The First AAA Souls-Like: Lords of the Fallen — what went wrong?

[Music] for the past few years there have been so many souls likes to come out aaa indie doesn't matter there are a lot of developers who looked at dark souls and decided they wanted to put their own spin on things however there is one game that came first when this game came out the term souls like didn't even exist yet that game was lords of the fallen i played this game at release but i thought it'd be worth revisiting after seeing this tweet we are very pleased to finally reveal the logo for hashtag lords of the fallen 2 officially our largest project to date and as someone who did play the original not release my first thought was why why make this so this video is going to be an in-depth look at lords of the fallen what does it do what does it fail at and how might the devs turn things around for a sequel this video is sponsored by surfsharkvpn at this point you know that i know that you know what a vpn is but stick around after the video to hear me make a few jokes about why you should finally get one while getting 83 off souls likes these are games that take inspiration from the soul series however lords of the fallen is a bit of an exception because it doesn't just take a few ideas it takes almost all of them on paper the mechanics are virtually identical stamina based sword and shield combat rolling with iframes three different types of rolls depending on your weight back stabs parries two handing a weapon an estes flask bonfires losing experience when you die similar bosses and even a useless stat to trick new players on top of that the aesthetics of the game are also very similar just like souls lords of the fallen has a grim dark fantasy setting with demons and magic and whatnot kinda rings a bell now you might be saying hold on hold on you play plenty of souls likes that lift tons of elements from dark souls and you even like some of them why does it seem like you're singling out lords of the fallen and you know what wario that's a great point but i actually do have an answer to that so when both the mechanics and aesthetics of your game are so similar to dark souls it sort of begs the question of why should i play this game over just one of the souls games or to put it another way what is the hook of your game beyond it simply being similar to dark souls i think that's a fair question to ask because in my opinion the souls likes that are the best all have good answers to that question for example ashen this is a game that i've never talked about on this channel before but i think it's great it's visually striking and the gameplay has more of a focus on exploration than what you typically find in a souls game it also has a few cool ideas such as a town building mechanic where you get to see the hub area expand over time sort of like terrytown from breath of the wild doesn't have issues of course but it nails enough elements and has enough unique things going for it that it really stands out from the crowd as a memorable and worthwhile experience however this is not an action video as much as you now may want it to be so i'm gonna cut myself off here bringing this back to lords of the fallen what is the hook here what does this game offer that dark souls doesn't and uh i don't think there's a good answer to that everything it is and tries to be can be described as a watered-down version of something you'd find in a souls game and for a lot of people that's enough they love this sort of gameplay and they want more if that's you go for it for me however you got to be a little more ambitious than that to win me over if you haven't guessed it by now lord's the fallen is not my favorite game so let's get into it for the rest of the video i'm going to walk you through my play through and talk about noteworthy things as they come up so first let's start with the story in this world crimes are tattooed onto your body and our protagonist is pretty inked up there's no character creator so unfortunately we're stuck with angry bald man with a beard harken he was in prison but he got released so we could fight demons and save the pope or something now this is actually one of the few ways the game distinguishes itself from dark souls it tries to tell a more direct and straightforward story through cut scenes and dialogue than something you'd see in a souls game with no emotion charisma or really anything for us to latch onto that might make us care harkin might win the award for most apathetic i've ever felt about a main character in a game it's funny how character development is the term this game uses for leveling up when there's zero actual character development to be found here so there isn't a character crater but there are a few options for your starting class you got your standard heavy armored warrior with strength a faster light-armored rogue with agility and something in between with a medium armored cleric it's worth pointing out that the game defaults you to a warrior so as such i imagine the majority of players experience the game as a strength character it's also probably what the developers intended to be the vanilla experience so that's what i went with i did however also pick the rogue class for a second playthrough later on to compare fundamentally not much change but playing with light armor did change the feel of combat a bit for this video though most of my experiences will reference the warrior strength playthrough and with that we are finally in the game so the first thing i noticed and i imagine everyone who played this game noticed as well is that a lot of the animations just feel off it almost feels like you're playing in slow motion when you see how your character moves the rolling especially feels bad but a lot of the weapons feel sluggish too this kick animation really this is what we're going with fellas and that's why this game has the reputation of being a clunky and slow dark souls in its current form this is