CI Games and Hexworks’ latest action role-playing game, Lords of the Fallen, was allegedly developed in UE4, and the move to UE5 eventually led to a severe downgrade.
According to an alleged developer who claims to be one of the 400+ outsourced developers who worked on Lords of the Fallen, the game was originally worked on in Unreal Engine 4, with development beginning in 2018 with 100 employees. According to them, by 2019, the scope of the game got bigger, and 300 additional developer from around the world, including them, were hired to work on it.
The alleged developer stated that CI Games and Hexworks got carried away with the idea of the project rivaling FromSoftware’s souls games, which led them to switch to Unreal Engine 5 mid development in 2022 when it was still called The Lords of The Fallen. According to them, this had a catastrophic effect on development, as no one working on the game had the engineering and experience to work with the new updated engine. A lot of things had to be cut and downgraded, including slower, more fluid combat and graphics, as Unreal Engine 5 is just that much more demanding, they said.
As per the alleged source, the vertical slices in The Lords of The Fallen presentation were real and was running on Unreal Engine 4 at the time, and it was an accurate representation of how the game was supposed to look. Ultimately, Lords of The Fallen had to receive a severe downgrade in order for it to working in UE5. Even then, they mentioned that the final release remained in an unoptimized state. They claimed that the development team had asked management for an extra year, but it did not comply.
Furthermore, the alleged developer claimed that Lords of The Fallen has two large expansions planned; one focused on a dream realm called Morpheus and the other expanding the overall world with two rival kingdoms. According to them, the latter is still very early and mostly includes placeholder content. They mentioned that the development team is currently cruching in order to fix the game, and the upcoming fixes including several Quality of Life changes.
