Jake posted a new video from his web series on his channel. The first chapter explains Vorador's ressurection. The next episode will be about the return to the wasteland of Nosgoth, the final epic redemption of the series. Check it out!
Saturday, 31 March 2012
Sunday, 25 March 2012
Soul Reaver reboot/remake rumours
Once again, there is a rumour spreading across the internet that a new Soul Reaver game is being developed by Crystal Dynamics for XBLA. Vg247 informed about this that their mysterious souce told them about the reboot. Can we really expect for the series to be remade with better graphics or totally re-imagined? In this era of constant reboots of several franchises, it might not be that far from truth. However, Crystal Dynamics did say just a few months ago that they are not working on anything LOK related and that they are working on 2 new IPs. Personally, I wouldn´t mind a graphical update but a complete reboot might ruin the already established story. This article on CVG provides several reasons why Soul Reaver deserves a remake.
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
New Lost Chonicle site and videos
Jake and me have made a new website called Lost Chronicle. You can find all sort of interesting info there.
We also made a tribute video for Legacy of Kain since it is already 15 years after the release of Blood Omen.
We also made a tribute video for Legacy of Kain since it is already 15 years after the release of Blood Omen.
Thursday, 24 November 2011
New Legacy of Kain: Defiance videos
I have made some new videos for my channel this month and also take a look at Jake´s new awesome classic costumes for Defiance:
Thursday, 17 November 2011
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Rant the Robot - LOK Defiance Review
Jake and me started a series of reviews hosted by Rant the Robot. Check it out if you like smartass robot commenting on games.
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
New Prodigal Sons video, screenshots and map released
Jake and I have made a new video from Prodigal Sons. You can view the screenshots here. Take control over vampire Raziel and summon his brethren to use their unique abilities to get to new locations and defeat powerful enemies. Visit the deleted locations such as Dark Eden, the Undercity and others in enhanced graphics. Immerse into the story of Kain´s conquest of Nosgoth, destroying the human kingdoms and regaining vampire clan territories. Jake also made a game map for Prodigal Sons and Soul Reaver. You can download the map here.
Thursday, 15 September 2011
The Dark Prophecy Fan Graphic Novel
Jake and I worked together to make a closure to the LOK series based on the lost chapter the Dark Prophecy. It´s a collaboration of art from the games mixed with some of Jake´s personal art. Dialogue written by Jake and me. You can read the comic in here.
In the first chapter, we join Kain on his way to the scorched Pillars.
In the first chapter, we join Kain on his way to the scorched Pillars.
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
Why was Legacy of Kain cancelled?
The history of Legacy of Kain
„New game is an illusion.“ (Kain after 8 years of being in retirement)
There is lot of debate, theories, and mysteries regarding this issue which is haunting all the Legacy of Kain fans out there for years since the release of Defiance. The purpose of this article is to summarize all the events which have ultimately led to the cancellation of Dark Prophecy after only three months of work in progress. This article will give a short description and insight into development of each Legacy of Kain title.
To know what exactly happened we have to go back in time, to 1992. In this year, Silicon Knights was founded. The following year, Denis Dyack conceptualized his ideas for a game which relied heavily on a dark, vampiric story. Dyack named his project „Pillars of Nosgoth“ and his co-worker Ken McCulloch wrote the script for the game.
The main concept behind the character of Kain, according to Dyack, was to depict Kain as an anti-hero, someone to whom mature audiences could relate to. The game raises the question of what really is „evil“, as all the characters in the game are not distinguished into typical black and white/good or evil division but are flawed, gray. Silicon Knights stated that the story of Blood Omen was influenced mainly by The Wheel of Time and Necroscope. The Pillars of Nosgoth was sent to Crystal Dynamics and they agreed to publish the game. The primary platform was PlayStation, later port for PC was made. The game was released in 1996 under the name Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. The reviews in several game magazines praised the compelling storyline, open-world exploration and voice casting. On the other side, the frequent loading screens are the gameˈs biggest issue. To this day, Blood Omen is considered one of the best of the LOK series with its classic 2D rpg style and solid 30+ hours of gameplay with many towns, forests, mountains and dungeons to explore and secrets to discover.
What followed, only a year after Blood Omenˈs release, was a surprising twist. Silicon Knights accused Crystal Dynamics of stealing their concepts of Kain 2, because Crystal Dynamics were working on their own sequel of Blood Omen without Silicon Knightsˈ influence. The law suit was brought up in 1998 but both companies settled this in private. The result was that Crystal Dynamics gained all the rights to Legacy of Kain under the condition that they must regard Silicon Knights as the seriesˈ original creator. SK thus gave up their own sequel to LOK and started developing a new IP, Too Human for Playstation. After becoming a second party exclusive for Nintendo, Too Human for PlayStation was put to stop and company began working on Eternal Darkness for Nintendo 64.
