Lords Of The Fallen 2 drops new devs Defiant Studios
Shield-bashed off the project
Despite the first game being a bit rubbish, publisher City Interactive Games are insistent on making Lords Of The Fallen 2 a thing. They've also booted recently-hired developers Defiant Studios from it just one year into production. As reported (and translated from Polish) by Eurogamer, the publisher announced via a press release that their partnership was being terminated over "inadequate execution by Defiant [of] a key work stage". It seems that the publisher were unhappy with both the quality and timeliness of the project, although Defiant disagree with CI's portrayal of their company.
As covered last year by that most Prime of Alices, Lords Of The Fallen 2 was originally produced by the first game's developers, Deck13. They've since gone on to make the slightly-less-rubbish The Surge, and are hard at work on a sequel that may even be decent. This left publisher CI Games with a license with no studio attached, so they brought on Defiant Studios, a work-for-hire outfit with no games of their own, just co-credits on the likes of Just Cause 3, Far Cry 5 & Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Eurogamer talked to Defiant last year, and discovered that they'd had to restart development entirely on LOTF2.
Nice YouTube charity lad "HBomberguy" on why you maybe shouldn't care.
CI Games still reckon that they can get Lords Of The Fallen 2 done, but this may prove difficult, as they fired their own internal development team in 2017 after - per Eurogamer - the initially poor sales of Sniper Ghost Warrior 3. The publisher has since found their footing and are working on yet another Sniper Ghost Warrior game, but it's anyone's guess how they'll juggle production of that and an action-RPG that's already changed hands twice already. As for Defiant Studios, I hope they're doing okay. It's a pity that they lost the project, as this would have been their first in-house production, even if it was under license.
Amusingly, the first Lords Of The Fallen: Game of The Year Edition (it was nobody's game of any year) is currently 85% off on Steam, reduced to £3.56/€4.49/$4.49. Even if it is cheap, you probably shouldn't buy it because reasons, like Rich Stanton's review of the original.