Divinity: Fallen Heroes Has Been Put on Hold

Developer Larian Studios has shockingly announced that the development of Divinity: Fallen Heroes has been put on hold. 

“Originally scheduled for a November 2019 release, it has become clear to everyone involved that the game will need far greater development time and resources than are available now to bring it to fruition, in a fun and sustainable way,” reads a statement from Larian published via Twitter. “Going forward, we at Larian will continue to work on Baldur’s Gate 3 with news coming soon, and Logic Artists will be focusing on their own Expeditions games. As an independent developer ourselves, we understand and value the importance of a developer investing into their own IPs and their own future.”

Logic Artists (who was set to develop Fallen Heroes) noted in that same statement that “It’s always sad to put an exciting project on hold, but sometimes, the realities of development and release schedules simply assert themselves in ways that are outside anyone’s control.”

This is an odd situation. It makes sense that the two parties involved with such a project would realize they need to focus on other things at the moment, but Fallen Heroes was clearly well into development at the time this decision was made. This feels like the kind of thing that the two major parties involved would have figured out before development of the game began (or perhaps earlier on in the process). However, it sounds like the two studios simply realized their other ongoing projects require more attention.

We’re also curious just how long this game will be delayed for. Given the nature of the delay, it seems logical that it will not be released until after Baldur’s Gate 3 and Logic Artist’s next project. Since the respective release dates for those titles are a bit vague at the moment, your guess is really as good as ours in regards to when (or if) we’ll see Fallen Heroes again. 

For those who may have missed the announcement the first time around, Fallen Heroes is a tactical strategy game that is already being compared to XCOM. However, that comparison isn’t entirely accurate. It is true that Fallen Heroes sees you select missions (there are 60 missions overall) and depart from a home base (in this case, the flying Lady Vengeance ship), in order to complete various objectives. It also seems that you will assign character skills (of which there are over 200) and equipment similar to what we’ve seen in the recent XCOM games.

However, Fallen Heroes shares more DNA with the Original Sin games than you might think. First off, its combat system seems to be much closer to the one seen in Original Sin 2 than what you’re probably used to in XCOM and games similar to that series. Second, and more importantly, Fallen Heroes will retain many of the RPG elements that made Original Sin 2 such a hit. That means that you’ll still need to make tough decisions and deal with the gameplay and story consequences those decisions result in. If anything, you could think of this game as a streamlined version of the Original Sin titles.

This news is disheartening given how promising Fallen Heroes looked, but we’re eager to see more from the project whenever it may resurface. 

Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.