potentially the game's biggest weakness and immediate turn off for people trying it out for now let's check out the first boss [Music] as exciting as that looked this actually brings us to the next big issue this game has the bosses just aren't great and that's for two big reasons one their designs are often too generic and blend together in my minds and two the fights themselves are typically poorly structured regarding the designs the game only has 10 bosses but a solid half of them are some version of a big guy in armor i played this game at release back in 2014 but i genuinely could not remember a single boss before replaying it and i don't think that's just on me as for the fights themselves far too many of these bosses come down to just letting you circle straight to the right while dodging a small and repetitive moveset the other type of boss this game has makes you wait around and dodge until they use that one move that lets you hit them but of course this is also extremely dull i highly encourage anyone interested in boss design to play dark souls and then play this game right after feel the difference and look into why that might be alright so with boss number one down we got our first bonfire crystal thing which actually introduces us to an interesting mechanic that differs from dark souls it's an experience multiplier basically every kill you get increases the multiplier but dying or resting out a crystal resets it thus you're encouraged to potentially play a little riskier with skipping an estus refill honestly not a bad idea little things like this that reward better play or neat with the church tutorial out of the way our first real area is this outside snow zone which i think looks pretty great so let's talk about the game's visuals in terms of graphical fidelity it actually holds up remember this game came out in 2014 however and i touched on this with the boss designs the art direction is way too bland for my tastes like if you gave me the words generic fantasy this game would be one of the first things to pop into my head it's like warhammer meets kingdoms of amler and i can't say that i'm a fan speaking of visuals the devs seem to really like camera shake because good god i think this game has more than any game i've ever played walking around shake it swinging a weapon shake it rolling shake it back step i guess we got a magnitude 8 earthquake now so this is my polite request for devs to always put things like this in the options menu hmm an npc giving us a dialogue option i wonder if saving this monk's life has any sort of impact on the story or a quest nope literally nothing they didn't even change the dialogue after so the game pulls this move of giving you a false choice a few times and i don't think i'm alone in this but i find this kind of annoying i'd rather you don't try to trick me either make the choice matter or don't give me a choice at all anyway second boss time [Music] good stuff good stuff by the way this is around the time i learned you could just run guys over with your shield you just hold l1 while you're sprinting and then joking aside actually a great feature i wish dark souls had this now despite my excitement with the shield shenanigans this is around when i started to piece together why the combat felt so off you might be thinking it's just because of how clunky and slow the animations are right and actually no the combat has this floatiness to it and i kept wondering why does it feel like this until i slowed down and paid attention the game actually adds a large amount of tracking to each of your swings even when you're not locked on on top of making you slide across the ground toward enemies i mean just look at this it's kinda crazy also i noticed that you can cancel weapon swings at any time with either a block or a wind-up follow-through doesn't matter you can animation cancel at any frame during the attack okay so the combat feels a little floaty why is this such an issue it's an issue because the game feels like it's going for slow and heavy everything should be weighty deliberate and impactful but then mechanics like this show me that the devs didn't commit one way or the other again this seemingly flies in the face of the base game philosophy that i thought wanted to prioritize heaviness these sorts of mechanics might make sense in a faster paced action game but the clunky souls clone not really do you guys see what i mean now having played the entire game i imagine the decision to add sliding and animation cancelling was a sort of last minute band-aid fix to enemies and bosses that are too hard to hit and don't always telegraph their moves well enough but yeah this got me to pay attention to any other mechanical mismatches in the game and i immediately noticed the idea behind recovering experience from your blood stain presented a similar issue basically instead of recovering all of your experience when you make it back to where you died there's a timer that constantly lowers the percent of experience you'll actually receive when you get there hold on you're telling me the big tank man that i just sprint back to my blood stain using clunky controls instead of taking my time do you see why this might be a problem for a game with an otherwise very slow pace and why this cool idea of recovering experience is horribly mismatched for the game itself if the game was about speed and control then by all means this could work but that's not what we've got okay just ahead is boss 3 graveyard guy another pretty unmemorable fight where you just strafe around him however he does have one move where you have to run and take cover in a little shrine so i give them credit for trying something at least a little different with this one next it's through this portal and into the demon realm this is where all the enemies are invading from the zone is pretty alright meet a blacksmith pull some levers make some jumps pull some more levers it's a fun time it's a lot of running