. I can't fathom why no one can emulate their combat because it's pretty damn simple.
• The parrying isn't satisfying although I'd be interested in how a heavy build with a greatshield plays. A lot of it is how scuffed the audio cues are.
• Speaking of the audio, it fucking breaks all the time and starts skipping and glitching after staying at a single location for a bit. It was worse yesterday but it was still happening this morning.
• The magic/projectile stance/lantern switching is awkward as fuck. I dunno why they didn't just have additional weapon slots like every other goddam soulslike and drop the bows and catalysts in there. What I would have done here is map the lamp to L3 with all the contextual controls still applying, map sprint to hold circle/B (and tap circle/B to leap while sprinting), map cycle quick items to down, cycle magic to up, and cycle left/right hands to left/right respectively. Like fucking souls. It's not hard, it's been done successfully for 15 fucking years.
• The level design is great, even the stupid scaffold area. It's probably the game's strongest asset. It's good that you can see things that you're clearly going to have to come from another area to get to. I dunno how I feel about locked doors giving a prompt about what key is required.
• I was hoping that the world aesthetic would be a cross between LotR/Berserk. So far it's not quite been that but it's not disappointing either.
• Umbral is annoying but I think it's supposed to be. There seems to be several kinds of bad shit that spawns when the eye turns red: I've seen the grim reaper guy but also got some kind of red aura that I think reduced my damage but I wasn't certain and I didn't bother sticking around long enough to conclusively find out.
• There should be a specific UI tab for the tutorial/glossary stuff or it should be under the journal, not tucked in the inventory. It's also weak that the character screen doesn't have a detailed description of what each stat means and how it breaks down. Lies of P didn't do this either and I dunno what gives.
• It's nice now the souls counter has an indicator for when you have enough to level up. Lies of P did this too. it's a nice touch that I hope these souls clones keep doing going forward.
• Performance has been mid. @Back me up!'s advice about turning down reflection and global illumination worked wonders and I've not had a hard crash or freeze but that's just me. For how it looks, it should run a lot better. To bring up Lies of P again, that game runs like butter.

It's definitely not worth $60 but I am having a good time.

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

Beat the game, got one of the three endings, which unlocks one of the three classes tied to the three endings.
I was only able to get one because I only found out about them after I cleansed a shrine, which locked me out of the other two immediately.

NG+ has no vestiges (bonfires), only seed beds which you can only have one of at a time, what kind of fucking moron thought that was a good idea? Will not ever be touching that bullshit.

 

[ZMOT]

NG+ has no vestiges (bonfires), only seed beds which you can only have one of at a time, what kind of fucking moron thought that was a good idea? Will not ever be touching that bullshit.

do you keep your shit? maybe to offset that.

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

Forgot to mention, there's a stat respec item in the game, there's only two you can find, but there's a merchant that sells them!
The merchant who sells it is locked behind an area, you get the key to that area from a boss that then requires you to immediately turn around and go find.
The boss is also standing directly in front of an elevator, and if you take the elevator the merchant instantly dies because another NPC kills them.

do you keep your shit? maybe to offset that.

You keep your stuff, but you have to backtrack a lot in the game, so you will either have to keep your only seed near where you will later have to backtrack to (good luck avoiding enemies they are 3+ in small rooms all along every single path) or go back to the beginning of the game and go through levels that take well over 20 minutes to traverse.
It's tedious and shitty, this was the original concept of the game as well, someone talked them out of it but they kept it in NG+ ensuring no one will ever play NG+

 

[Asian tech support]

NG+ has no vestiges (bonfires), only seed beds which you can only have one of at a time, what kind of fucking moron thought that was a good idea? Will not ever be touching that bullshit.

Can you at least warp back to the hub?
God, what a dumb decision. I'm usually a fan of NG+ switching things up a bit or optional difficulty stuff like the Company of Champions or rejecting Kuro's charm/the bell demon, but this is too much.

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

Can you at least warp back to the hub?
God, what a dumb decision. I'm usually a fan of NG+ switching things up a bit or optional difficulty stuff like the Company of Champions or rejecting Kuro's charm/the bell demon, but this is too much.

