The Lords of the Fallen 2 game Defiant is making for CI Games will be a fresh start and won't use any existing design work done by former project leader Tomasz Gop and team, who were tinkering in pre-production for a couple of years. The sequel will still, however, be an action role-playing game in the vein of Dark Souls.

"It's really a reset, it's a fresh start," Defiant Studios managing director David Grijns told me. "It's a new engine - Unreal 4 - and a new team. A team which does not have a long and illustrious background in action RPG development, but we actually see it as a strength."

The team's background is the open-world sandbox mayhem of Just Cause. Grijns and Defiant co-founder Roland Lesterlin, who's creative director, also co-founded Avalanche New York in 2011. There they shipped Just Cause 3 and began work on Just Cause 4, before leaving in 2016 to start something new.

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Polish company CI Games has found a new team to partner with on Lords of the Fallen 2, a sequel previously in limbo.

The partner is Defiant Studios, a relatively new and small studio in New York. It was founded in 2016 by some of the leaders and founders of Avalanche's New York office following the release of Just Cause 3. There's little information about Defiant Studios available but on LinkedIn the company is in the 11-50 employees bracket.

CI Games boss Marek Tymiński said: "We talked to a number of globally respected studios that had shown a strong interest in making the next LOTF, and received several solid pitches. We finally decided to move forward with Defiant because we were impressed with their game concept, production expertise, and the pedigree of their developers."

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