around so i need to point out the heavy breathing that happens whenever your stamina gets low [Music] it's so loud it's so much i wish every fight didn't have to end with asmr angry bearded guy breathes in your ear that would be nice at the end of the zone we get to fight cue lag but significantly less hot because there's no fire attacks so this is how it went on my agility play through [Music] and for my strength playthrough this is where i discovered that the devs made a mistake with the magic options they give you with any class you get access to four skills that you can unlock sequentially the second skill in the strength class that you get very early by the way is called rage and it gives you unlimited stamina for 12 seconds let's think about this for a minute if you have unlimited stamina what are you gonna do mash the attack button now if i was gonna spam attacks the next logical move is to put on my heaviest armor and tank all damage while i'm doing that and guess what this strategy works very well and trivializes the rest of the bosses in the game but what about souls can't magic be broken in those games too and yeah of course i don't actually have a problem with something like that being in the games in fact i think it's a great and fun way for the player to set the difficulty for themselves without resorting to something like an actual difficulty slider in the options menu no the problem is that the strategy is essentially spoon fed to the player by being easy to access right from the start there's no secrets to find or synergies to work out it's just handed to you as the default way to go again i picked the standard vanilla strength class and this is what i got it just seems like such a strange thing to include in what amounts to your base moveset does that make sense and with that we are done with the demon realm so it's time to walk all the way back while making sure to say hi to these knights along the way cool so we're out of the demon zone we cut through the graveyard and it's on to the catacombs just like all the other areas the first word that comes to mind when i think of these catacombs is serviceable like it's nothing special it gets the job done but it does remind me just how important level design and enemy placement actually is to making the souls game special i think most people don't realize just how much heavy lifting the level design in fromsoft games is doing until they play a game like this a bunch of similar looking hallways with enemies haphazardly placed throughout doesn't have the same sort of charm but there is one thing in this area that i want to rant about for a bit this side quest right here is hilarious to me and it might be satire in which case good job but i don't think it is basically you stumble across two monks and two separate jail cells apparently one of them is a murderer and one of them is innocent though naturally they each claim the other is guilty here's the twist though you can only save one because there are sleeping zombie monsters in each of their cells and opening one door will wake the monsters up in both cells at the same time so you only have time to save one person keep in mind by the way that this conversation is being had at full volume with whisper screaming while the monks are literal inches away from the monsters oh and guess what there aren't any hints and you can't ask them questions this isn't a puzzle or a riddle or anything really you just have to blindly guess on who to let go beautiful stuff good moral dilemma very interesting why do i care so much about some throwaway quest it's because i think it perfectly encapsulates the way in which this game takes ideas from other games without any of the finesse or understanding that the originals have like take the witcher games and all the interesting choices they present you with this quest in lords of the fallen is like a witch request with everything else stripped away the build up the story the writing the nuance all gone and this might sound harsh but to me that's what this game as a whole is it's dark souls without the level design the inspired bosses the well-balanced combat and the varied environments with interesting npcs you take all of that out and you're left with lords of the fallen all of the dark none of the soul that's what this game is to me anyway moving on we got this big guy who looks to charge at us like a bull now if you thought to yourself hmm maybe you're supposed to bait him into charging into certain spots on the wall or something in the environment we had the same thought uh but no you just dodge after that we're finally in the citadel the midpoint climax of the game it's this big human stronghold that's under attack and i think it's supposed to be a sort of intense moment however i found out you can just run past all the enemies except the last guy and you'll get credit with this great line was that the last of them yes then at last we get some story context we meet with a guy named antanas who is basically like the pope and he says yo thanks for the assist my man i know you just came back from the demon realm but you actually need to go back again and kill a god for me and this is the moment where i think the game ran out of time or money because the rest of it is just running through old areas and fighting bosses in arenas we've already been in this is a short game and i'm fine with that but you can definitely feel the cut corners more so than most games but before we get to that we need to talk about the enemies in this game because i've been putting it off a lot of them have issues namely they don't always visually communicate what they can do and they don't follow the same rules as the player and i think this knight guy with the big tower shield is the worst offender and best exemplifies what i'm talking about so let's try to beat this guy he's got his shield up and his back seems exposed so maybe i can just circle around for a backstab nope though it looks