Lords of the Fallen developer claims the game was originally developed on Unreal Engine 4

CI Games and Hexworks' latest souls-like action role-playing game, Lords of the Fallen, was recently released amidst a lukewarm reception from players and critics alike. While the game did manage to bring a fresh spin on the traditional souls-like formula that many FromSoftware fans have come to adore, it left a lot to be desired in terms of technical polish.

Recently, an anonymous Hexworks developer has come forward, stating that the game was initially developed on Unreal Engine 4 before being ported over to the most recent iteration of the engine - Unreal Engine 5.1. And unfortunately, most of the game's technical shortcomings stem from it being a Unreal Engine game.

Alongside the game's Unreal Engine 4 roots, the developer also shed some light on its development history and how the project shifting to Unreal Engine 5 muddied the game's technical state on PCs as well as consoles.

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Hexworks developer claims Lords of the Fallen was originally developed on Unreal Engine 4 before shifting to Unreal Engine 5.1

The Hexwork employee mentioned that Lords of the Fallen's internal development started in 2018 with Unreal Engine 4 as the base. However, with the rising popularity of Epic Games' latest game engine, the project was eventually shifted to Unreal Engine 5.1.

This ended up becoming a challenge for developers in terms of optimization, as UE5 isn't as flexible or scalable as its predecessor.

Lords of The Fallen "dev" says the game was originally made for Unreal 4. Unreal Engine 5 broke the game. byu/IcePopsicleDragon inGamingLeaksAndRumours

Despite all its visual bells and whistles, Unreal Engine 5.1 is a very heavy engine. It is also extremely resource-hungry, especially on lower-end PCs and consoles. This is mostly due to how Unreal Engine handles texture streaming and global illumination, thanks to Lumen and Nanite. The engine's advanced ray tracing capabilities also play a significant part in causing this issue.

While Unreal Engine 4 also has hardware-level ray tracing built into its render, it isn't as advanced as its successor. As such, the engine is much more troublesome for developers to optimize for the lower-end hardware.

Lords of the Fallen was released as a current-gen-only title, despite which the game exhibits frequent stuttering and blurry textures on both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. According to Steam, the situation of the game is even more dire than is reported, with many players facing crashing and constant stuttering even on higher-end GPUs.

Although CI Games and Hexworks have been hard at work deploying updates to all versions of the game, Lords of the Fallen has yet to deliver a smooth and stable experience on either consoles or PCs. It remains to be seen whether the developers can make enough changes and optimizations to the game to rectify most, if not all its performance-related issues.