Forget Dark Souls – Lords of the Fallen will let you place bonfires

pcgamesn.com:

With Lords of the Fallen (yes, they dropped the ‘The’ for the reboot) releasing later this year, one of the first Souls-like games not developed by FromSoftware is coming for Dark Souls’ legacy, and we had a chance to watch a preview and chat with Hexworks creative director Cezar Virtosu at GDC 2023 in San Francisco. There’s a lot going on with Lords of the Fallen, and one of the biggest changes in the RPG game genre is coming to bonfires.

“I think it’s high time to discuss a breakthrough that we’re doing: the ability to create your own bonfires,” Virtosu says. That’s right, those paragons of safety from Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring will be placeable. But before you start worrying though, Virtosu knows this is controversial, so it won’t be easy to do.

“You’re perhaps wondering, ‘are you adding a manual save to a hardcore game?’ We are, but creating this anchor requires three to five Umbral Seeds. We’re still tweaking the number exactly, but it’s expensive.”

You get Umbral Seeds from exploring Umbral – the more dangerous version of the overworld you go to when you die, which you can explore while alive with a lantern that transforms the area it lights into its umbral counterpart, and is layered directly on top of the base game – and killing marked ones, but a drop isn’t guaranteed. Virtosu tells PCGamesN that these placeable bonfires are an “investment of time, luck, and drop rate,” and not something to be placed lightly.

Lords of the Fallen’s placeable bonfires can also only be put down one at a time, so if you already have one in the world and drop another, the first will be overwritten. “We’re currently still tweaking if our bonfires can be destroyed or not,” Virtosu adds. “Because currently, our given