like that and there's even other enemies of the same size that you can backstab this one is off limits in fact there's a good chance you might turn around in a single frame to block an attack from the back okay so that doesn't work i guess i need to guard break and if you spam the guard break move enough times eventually this will actually break his guard but the problem is that he's not vulnerable long enough for you to get even a single hit in so what are we left with in terms of options the best one is probably to parry however it's worth noting that the only shields that can parry require the agility stat so two out of the three starting classes probably won't use this or think of it as a strength player all i'm left with is trading hits when the enemy decides to attack or using the previously established rage spell that gives me infinite stamina so i can just keep attacking neither of these options are satisfying with this and other similar encounters what i felt and what i imagine a lot of other players felt too was not that we were mastering and outplaying a well-designed enemy or boss but rather like we were just brute forcing our way through the game and to me the feeling of brute forcing a solution sums up how i feel about a lot of the enemies and attack patterns in the late game these encounters aren't particularly hard but they're annoying and that's never a good sign without the way let's speed through the rest of this game's bosses first up we got giant ogre looking guy is this just the tower knight from demon souls where you avoid his stomps and his ankles until he falls over uh yeah but you know at least it's a change of pace uh so i give it a b up next we got generic night guy ah dang it pretty standard fight i think i genuinely don't remember what he even does though after that we got dang it another generic big night guy uh it's okay though i came prepared then we meet with the god we were supposed to kill but he's like no you're so sexy don't kill me take this rune and kill the pope instead and you're like okay fine i'll think about it and you leave then you run back to the citadel but not before you get intercepted by the classic dynamic duo ornstein and ornstein unfortunately ornstein number one bugged out on me so definitely a bit less exciting than i imagined it should have been and finally we make it back to the pope who has transformed into a horrible monster off screen and we gotta kill him this dude has way more health than he has any right to so this fight is tedious as hell if you're trying to actually dodge him this fight is a disaster but luckily we can just use all reliable infinite stamina and win and that's the game we did it that's lords of the fallen as a whole i'd say it's a serviceable and middling experience but a mostly joyless one if you thought to yourself that i've been pretty harsh on this game i don't blame you i agree i've been harsh but part of that is due to the success that this game has had it was profitable within its first week of release and went on to sell over 3 million copies as of january 2021 this is wild to put that in perspective not a single game within the metroid franchise has sold that many copies when i think about the quality and cultural impact of something like super metroid or metroid prime and i compare it to lords of the fallen i can't help but laugh so clearly the devs don't need my advice they've already proven themselves to be hugely successful commercially and with a sequel on the way i don't expect any serious changes however i'm gonna say what i think they should do anyway the biggest piece of advice that i'd offer to the devs is that they need to find their niche like i mentioned near the beginning of this video lords of the fallen doesn't do enough to separate itself from its inspiration and as a result it's hard to see it as more than simply a shoddy imitator if they want to be the clunky and slow version of dark souls honestly go for it but they need to lean into the weight and heaviness that comes with that in order to find their niche while also digging a little deeper to have more inspired and varied environments enemies and bosses the sequel might be a great game but the devs have their work cut out for them as a genre souls likes can be really cool but part of that involves taking chances and being different hey man how's it going leave me alone see i hear you but i noticed you've been sitting around a lot and it seems like you're not doing great am i right are you okay you ask too many questions yeah i think i'm right i know what you need i don't really care hear me out pull out your laptop and i'll show you you never give up do you okay so do you consider yourself part of the anime community i die again before i step foot in that cesspool fair enough my bad but the anime itself can still be fun so i think you need a good wholesome movie off netflix like like a ghibli movie unfortunately we can't watch them do the region locks because they're not available in the us which is where we are right now apparently hash times gosh times indeed good news though we got surfsharkvpn literally one click then boom where in canada easy as that and we can watch what we want why what a surprise and as a bonus we can use surfshark with unlimited devices so you can rot up here on your laptop or down in new londo on your phone it's up to you man i think you've done me a favor so yeah if that sounds enticing use code iron pineapple to get 83 off plus three extra months for free and there's even a 30 day money back guarantee check out the link in the description but yeah i guess that's it what now have a seat and get comfortable sounds good man sounds good

Channel: Iron Pineapple

Views: 2,780,965

Keywords: soulslike, souls like, iron pineapple, dark souls, gameplay, funny, co-op, review, guide, commentary, demon's souls, lords of the fallen, video essay, essay

Id: GDkc7_fhVfA

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021