Hexworks and CI Games are working on a sequel to the 2023 action RPG Lords Of The Fallen, itself a sequel to the 2014 action RPG Lords Of The Fallen. The launch is scheduled for 2026. Will the new Lords Of The Fallen also called Lords Of The Fallen? Will it build on the exciting innovations of Lords Of The Fallen, or will it attempt to recapture the nostalgic charms of Lords Of The Fallen? Maybe in ten years we’ll create a list feature, “Lords Of The Fallen Games Rated”, with just one entry. I’m pretty sure that in ten years, generative AI plagiarism will have made everything interchangeable anyway.
The new Lords Of The Fallen – again not to be confused with Lords Of The Fallen, not to mention Lords Of The Fallen – is currently called Project 3. It will be released on a new Strategy report from CI Gamesnoted by Insider gaming. It runs on Unreal Engine 5 and features “gameplay improvements” such as “increased game mode capabilities, more commercial art style and story, increased production values,” which I would roughly translate as “greater selection of modes, an art style and story that will appeal to more players, and an overall classier look and feel with, I don’t know, catchier menu fonts and the like.” It will have a single-player campaign with full co-op for “shared progression,” and we can expect a real announcement in 2025. Oh, and Epic has gone out of their way to make it exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC. Sad trombone!
Resident RPS Soulsliker Edders wasn’t exactly sold on Lords Of The Fallen, stating that “realm-hopping magic can’t stop this Soulslike from getting on your nerves,” but he did rate it higher than Lords Of The Fallen, which Rich Stanton summarized it as “the game that’s so mediocre you don’t want to play it.” However, CI Games believes that the series has enough power. In the report, they describe it as one of the “two big evergreen franchises,” adding that the 2023 sequel accounted for 72 percent of company revenue in the first half of 2024.
CI’s other “big evergreen franchise” is the camo-faced shooter Sniper Ghost Warrior, which is set for another “major iteration” in 2027, once again running on Unreal Engine 5. CI is working with an undisclosed third-party studio on this. It will be a mix of survival game and shooter, and development has been “accelerated” by reusing a lot of stuff from two other projects, “Project Survive” – described elsewhere in the report as a “new survival genre IP” – and “SGW Next ”.
We haven’t written much about the Sniper Ghost Warrior series lately, although Alice0 (RPS in Peace) made a great pun about Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts with a smaller focus in 2018. I think the last one I played was a preview build was of Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 in… 2016? I wasn’t super excited, but on the plus side, at least I can write about several Sniper Ghost Warrior games at once without feeling like I’m the butt of the joke. Who’s first?.
Last but not least, CI Games has a “major new action RPG” from Underdog Studio, which will use “systems and architecture” from the most recent Lords Of The Fallen and whatever the next Lords Of The Fallen game is called. It’s currently in pre-production with a small team and will hopefully go into production in late 2025, at which point Hexworks should be able to help through “cross-studio talent allocation.” The game is scheduled to be released in 2028.