A follow-up to the 2014 title, Lords of the Fallen picks up over 1,000 years after where the first left off. The game comes from developer Hexworks and publisher CI Games, the latter of which has also helped produce titles like the Sniper Ghost Warrior series. Just like its predecessor, the new Lords of the Fallen is a soulslike game built around difficult boss fights in a dark fantasy world.

Lords of the Fallen has two different areas that players will explore: Axiom, which is the world of the living, and Umbral, the realm of the dead. These two worlds are aesthetically distinct, drawing inspiration from a myriad of different horror and fantasy sources. The game also boasts an array of grotesque enemies, each with their own moves and attributes that make for a roster of unique challenges throughout the two environments for players to conquer that's garnered Lords of the Fallen critical praise.

Screen Rant sat down with Alexandre Chaudret, the art director for Lords of the Fallen, to discuss his creative process, crafting characters with gameplay in mind, and his favorite designs within the title.

Alexandre Chaudret On Lords Of The Fallen

Screen Rant: First, I would love to know a little bit just about the creative process with a game like this, deg each enemy and class character, where do you even know where to start with something like that?

Alexandre Chaudret: Well, for a project like Lords of the Fallen, first of all, we had a legacy, because it's the, let's say reboot plus sequel of the first game that was out in 2014. So there was this back package that we had that was analyzed for a long time. We took what was good in it, what was bad in it, and of course the more we were evolving on our Lords of the Fallen, the more we're getting some distance was the first one, especially on the art direction, because we shifted completely. The first one was more high fantasy, and this one is purely dark fantasy. So that was small bits of it, but on my side, I'm heavily relying on two main pillars.

First one is the gameplay, because we're doing a game, we're not doing an art book. That's what I say to all my teams first day ever. I always say, "We're here to do a game, not an art book." So gameplay is what's the most important, and then we have the story, the lore that evolves at the same time that we're creating the art, but it makes a kind of majestic triangle. You have art, gameplay, and lore, and it's a balance between each of them. So, even if at the start of any art direction you have some references, you have your own baggage of what you like or what you like to draw, or what you want to create, the more you're creating on this game, the more the new universe itself become its own reference. So, creating a character at the beginning of the pre-production and a character at the end of the production is very different. When you're starting on the pre-production, you're like, "I have nothing. So I have small bits. Let's start." You iterate a lot until you find something. It can be just a shape that suddenly is appealing, something that you feel in your guts that it's going to be the good vision and everything is going to rely on it.

And at the end of production it's much easier. We'll tell you, "Okay, this is this character. He comes from here. He needs this kind of weapon. This type of armor." You almost have all the stats of the RPG, and then it's like, "Okay, I'm just going to ask the game." So, this is what we have to create, "What should I do?" And then everything is popping out somehow.

And talking about drawing inspiration from the world after a certain point. I'm also curious about what the process was like, because you have the two different worlds in this game; you have the Axiom and the Umbral worlds. What were the main aesthetic elements you wanted to include in each one and sort of use to differentiate the two spaces?

Alexandre Chaudret: So I would say that first we had a common vision and direction for the whole game. And this is at the beginning, that's what you rely on because that's the only thing you have. The vision from very early on in the game was to make a dual realm, that's for sure, that would bring immersion to the player, but with enough contrast to get a twist.

And then already just with this pitch, there are already keywords that just appear to create both realms. So if I want to immerse our players in this game, we need to appeal to stuff that they can rely on. So dark fantasy is perfect for this, because it's something that we all have from our bedtime stories to our Game of Thrones series or the books, the movies we read, we have this common language on it. So we took this and we made it very tormented and that was our base.

And then it was: how do we contrast with this? And we had more or less two solutions. Either we make this Axiom tormented world a bit brighter and we have a dark place that will be Umbral. Or we say no, we stay super dark in the Axiom and we create the nightmares of tormented people. So we just went even deeper in the darkness.

So where Axiom is very dark fantasy grounded, so blood, guts, candles, skulls, medieval armors with rust and thorns everywhere. Umbral is a bit more like a gateway to cosmic horror; a bit more Lovecraftian where time and space doesn't occur, where the gravity is being weird, where you can see the moon is becoming a giant eyeball and there are titan skeletons that are frozen in time. And this was the happy creative parts because we were basically free to do more or less what we wanted, but always focusing on creating emotions for the player.

So when we saw, for example, our players or even during the play test, some players raising the Umbral lamp, so how having this keyhole to lurk a bit in Umbral and they had a visceral reaction of, "What is this?" Or "What?!" And that we are like, "Okay, this part, we nailed it. It's okay. It's going to work." And that was the main focus, twisting and contrast basically.

Were there any particular enemies or classes that were hard to design or animate for any particular reason?

Alexandre Chaudret: Almost all of them are difficult. The action RPG general comes with a lot of constraints too, because as I said, the gameplay is focused number one. The story is very important, because you have this cryptic narration, so you don't have full explanations with cut scenes all the time. You have to understand the story of a character just as by looking at him. So why does his arm is like this? Why does he have this weapon? Why this emblem? Why this sigil on his back? Et cetera, et cetera. So every character or every mob is like a complicated piece. The bosses even more, because we have to be super strict on the gameplay side, you can't create an arm that is 20 feet long when you need 18, so you have to deal with it.

