CI Games' Tomasz Gop has gone on record with the admission that at one time he struggled with the sheer amount of comparisons between his game and the Dark Souls series.
"I had a really tough time around a year ago, or even beyond that," the former The Witcher dev told Digital Spy. "It's a tough start for a developer to be associated that strongly with something, even if it is something that's a great inspiration.
"But at the same time, just one day I said, 'Hey man, you have to let go. Whatever people think, just make sure it's not going to be a rip-off, it's not going to be a bad inspiration,' and I sleep way better since then.
"I've never heard people saying that you have ripped off that game completely, which is good enough for me. There are a lot of inspirations in this game - and everybody can see that - and I'm not going to be hiding that.
"There are fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter, there are elements of Souls games and so on, and we definitely try to nail the elements that bumped the feeling of the game being punishing for a lot of players, especially for people who don't treat games like 600-page books, where they have to bite nails into it."
Lords of the Fallen is due out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC around the end of the year.