It’s been a month since gamescom and it’s a month until the launch of the next generation of consoles… and still, the only next-gen game I’m actually waiting for, and rooting for, is Lords of the Fallen. What I’ve seen in Cologne was just a prototype – not even an alpha – and after the presentation and an hour of conversation with Tomasz Gop, the creative director in charge of the game, I just couldn’t care for any other title I’ve seen there.

So I wrote a preview for our print edition. And then we thought that Harkyn, the game’s protagonist, might look nice on our cover. And he actually does. But then, two days before our deadline, we got an e-mail saying that some things about the game have changed. I got scared, thinking that they’re going to change everything I liked about the game, but fortunately, after another two hours on the phone with Gop, I knew that I have nothing to be afraid of. Hell, Lords of the Fallen is probably going to be even better than I thought. And I’m soooo glad to be the first to tell you about some of these things!

Please, be excited

So, the easiest way to write about Lords of the Fallen is to say that it resembles Dark Souls. It’s an action RPG focused on tactical combat, a game which requires the player to have an actual will to learn its mechanics instead of allowing him to blindly hack and slash through the dungeons. It’s going to have an open world connected in various places by shortcuts and plenty of arenas in which we’re going to fight, most often, one on one.

However, there are plenty of differences between those titles. For example, the entry level, the amount of work you have to put into Dark Souls in order to enjoy it, is set real high. Plenty of players are missing out on the game because it’s just so hard to get into but Lords of the Fallen is going to be different – what Gop’s trying to achieve is a game of the same depth and complexity as Dark Souls, but with the entry level resembling a standard western RPG. He wants to create something your Skyrim-obsessed friend could actually pick up and learn to play without getting mashed, and demotivated, by the Asylum Demon in the first five minutes of play.

Gop wants to teach and motivate – to introduce the mechanics properly and make them understandable to everyone who will pick up the controller. Yet, at the same time, judging by what I’ve seen and heard, he’s going to direct the game in a way which slowly turns newbies into pros and at the same time – being a Dark Souls fanatic himself – he doesn’t want to bore the hardcore players who are sure to try his game out. How? Let’s start at the beginning.

Just try not to die

In Lords of the Fallen you’re going to play as Harkyn and you’re going to choose his starting class from three archetypes: the cleric, the warrior and rogue. That choice is instantly and intuitively understood by every player who’ve seen an RPG before -- it could have been easier to design the game around three possible playstyles but that’s not what Gop’s aiming at.

By choosing a rogue you won’t be stuck with fast attacks and stealth for the rest of the game – you can change your class gear anytime you want and become a warrior whenever you want. The only thing which you won’t be able to do is use a certain kind of magic available only to the starting class you’ve taken. So, archetypical clerics might be able to heal themselves and rogues could affect their critical attack rates -- and once you’ve decided on a rogue you won’t be able to use cleric’s spells... But you probably won’t need them in the long run anyway.

Because the starting class system is designed to be easy to understand – hence the clichéd classes – and not to let players drown in thousands of options and choices. Moreover, magic in Lords of the Fallen will be overpowered. And that’s a conscious design decision. You won’t be able to spam bosses with fireballs and 1-hit KO them, but what magic is supposed to do at first, is to help newbies direct the difficulty level of the whole game until they’re able to swim on their own.

At the same time, veteran players of Dark Souls and such, will be able to ditch magic and focus completely on melee combat – they will be buying skillpoints instead of spells (a choice of either-or because there will be only one currency and magic will be more expensive) and developing their characters according to their own vision of gameplay. The spells are a helping hand you might want to accept but you don’t have to.

What’s going to be necessary, though, is understanding and learning of mechanics. At first it might be easier just to bomb half of the enemy’s health bar away with a nice and flashy spell, but the beast will still have to be killed anyway. So, either way, you will actually have to learn how the game’s really played.

And Lords of the Fallen will focus mainly on duels – you will have to observe the moves of your enemies and learn when to attack, when to parry, when to dodge and when to just get the hell out of the fight. Normal foes might come in pairs – like an archer teaming with a melee fighter – but this kind of encounters will rather test player's knowledge of the game and his skills than serve as another reason to laugh in his face with another YOU DIED on the screen. Bosses, however, will pose a different kind of threat – their tactics will change during the fight. Once you reach a certain point of their health bar, they might lose their shields and start to fight with two hands, later they might lose their armor and go bananas – spamming you with attacks, so you’ll have to roll, roll, roll and roll just not to get killed and think about fighting them when they chill the hell out.

