Lords of the Fallen

I was reminded of Lords of the Fallen's existence once again when it was included in a Polish Games sale on GOG few months back. I thought that was a bit odd: isn't Deck13 Interactive German? Was the game published by a Polish company or something? Yes, as it turned out. The publisher CI Games were also a co-developer of this Dark Souls style third person action roleplaying game and have also founded a new subsidiary Defiant Studios for its sequel.

The Surge's fantasy predecessor

You can definitely see Lords of the Fallen was the game Deck13 made before The Surge. There are a lot of similarities with the two games such as the hefty movement, many practically identical animations, as well as the kind of terrible writing. Having dialogue options feels so gratuitous in action and exploration focused games like this; I'd rather have the characters say their pieces without you having to press buttons. And then you have the same side quest choice pitfalls as in The Surge games. It's often impossible to guess the consequences or if there even is an actual consequence.

There's a character called Yetka who gives you little quests throughout the game. The payoff for her story was astonishingly unrewarding. You get no in-game benefits and are just left with questions and one slide in the game's tapestry ending. She's there along the main story but she's not really related to it at all. Like, is she there just to have at least one female character in the game?

You play as Harkyn, a warrior imprisoned for something but now freed by monk Kaslo to stop Rhogar Lords from invading the world from another dimension. You start off by picking Strength, Faith, or Agility focus and one spell school from three (each with four spells). You can technically beat the game without spells but they can -- and will -- make things quite a bit easier. You want at least one spell point spent in your chosen school's first spell which is Prayer. It creates a statue to distract enemies and -- more importantly -- something to put on a pressure plate to keep treasure-guarding doors open for you.

I chose the Strength focused Warrior starting class and Deception spell school. Deception's final spell is Shift which makes you invisible and increases your next attack's damage by a large percentage (1000% weapon base damage at rank 3 according to the rather barren Lords of the Fallen wiki). It works very well with the slow-ass Strength-based weapons of the game. The spell won't hide you from enemies who have already seen you but you still get the damage bonus even in boss fights provided you get your attack to go off without being hit and/or interrupted first. I didn't even get to see what the game's final boss actually does on my first run because I ended the fight so quickly, basically two-shotting the boss.

Like in The Surge games, each boss drops a special weapon if you beat them in a certain way although in most cases the special way is probably the default way in Lords. The first boss's special requirement is you not taking any damage during the fight. That was a big challenge for me; it took many tries before I got the boss's moves down. I think it was about getting in terms with the game's feel too.

I found the boss's weapon drop aptly named after all that: Persistence. The sword turned out to have been worth the effort too: it made the early game a lot easier for me. The special version sends a shockwave (by spending your Magic bar) on one-handed heavy attacks which allows you to soften or finish enemies off from a distance. Later on I developed a bit different approach and didn't find the sword's ability as useful anymore.

Another useful special boss weapon is Uras polesword that is dropped by Infiltrator if you kill it quickly enough (and you probably will). On a two-handed heavy attack the polesword creates a small pool of healing. With them you can heal 'your ass' outside of combat without having to quaff your potions. Thus you avoid having to refill them as often at a save point -- an action that resets your experience multiplier. (Kaslo can refill your potions once per every story section for no multiplier loss.) Solace school's Shelter spell also heals you but I think it's not percentage-based like Uras's pool, possibly being slower if your maximum health is high.

Lords doesn't have convenient medbays to respawn enemies like in The Surge. Instead you have to leave and re-enter an area. The game has short loading times though -- a bit too short in fact as I rarely had the time to read the gameplay tip on them.

I've seen multiple comments complaining about the game's shield-wielding enemies being too difficult. Luckily I also saw a tip to use shield charge to stagger them. That followed by a sprint attack -- or jump attack like the game calls it -- makes them one of the easiest opponents although your build may affect how successful the technique is. The bigger shield-wielders need to be jogging at you for your shield charge to stagger them.

I started using the shield charge + jump attack combo against every enemy. The jump move is the fastest attack for otherwise extremely slow greatswords -- my playthrough started to resemble my Surge run in a big way funnily enough. A follow-up light attack is often fast enough to use after the jump attack too but you're likely to run out of energy, having no way to avoid getting hit in turn if the enemy's not dead after that.

Exploit saves to fight randomness

I can see why Deck 13 made The Surge games use autosaving instead of manual like in this one. Manual save points being the only time the game saves (besides when dying) opens a window to lose a lot of progress if you forget to do it. However, it also allows you to abuse the system to your benefit which is maybe against the nature of a game like this. You can exit back to the main menu to avoid having your experience multiplier reset from dying, or keep reloading your save until a sealed rune breaks to the one you want.

On NG+ and NG++ you also have a chance to get an attribute point shard from gear chests you opened on your first go. Having a high Luck score increases the chance (85% at Luck 30 according to the wiki) but you can also just reload your game and open the chest again if you didn't get an attribute shard. Of course you have to run to the chest from a save point each time but the Shift spell makes it more convenient.

(Luck's other use is increasing the amount of consumable drops from enemies but they drop them plenty enough at 2x experience multiplier anyway. Luck shouldn't be increased until NG+.)

