Lords of the Fallen 2 loses developer due to “low quality”

CI Games has encountered yet again another setback in the development of Lords of the Fallen 2. In a press statement to Eurogamer, CI Games justified the decision with developer Defiant Studios’ work being of lower quality than expected.

The sequel to 2014’s first major souls-like game had quickly become anticipated due to the publisher CI Games’ follow-up souls-like game The Surge having improved on pretty much every grievance of the first Lords of the Fallen. Both these games were developed by German studio Deck13 but after the breakout success of The Surge, the developer decided to step away from Lords of the Fallen 2 in favor of working on The Surge 2.

This obviously was a kick towards fan expectations regarding Lords of the Fallen 2 as the expertise Deck13 built up, won’t be used there. Still, Lords of the Fallen was enough of a success that CI Games announced a sequel soon after the game came out. Early on things started to look bad however as the Executive Producer announced his departure from the project.

“The termination of the agreement was submitted due to inadequate execution by Defiant [of] a key work stage (milestone no. 11), a so-called vertical slice. The quality of the work was lower than expected by the company, as precisely described in the agreement, despite three calls to improve the quality of this stage of work.” – CI Games

Last summer then CI Games unveiled that the newly founded New York game developer Defiant Studios would take over the task of developing Lords of the Fallen 2. A lot must have happened since then as CI Games now announces that the partnership with Defiant Studios has ended. In a statement to Eurogamer, we also learn of the reason why CI Games took this drastic decision. CI Games states that the work done so far by Defiant Studios simply wasn’t good enough and up to the quality standards desired by CI Games. The good news here is that CI Games isn’t scrapping the sequel but instead will make the game themselves in-house.