Melee in Lords of the Fallen is dynamic, it’s different, it’s beautiful – you have to adapt to the situation and solve puzzles on the fly. You have to get better and you will want to get better -- learn the pros and cons of every class and every weapon you’ll find. Facing a certain enemy you might want to change into a rogue and make use of his combos – if you time your attacks perfectly (and I mean perfectly), they will drain less stamina and you’ll be able to kill more efficiently. But maybe you’ll feel better as a cleric who can charge his attacks by draining more stamina than needed and hitting the harder the more was used. You will look for the right moment, you will adapt and take chances. And sometimes you’ll die.

Gop wants to make every death count – it will be a learning mechanism, just like in Dark Souls, because you will always know what you’ve done wrong. But it won’t be as painful. He wants to motivate players and make them care about what they’ve lost while dying. So when you die, you lose all you’ve got and you have to get it back. You lose all the currency and all temporary perks you’ve unlocked by slashing your enemies -- because the better you are, the more efficient your playstyle is, the better killstreaks you get, and you are rewarded with more experience from every kill until it's doubled. But it's easy to get careless, so you'll have to run from the last checkpoint – which won’t be a rarity – to the beautiful corpse you’ve left along the way.

The faster you get there, the more of your lost money and perks you regain. If you’re too late – you get nothing. But every time you’re able to meet with your corpse, even if you needed an hour, the game will randomly give you a boost: for a short duration of time you might recover stamina faster, get more EXP or be stronger. It’s a gamble, but you’ll never end up empty-handed – death is a tool which is supposed to help you learn, but every time you die you get something to help you regain everything you’ve lost.

Crafting and gear

But equally important as “how you fight” is “what you fight with”, and Lords of the Fallen looks damn nice in this aspect. You will be able to choose from variety of weapons and armor – most often you’ll find full sets of cleric, warrior and rogue gear, and you’ll optimize them in order to get the best results in stats. Gop doesn’t want to make any promises, but right now he’s experimenting with four pieces of armor (head, chest, hands, legs) and two slots for weapons, one exchangeable for a shield or a secondary, off-hand weapon – the gauntlet.

The off-hand weapon will allow players to fight not only in melee, but also from the distance. Players will be able to find some varieties of magical gauntlets, allowing them to cause dfferent kinds of attacks – some will look as if they were throwing grenade-like projectiles, some will remind crossbows in the way they attack. They’re not going to be as overpowered as magic, but certainly will help in weakening enemies before the normal fight and since gauntlets will be craftable, they might be very, very creative. Because crafting in Lords of the Fallen is something really interesting.

The basis is simple: sometimes you will find armor and weapons with slots, and you’ll be able to put runes in the slots. It’s like Diablo, but better, because even the runic words composed of runes put in whole sets of armor and weapons won’t be just adding “+2 to fire damage”, but things much more suitable to this kind of gameplay. Gop doesn’t want to spoil anything and talk about details but he told me to imagine things like, “you’ll get +25% chance that once hit, your enemy will turn around and give you a chance to perform a backstab”.

And that’s not all. We don’t know much, but whole world of Lords of the Fallen will be tightly bound with runes in certain ways. Before we hear something about the story of Harkyn and get an answer as to why he’s got runes on his face, we would have to speculate. Gop told me, though, that gameplay-wise there will be an element of gambling present in the usage of runes: you might find one, shining red and beautiful, and you won’t know what it will give you. You will have to get back to someone and “identify” it… but at the same time, you’ll be standing near huge doors with a lock shining with the same color as the rune you’ve got. It’s either-or situation – what will you get if you decide to open the gates, what will you get if you forget about them and decide to use the rune on your equipment?

Can’t wait!

Lords of the Fallen launches on PC, PS4 and XBO, but we still have no idea when. It’s safe to assume that by the end of 2014 we should be able to see whether Harkyn’s a worthy opponent of the Chosen Undead, but right now it seems that there’s nothing to worry about.