A character that was really difficult to create, there is one that's quite difficult, because it was coming more from a creative standpoint and then it had to mix. I think his name in the game is Mendacious Visage. It's like a giant Umbral monster who is just a giant head with legs and arms, and this horrible face can open inside. You see a smaller creature with an angry face and everything. And I when I came with this design, that was ticking the boxes of the gameplay restrictions, but everybody was like, "What is this?" And I said, "No, no, don't worry. It's going to work. We're going to make it work."

I take inspiration from stuff of my childhood or movies, anything. It was coming from a Ghibli movie, Spirited Away, there were those giant heads that were blowing, blowing, moving all around. And since we needed something that was really the representation of grotesque, something that really feels weird when you discover it in the game, it feels like it's not fitting, but it's still fitting super well and you're a bit unease. That's why I took this giant head and I added big feet and big arms to crush the player, and then the whole mechanics and everything added on top of it. But that was a fun ride on this character.

And I mean, it might be the same answer, but I was also curious if you just had a favorite design, whether it was because it was so intricate or weird or anything like that.

Alexandre Chaudret: I don't have necessarily a favorite design even, because first of all, there are designs I do, but most of the work, it's the work of the team, as a team. So there are several artists, there are characters that we commission, characters that come in, come out, that I retake or not. There is one I really like because it was coming from a silly idea, I'm not sure of his name in game, but we nicknamed him Bellboy, because he's like a giant muscle pious warrior. But he has a giant bell on his head.

And I when we were thinking of doing another heavy character, and I just came with this design, it was at the moment where I was choosing to add more bells for the sentinels, more thorns and stuff, and I just took this beefy character, strong like a Kratos of God of War, and I said, "But if he was the most devoted character of the Sentinel, he would just put a bell on his head." We put the bell on the head. And so, [Saul] Gascon the executive producer, when he saw it, he's like, "That's just great. It's the perfect personification of this religious fanatics." So yeah, I love Bellboy.

Can you talk a little bit more about what the collaboration process is like with the gameplay team when it comes to deg each of these big fights?

Alexandre Chaudret: So to be honest, it's a lot of back and forth, because we are iterating a lot, constantly, and discovering everything. Plus gameplay is in the middle of a lot of other parameters in this kind of game. You have the level design, even the VFX that are coming on top, the sensation of the player, the cameras and everything. So usually we had a first, let's say high level discussion with the directors to get what would be the family brand. Then in this family brand, for example, the sentinels or the demonic Rhogars, or the Umbral monsters, we get some sizes and different aspects and type of gameplay where we want, a heavy one that's going to kick you, a small swarmy character, a zombie patrol character, et cetera.

And from this, either we start directly from the sketch and we create the character, and then we readapt the character depending on the gameplay. Or the other way around, the character is created in gameplay and we adapt our creative process to fit the character in gameplay. It really depends on each mob, and there were, I mean, so many iterations, not that much changing the aspect of the characters themselves, but really adapting them so their function works as well as their looks somehow.

And you talked about this a little bit in the beginning, but sort of keeping some of the same aesthetic influences from the original Lords of the Fallen while also making something new. What was that balancing act like visually? What were the most important elements that you wanted to make sure to keep while leaving some others behind?

Alexandre Chaudret: So from really from the get go, the one thing we were sure we wanted to drop was what we call power fantasy. So it's huge cauldrons and big armors, a bit of World of Warcraft or Warhammer with a lot of decorations and everything. This we wanted to drop, because our keyword was immersion. And for immersion you need emotion, and so you needed to be a bit more grounded. So we wanted to base the game and the looks on the dramatisms, the tormented world. I think it's horrible to live in Mournstead, the realm of this world. I wouldn't like to go for my education there. It's horrible. So to transpose this art-wise, we had to make this change. And making this change is not nothing. It's like a huge shift that really almost reboots the entire art direction.

What we kept is part of the essence of the first game, meaning that they were already gruesome and meaty and with violence and stuff like this. We just pushed a bit the cursor, and even the game, our game is 1000 years after. So it has implications. You can find pieces of the first game here and there on some vistas or even some characters, names that are dropped and everything. With a lot of respect of the first game, but we did our stuff.

So yeah, it was honestly a big change. And I can say I think we almost kept nothing from the first game aesthetically, but we had a lot of homage and tributes to it. For example, one of the armor is a direct tribute to the armor of Harkyn, the first hero of the first game. So people who played the first game would know that there were some bits of it, but you can completely start our game fresh without even knowing the first one.

Are there any other fun Easter eggs like that that you can think of that were put in for fans of the first game, visually speaking?

Alexandre Chaudret: Yeah, so I don't know if maybe now the game is out for a month, so maybe spoilers, we can spoil. But yeah, there are some characters that are here. We kept some obvious things like the giant hand mountain that's coming out in the distance of our game. That was in the first trailer. It's part of the universe. It's called the Hand of Adyr. Some characters and especially let's say the main character is doing an appearance and not a small appearance in our game, and he's completely revisited and we continue his legacy. There are some other characters that are - especially one that I think people will start to notice - I think it's already on YouTube and stuff like this, but there is this slave character from our blacksmith. He looks very weird, like a bit alien-ish and everything, and he can be used to craft runes in our game. And actually there was a rune crafter in the first game, and so you can easily do the connection between those two.

And after there is a lot of small stuff, not that much on the first game. Even if they are direct, not Easter eggs, but really lineage of the first one. Adyr is in our game, the Rhogars are in our game. We talk in some places of the monastery where the first game was settled. There are bits here and there.

Source: CI Games/YouTube

Lords of the Fallen is available now for for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.