Attribute point shards are desirable because increasing attributes, i.e. leveling up, with experience becomes slower and slower, each consecutive point requiring more experience. (Experience can also be spent on spell points but that's a complete waste -- eventually you will have more spell points gained solely from spell point shards than you have spells to use them on!) Towards the end of my NG+ run I noticed (way too late) that consuming an attribute shard also increases the experience cost for the next point the same way if you had used experience to buy a level. (The Surge did this smarter by having the consumables just give you experience (scrap) instead of points; you don't have to worry about when to use them.)

A handful of levels probably won't matter, especially if you only play through Lords just once. But if you want to truly optimize your NG++ run attribute-wise, you will want to save all of your shards until leveling up with experience becomes too slow. Where that point is, depends on you. You have to remember though that waiting for too long means the shards' benefit on your run will be short-lived. But when you finally do use them is when acquiring experience becomes pointless.

I started a whole new run after finishing my first NG+ -- I guess because not having my attributes optimized bothered me so much. I also found Lords of the Fallen to be oddly compelling, easy to just launch and continue playing.

I chose to spend my shards when you first meet the smith (on NG++) which is about a third way through the game after 3 bosses (or 4 if you want to kill the one in the catacombs before it's needed). I reckoned that at that point, having access to crafting again, I could switch out the luck runes from my armor since with high enough strength I could wear the heaviest stuff without weight capacity boosters. By then I was at level 85 with 71 shards saved and the next attribute point would have been worth about 300k experience. (In comparison, my first NG+ run finished at level 122.) At the very end of this more optimized run -- you can't go past NG++ -- I was at level 224 and the next attribute point would have cost over 1 billion experience. The game's GUI clearly wasn't designed for such high numbers because the values got overlapped.

Grinding pays off

Attributes have diminishing returns -- to my great disappointment. Strength, for instance, started giving only 1 more damage per point. Interestingly enough though, Vitality seemed to work the opposite, granting more health per point the more points were spent on it. Finally having more than the starting health made it a lot easier to recover from mistakes in combat.

I had Faith at 21 as you need that much to get Shift to rank 3 but with the shards I upped it to 40. That allowed me to equip Between, a with-Faith-scaling greataxe, which seemed to have the highest non-physical damage of all the weapons. You need that against ghosts who are immune to physical attacks. Previously I had used Heirloom hammer (requires Faith 10) which with Shift was adequate. However, the same Ancient Labyrinth DLC the Between axe is from also has a tougher immune-to-physical enemy type. Even with Shift, Heirloom was never enough to one-shot them because the hammer has 0% attribute scaling and no rune slots: it always does the same amount of damage. With Between I was finally able to kill the tougher ghosts easily.

At the end of NG++ I had my Strength at 120. Despite the diminishing returns it was enough to one-shot the final boss using Shift, Peacemaker greatsword socketed with a flawless luck rune (+4% attribute scaling), and Amulet of the Betrayer (+40% damage dealt and you take 5 damage with each swing). The ending cutscene freaked about that slightly and played with camera stuck in the middle of the area where the boss is supposed to throw you down to.

You can most likely one-shot other bosses along the way too if you're more heavily specced towards damage. I had too many points spent on Endurance: I wanted more energy and weight capacity -- heavy weapons and armor are heavy!

Better than I was led to believe

Lords of the Fallen is generally panned for simply doing everything Dark Souls does but worse. Even now it's sitting at Mixed user rating on Steam. I can't attest to the comparison since I haven't played FromSoftware's games. All I can say that I enjoyed Lords, maybe even more than both of Deck13's later games even if they have more refined gameplay.

I definitely like the visuals and the fantasy setting more than The Surge's scifi industrial/urban world. Great use of cloth physics in environmental decorations and cloaks too. The maps aren't as maze-like either nor do they loop back as often. There are some tight corridors though which aren't great for the camera when you are locked to an enemy that gets close to you. But playing with a controller you still want to use locking as otherwise your shield will most likely be facing the wrong direction and be completely useless.

There is sometimes an excessive amount of screen swaying. I wonder if it's related to your weight capacity but I can imagine someone susceptible to getting motion sick from games might find it intolerable. What I personally probably disliked most is the loud, bassy sound effect played when quest text is refreshed, which sometimes happens just from exiting your inventory. I started to cringe every time it played. There's also no option to turn off controller vibration -- I personally don't understand why would anyone enjoy having their interfacing device to shake -- but at least that was easily fixed with an .ini edit.

Lords' soundtrack was composed by Knut Avenstroup Haugen. It's fine, I would say; not exceptionally memorable -- except for the title theme, Winter's Kiss, and its variant Sacrifice which plays during the final stretch of the game, creating an absolutely amazing atmosphere. ("The traitor's here!") I place it among my top favorite video game music moments. It's comparable to the Guardian boss fight in Darksiders 2 (by Jesper Kyd) and the parts in Diablo III where Reaper of Souls' title theme's 2 to 3 min. section plays (by Derek Duke, I think).

Edited 2021-08-09: Corrected a typo.