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The upcoming Lords of the Fallen reboot takes some risks with the formula laid down by FromSoftware and its Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring lineup. New ideas and hopes for improvements come from developer Hexworks, who explained how the team wants to rethink the use of magic in the genre, with Star Wars being some example for the team.
Lords of the Fallen has already set its sights on the bonfires of Dark Souls, and magic will be the next potential rethink. In FromSoftware games like Elden Ring, you have to equip a catalyst in one of your hands and cycle through all of your casts, but Lords of the Fallen wants to make the experience smoother by using “Jedi fantasy” with quick switching between abilities. Creative Director Cesar Virtosu says:
You can equip three spell shortcut slots. Each catalyst has a fixed number of starting spells, and the more you upgrade a magical catalyst, the more shortcuts you will have, up to five or six, depending on the situation.
You’ll just have to press a button like you would with a bow to cast one of those spells in the hot slots “so you can use magic and spells unhindered”.
So it gives you that Jedi fantasy of swinging a lightsaber, strangling someone with force while continuing to attack the current target.
While this use of magic is a fairly simple idea for a Souls formula, it should lead to more build diversity where you can focus on magic to some extent and cast spells even if you’re melee oriented.
The release of the game Lords of the Fallen is scheduled for this year. The developer of the original Lords of the Fallen, CI Games, took over publishing duties, while Hexworks spearheaded the reboot. Hexworks is a new studio founded in 2020 under the leadership of CI Games, whose first game will be this reboot. Virtosu has worked for Ubisoft on several Assassin’s Creed games, as well as Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Marvel’s Avengers.
