No More Room in Hell 2 Q&A – Torn Banner Talks Permadeath, Roguelike, and Sandbox-ish Elements

Many years after the original announcement of No More Room in Hell 2, the game is finally about to launch in early access, having recently confirmed the October 22 date - just in time for Halloween. Chivalry studio Torn Banner acquired Lever Games and is bringing the project to completion at last.

At Gamescom 2024, I chatted with Kenneth Bourgon, Marketing Manager at Torn Banner Studio, about how the developer became interested in No More Room in Hell 2. Bourgon also outlined the current and future content plans.

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Talk to me about No More Room in Hell 2. I know Torn Banner didn't make the first one, right? Why did you think of this game?

Yeah, the first one was created by Lever Games in 2009. It was the first ever Half-Life 2 Source mod, a pure passion project. It was like 10 to 20 developers that worked on it, and then 9 million players played the game. Later on, when they started working on the second one, their dynamics all changed for the most part, like the amount of time that they had to invest out of university on the first game just wasn't the same on the second.

At the same time, Matt 'Maxx' Khazan, who led the project, was working his day job at Torn Banner, so he started talking to our CEO, Steve Piggott. What happened was they started realizing that the original Chivalry also started as a Source mod, and they felt like there was a real shared heritage between the two. What ended up happening is that most of the people working on the Lever Games project for No More Room in Hell 2 came to Torn Banner. So a lot of the people that were working on the original are with us now, still working on the second game, and it just felt right. It felt right that it was a studio in Toronto, a bunch of developers who knew and loved the game, and a genre that we were really interested in going in.

This sequel is a bit different from the first one, right? It's an open world, after all.

Ye