As reboots have become increasingly common in video games over the last decade, we’ve all had to get comfortable with the eleventh entry in a series having the same title as the first, for some reason. In 2016, we got a sixth mainline Doom game that was simply calledDoom, and a sixth mainline Hitman game simply calledHitman. God of War came back for its fifth Santa Monica-developed entry in 2018, and it was just calledGod of War. Layers of Fearattempted to buck the trendwith Layers of Fearsin 2023, but that was reverted toLayers of Fearfor the final release, I assume due to the horrible mouthfeel. As a result, two-thirds of the games in that series have the same name.
Lords Of The Fallen 2 Is Lords Of The Fallen 3
TheLords of the Fallenseries finds itself in a similar position, and the approach developer Hexworks and publisher CI Games have taken to naming the series kinda makes me mad. The first game, released in 2014, was an inoffensive Dark Souls knockoff with a boring name, Lords of the Fallen. Nine years later, after original developer Deck 13 left to make the sci-fi Souls-like The Surge series, Lords of the Fallen returned with a successor titled… Lords of the Fallen, again. That’s right, it pulled the ‘reboot with the same name as the first game’ card afterone game.
It’s put Lords of the Fallen in a gloriously stupid position going forward. The series' official Twitter accountannounced that a sequel will arrive in 2026. So, what will they call it? Lords of the Fallen 2? Lords of the Fallen (again)? Most truthfully, but most confusingly, Lords of the Fallen 3? The rebot title unnecessarily complicates things.
Other, Better Approaches To Titling Reboots Or Long-Awaited Sequels
Back in the day, when a developer wanted to harken back to its series' roots, they were brave and put a number on it anyway. Final Fantasy 9, which riffs on the early games in the series, wasn’t simply calledFinal Fantasy. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, the first game to bear thePro Skatersubtitle in 13 years, might have been as painful as passing a kidney stone, but it at least had the dignity to slap a 5 on the end.
Other times, games suggest the reboot with a subtitle.Outcast - A New Beginning was originally titled Outcast 2, but publisher THQ Nordic seemed to realize that nobody actually remembered the original Outcast, which was released all the way back in 1999. So, it made the switch to a subtitle that implied it was a good place for new players to start without invalidating the original game.
What irritates me so much about this trend is that the games industry is terrible at preservation. Unless a series was really successful back in the day and continues to be successful now, older titles are often AWOL on modern consoles. This became a big topic of discussion recently, in response to Astro Bot’s tributes to Sony games that no one can play on current-gen hardware. Publishers typically only want to make old games widely available if they can make money on them through a new port, remaster, or by adding it to a subscription service. If both Resident Evil (1996) and Resident Evil (2002) are calledResident Evil, players would be forgiven for thinking that the original game is irrelevant, replaced — like an iPhone — by a more modern, superior version.
But games aren’t mere pieces of technology that can easily be replaced with a newer model. They’re pieces of art, and the context they were made within informs what makes them interesting. The original Resident Evil may not control as easily or look as pretty as its successor, but it still matters. When we flatten the gaming landscape out with simpler titles, we lose a bit of that history in the process.
