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Talking art, Lords of the Fallen and its sequel with Hexworks at Gamelab Nexus

Right on the first anniversary of Lords of the Fallen we talk the successful soulslike reboot, its dual world, its post-launch care, and what Lords of the Fallen 2 will be like with Hexworks' head of art Javier García Lajara, who also talks about going from zero to triple-A in a very short timespan.

Audio transcription

"Hi friends, we are in Málaga at the Polo Digital building where Gamelab Nexus is happening and where we are attending several panels and talks and one of them was by you, Javier, thank you so much for joining us talking about Hexworks and art and the studio and how you guys work, so that's interesting I had Saul a year ago, we were talking about Lords of the Fallen and you were about to release but the game then released and it was a year ago, just a few days back we were celebrating the first year since launch so congratulations on that anniversary and also on the success of the game, so it was pretty successful in the first month already Yeah, so basically in a month we reached out a million copies sold and after that we kept working on several updates of the game and post-launch content for several months and we are around one million and a half more or less, I don't have the final numbers but it should be like that That's very good and one of the updates that you guys released was earlier this year, that was a big one and you also guys released on GamePass so why can't you tell me about both things, because even though it was quite successful it had a bunch of bugs when it released and then you fixed many of them Yeah, unfortunately we have like not a perfect launch, mainly on PC, you know the PC market is full of different specs PC computers for everyone at home is completely different so you can run the game in a pretty beefy machine or you can have a low-end PC and our game needs to run on both platforms on those PCs so we were trying to fix all these problems after launch and we spent several months doing that I think we managed to do it and the game right now is a completely new experience a year after is a whole new experience and I think it's worth it to try again if you got problems on launch Also for a game like this I guess it gets more difficult when it's based or built around a crazy idea or a crazy premise such as the dual world that you guys used here so how did that impact how difficult it was to both develop and maintain the game afterwards?
The development was pretty tough, so when you're having this dual realm mechanic that we have between Action and Umbral basically you are having two worlds at the same time, so you are drawing, you are rendering two worlds at the same time even though you only have one visible at the same time but you can peek into the other one in Umbral or you can completely traverse into Umbral and that means that you have a layer on top that is not visible always but you got it there and you need to render it, so technically it was a big challenge so luckily with the new release of Unreal Engine 5 we jumped into very early accessing to Unreal Engine 5 and we got the support from Epic also and I think we were the second big title to release using Unreal Engine 5 and it was very helpful for us managing that You got me right where I wanted to be because I have to ask you about the second game which is of course going to be running on Unreal Engine 5 I think that's pretty much what we know, 2026, PC and consoles Epic as a partner Epic as a partner, so Epic exclusive I can guess Is it going to keep the dual realm thing?
Yeah, we are not only keeping it, we are improving it, we are leveraging on what we do there so it's a sequel from Lords of the Fallen, I can't say too much about that Epic joined the ship for funding the project and we are using of course Unreal Engine 5 Anything about the art itself, you are in charge of that, it's crazy with the first game so anything that you would like to try in the future art-wise?
It's not going to be a revolution, it's going to be an evolution of mainly Umbral and even though our game is dark and gritty and full of details, we want to open it a little bit more so let's try to reach a wider audience, speaking of art so that's also working closely with our art director, Alex Chaudret, great guy, great art so we are trying to reach more people That's enough of a tease, thank you so much for that and you had your panel earlier today, I arrived right when you were done with it so I couldn't attend, sorry for that What was the main takeaway from it?
You guys went from 0 to AAA after the pandemic in 3 years to release this AAA game and you guys distributed the studio that works remotely so what was the main takeaway from your panel?
I was speaking mainly about the problem of doing several things at the same time so when you are a well-established studio, you have launched titles before you have been doing games in the studio as a team so everything is established, you can leverage on that in our case it was not the case so for us it was, we need to create the company, we need to build the team we need to create the pipelines, the workflow, finding outsourcers that help us bringing content and codecs and then the launch on several platforms as a multi-platform game, you can imagine the kind of problematic that you can find As we mentioned with PC How are you distributed right now?
Are you expanding the team?
Is it more Spain-based or are you all around Europe and the world?
It's mainly Spain, so the company was created in Barcelona the initial plan was having offices as a standard company but when the pandemic hit, we converted into a full remote we moved into a full remote model and that's how we have been working for these years and the team is multinational so we try to keep it between Europe because of the time zones it's very difficult to work with the other side of the planet so we try to keep it inside Europe more or less and we have a bunch of people from Spain divided between Barcelona, Madrid and several places but then there are a lot of people all around Europe and some of them are also in America So let me ask you about AAA and Spain you are experienced, not just from Hexworks from the past you are a veteran here and we don't see those many AAA games made in Spain we see a lot of talent, AAA games, successful indie games and of course the occasional MercurySteam but we don't see that many how do you feel about that?
do you think this is evolving into more games such as yours or back in the day when Mercury had the Castlevanias etc?
I really hope that will happen in the future it is true that mainly in Spain we have a very strong indie community that means that you can hire easily the talent is..."

"there is a lot of talented people here the only thing that is needed now is kind of a structure and a way for publishing big games, not only indie games so for that you need investment from administrations or big companies that are established in Spain and can create an atmosphere that propagates the kind of games and it's not the best time for AAA in the industry but we'll see next year?
we'll see, we'll see, I don't know really but it feels a little bit of an earthquake but we'll see, we'll see how it goes looking forward to learning more about Lords of the Fallen 2 in the near future, 2025 you have to start showing stuff guys so thank you so much for it very close, very close thank you very much thank you for coming"

Gamelab

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