Yes, the hub is the only active vestige in NG+

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

There doesn't seem to be a level cap.
Level cost caps at 757,764 each.

Past 99 you don't get any weapon scaling either, just infinite defense/resistance increases.
HP, mana, stamina and carry weight also have a hard cap.

Past 5k+ defenses you just shrug off damage from even end game areas.

https://streamable.com/fvsgke

Not sure why anyone would level up that much, doing multiple ng+ would drive someone mad I think.

 

[Asian tech support]

Not sure why anyone would level up that much, doing multiple ng+ would drive someone mad I think.

"Leveling to 9999 in the tutorial area CHALLENGE"

There is a spot in pligrim's perch where you can afk on a ledge while in umbral and the reaper guy will continually spawn and fall to his death leaving behind infinite souls and umbral scourings.

 

[11 Herbs and Spices]

Leveling to 9999 in the tutorial area

I remember seeing YouTube videos of that a while back that I never bothered to watch. What in the fuck was ever the point since I assume it would need to be some form of tool assisted or years.

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

Some boss weapons have some "hidden abilities" it seems.

You have to do the Dark Crusader questline, then you have to not kill the Lightreaper until he's in Upper Calrath, and then you have to die against him so you can summon the Isaac NPC summon and kill the Lightreaper that way.
If you kill the Lightreaper any other way you can't do it.

This one requires Pieta's sword and the last boss in the Umbral Ending's sword.
It's not clear what unlocks it, some people were given the sword by their friend early in and were still able to trigger it.

Lightreaper's one is basically useless because you can only do it either in the very last zone of the game, or in NG+

 

[SpellforceFan]

Got a solid 2h in before refunding for following reasons:

• Absolutely shit performance (RTX 2070 SUPER). Even with the trick described above, it struggled to maintain 60FPS in certain areas (medium settings except reflection and illumination at low), whereas Cyberpunk 2077 on high easily stays at 60 at all times.
• Controls are too complicated for an allegedly action game, I was throwing gang signs on my gamepad to do simple shit. Compare pretty much any FS Souls game (excluding ER), where everything except jumping is intuitive.
• All of the soulslike cryptic, pompous and loldeep lore shit, without any appeal. Also couldn't give a flying fuck about any NPC I've met - even the worst Souls titles have at the very least cute waifus, like Emerald Herald from DS2.
• Why the fuck do I have to level an unrelated to my build combat attribute to reveal item lore? This ain't a cRPG.
• Not as slow as the first LotF, but still too sluggish and sometimes unresponsive. Committing to a move in ER feels much better than committing to a move in LotF. Getting eurojank vibes from that title, which isn't necessarily a bad thing seeing how only European game devs try to innovate, but this is allegedly an AAA title, so it should be more polished.
• First real area is just blighttown nailed to the side of a wall over an abyss, fuck that. Why do those devs insist on gravity being the enemy in an action game? It's like adding jumpscares to a precision platformer.

Refunded the second I hit Pilgrim's Perch. I would have added cryptic and counterintuitive weapon unlocks to the list as well - I'm fine with game rewarding player for no-hitting a boss or some other feat that shows off player's skill, but purposefully dying just to get a better weapon is retarded.

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

• Absolutely shit performance (RTX 2070 SUPER). Even with the trick described above, it struggled to maintain 60FPS in certain areas (medium settings except reflection and illumination at low), whereas Cyberpunk 2077 on high easily stays at 60 at all times.

It's because the game uses unreal engine 5, a new and barely optimized shit engine compared to the red engine
By the way cdprojekt is dropping the red engine and using unreal 5 from now on

 

[Asian tech support]

It's because the game uses unreal engine 5, a new and barely optimized shit engine compared to the red engine
By the way cdprojekt is dropping the red engine and using unreal 5 from now on

Maybe it's negative news bias but I've never heard anything positive about UE5. Never. It's always horror stories about how unbelievably shit it is to work with and the results seem to speak.