CI Games reveal new Lords Of The Fallen, Sniper Ghost Warrior and a “major new action-RPG”

Hexworks and CI Games are working on a sequel to 2023 action-RPG Lords Of The Fallen, itself a sequel to 2014 action-RPG Lords Of The Fallen. It's slated to launch in 2026. Will the new Lords Of The Fallen also be called Lords Of The Fallen? Will it build on the exciting innovations of Lords Of The Fallen, or will it seek to recapture the nostalgic charms of Lords Of The Fallen? Perhaps in ten years time we'll do a list feature, "Lords Of The Fallen Games Ranked", with just one entry. I'm pretty sure that in 10 years time, generative AI plagiarism will have rendered everything interchangeable anyway.

The new Lords Of The Fallen – again, not to be confused with Lords Of The Fallen – is currently called Project 3. It appears on a new CI Games strategy report, spotted by Insider Gaming. It’ll run on Unreal Engine 5 and feature such “gameplay improvements” as “increased game mode optionality, more commercial art style and narrative, elevated production values”, which I would roughly translate as “larger selection of modes, an art style and narrative that will appeal to more players, and an overall posher look and feel with, I don’t know, catchier menu fonts and suchlike”. It’ll have a single player campaign with full “shared-progression” co-op, and we can expect a proper announcement in 2025. Oh, and Epic have ponied up to make it exclusive to Epic Games Store on PC. Sad trombone!

Resident RPS Soulsliker Edders wasn’t especially sold on Lords Of The Fallen, declaring that “realm-hopping magic can't keep this Soulslike from getting on your nerves”, but he did rate it higher than Lords Of The Fallen, which Rich Stanton summarised as “the game so average it doesn't want you to play”. CI Games reckon the series has plenty of juice, however – in the report, they describe it as one of “two major evergreen franchises”, adding that the 2023 sequel accounted for 72 percent of company revenue in the first half of 2024.

CI’s other “major evergreen franchise” is camo-faced shooter Sniper Ghost Warrior, which is due another “major iteration” in 2017, again running on Unreal Engine 5. CI are partnering with an unnamed external studio on this one. It’ll be a mix of survival game and shooter, and development has been “expedited” by reusing a bunch of stuff from two other projects, “Project Survive” – described elsewhere in the report as a “new survival genre IP” - and “SGW Next”.

We have not written much about the Sniper Ghost Warrior series of late, though Alice0 (RPS in peace) did a banger pun about Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts having a smaller focus back in 2018. I think the last one I played was a preview build of Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 in… 2016? I wasn’t massively enthused, but on the upside, I can at least write about several Sniper Ghost Warrior games at once without feeling like I'm the butt of the joke in Who's On First.

Last but not least, CI Games have a “major new action-RPG” forthcoming from Underdog Studio, which will use “systems and architecture” from the most recent Lords Of The Fallen and whatever the next Lords Of The Fallen game is called. It’s currently in pre-production with a small team, and will hopefully go into production in late 2025, at which point Hexworks should be in position to help out by way of “cross-studio talent allocation”.