Lords of the Fallen 2 will be made by new developer Defiant Studios

Polish games publisher CI Games has put out a statement today that they secured a different developer to make Lords of the Fallen 2. New York based developer Defiant Studios will helm the task of making the sequel to 2014’s Lords of the Fallen. The studio is fairly young and was founded just in 2016.

CI Games explained their decision to choose Defiant Studios with the new studio consisting of veteran talents in the games industry. Among those is former studio head of Avalanche Studios New York, David Grijns who whose team had worked on 2014’s open-world chaos-simulator Just Cause 3.

CEO Marek Tymiński went on affirming that the first Lords of the Fallen has sold more than 2 million copies and that this interest of players lead to CI Games to search for a suitable developer for a sequel:

“We talked to a number of globally respected studios that had shown a strong interest in making the next LotF, and received several solid pitches. We finally decided to move forward with Defiant because we were impressed with their game concept, production expertise, and the pedigree of their developers, […]”

Lords of the Fallen released to fairly positive reception in 2014 and became a sleeper-hit for hack-and-slash fans. It was heavily influenced by games like Dark Souls which caused some to look down on it as a mere clone when in fact Lords of Fallen had a slower-paced combat and put its own spin on the challenging melee-combat genre.

Initially developed by games studio Deck 13, Lords of the Fallen 2 was also planned to be developed by the same studio but the sudden departure of CI Games executive producer Tomasz Gop in 2015 lead to a directional change at the Polish publisher, and thus development of Lords of Fallen 2 halted for a while.

Tymiński further teased the publisher’s future vision for more third-party developed games:

“Signing the next LotF with Defiant is a very important step for CI Games as a publisher. We look forward to continue teaming up with third-party developers […] For the past several months we have been in discussions with many talented studios from around the world, and will soon have more to share about the outcomes of those discussions.”

Whether this means we will get announcements of new projects soon, maybe even during E3 only time will tell.