„When we were doing Legacy of Kain, we had a lot of research into vampire mythology and a lot of ideas on where we were going. Crystal Dynamics merged in this entirely different game that had nothing to do with the series and then slapped the IP on it, and that's where Soul Reaver came from. That was just a weapon in the game. Even if the developer's good, and I think Crystal Dynamics is not a bad developer, you get this dilution of the content, because the original author is gone.“(Denis Dyack for 1up.com)Going back to Crystal Dynamics and their game, in 1997, Soul Reaver was Crystal Dynamicsˈ vision of a game based on Blood Omenˈs rich backstory and on the concept of another game, Shifter. Using entirely different technology (modified Gex engine) and swapping the rpg style of gameplay for a third person action-adventure, Soul Reaver became one of the most impressive games of PlayStation era with its detailed graphics and no loading times. Its development process was delayed several times (one of the reasons being SKˈ lawsuit) until its final release in August 1999 with Eidos as its Publisher. The game competed with Tomb Raider 3 on the thriving third-person adventure games market, together with Shadowman, Akuji the Heartless and many others. Selling more than 1,5 million copies since its release, Soul Reaver was a huge success and introduced Legacy of Kain story to new players, who previously have not heard about Blood Omen. To help the sales, Eidos poured 4 million dollars to promote the game in game magazines, television ads and comic books before its release. Together with Blood Omen, Soul Reaver is regarded as the peak of the series as it resembles Blood Omen with its non-linear style of gameplay where the player discovers new areas as he gains new abilities. The game also introduced its own new features – the shifting between two realms of existence in real-time and smooth passing between locations without the need to stop and wait for loading screens. Unlike Blood Omenˈs complex inventory system, Soul Reaver went its own way and the main character can carry only one weapon at a time. Despite the gameˈs length being up to 10 hours (the Dreamcast version claims 40 hours on its cover for some strange reason), the game was cut almost in the middle. Instead of pursuing Kain throughout the desolate Nosgoth as originally planned, Raziel follows him into the past, where the game ends. Overall, Soul Reaver was well-received both by users and game reviewers.
During Soul Reaverˈs development, work on Blood Omen 2 began by another team inside Crystal Dynamics. Soul Reaver 2 was in development right after Soul Reaver, having Crystal Dynamics two LOK games in production at the same time. This was possible mainly due to the sales of Soul Reaver which provided budget big enough to sustain future games. With most of the money going to the development of Soul Reaver 2 and securing the same voice actors, the budget for Blood Omen 2 was much smaller. The game became basically a modified version of a cancelled title called Chakan (a very similar situation to Shifter) with a very different game style from Soul Reaver. Blood Omen 2 has a closer camera, 3D control scheme, linear progression and a new chapter system. The engine which was used for Blood Omen 2 is from Mad Dash Racing (TLW) and not the modified Gex engine, as in the case with Soul Reaver 1&2 and later, Defiance. Blood Omen 2 is considered a black sheep by many (sometimes considered at the level of a fangame) in Legacy of Kain family, because it takes place on an alternate timeline. Together with its overal presentation, poorly designed and repeated character models, the blunt and blocky architecture gives a hint that the game had very low budget in comparison to Soul Reaver 2. It seems that even though BO2 was developed for two years longer than Soul Reaver 2, its team of developers could not produce a game which would be on par with previous titles, possibly due to limited resources from Eidos.
In comparison, Soul Reaver 2 was released ahead of Blood Omen 2 by 6 months. The game was initially developed for PlayStation from which a few screenshots exist, depicting Avernus cathedral area, before switching to PlayStation 2 hardware. Similarly to Soul Reaver, a Dreamcast version of Soul Reaver 2 was developed as well, but was dropped.
Soul Reaver 2 abandoned the concept of acquiring new abilities and open world gameplay system which were the trademark features of both Blood Omen and Soul Reaver. Instead, it focused heavily on the story and linear progression throughout the game. The concept of forging the Reaver with different allignments of energy was re-introduced into Soul Reaver 2 after it got cut from original Soul Reaver. Only four out of seven forge locations made it into the game though. Glyphs were also supposed to return in the form of pillar glyphs with the power to influence the game environment. As with previous games, these features were cut due to time constraints. The game sold pretty well, but did not come close to the huge success of Soul Reaver.
What firstly became known as Soul Reaver 3, was renamed into Defiance and hit the stores in 2003, two years after Soul Reaver 2. The game contains two playable characters first time in the series and a new combat and camera system. Defiance is an action oriented departure from Legacy of Kain series in an attempt to improve the gameplay mechanics. Ironically, the introduction of these all „new features“ which were promoted in several interviews and previews, made the game actually a Devil May Cry clone, however, with less complex fighting system. With almost little or no puzzles in Defiance, which were part of every game, Defiance tried to appeal to a wider consumer market by including more gore and heavy combat, and overall, trying to be „a really cool, intriguing, and, above all, exciting action adventure title with a lot of gameplay.“ as Lemarchand explained for Gamespot. This came at the cost of repetetive locations (especially the Vampire Citadel is one of the worst designed areas in the whole series), overdoing the forges concept (re-forging the Reaver for three games now), music (only one entirely new score, all others are mixes from previous ones), loading screens, too big focus on combat, no puzzles, practically the opposite of all the elements which were defining the series. Just as its Soul Reaver predecessors, Defiance ended prematurely due to lack of time.
The game was received by critics with various scores. Before the release, Henning described this new system in Defiance as following:
"We wanted the camera in LoK: Defiance to support the epic feel of the game, so we developed a scripted, cinematic in-game camera system, which captures the action from the best possible angle and distance as the player moves through the environments. The player no longer needs to manage the game camera in order to navigate the levels, and the game overall has a much more seamless, movie-like feel.“ (Amy Henning on Neoseeker)
This might have looked good on paper but the new camera actually was one of the most criticized elements of the game. While suitable for battles, exploration in Defiance became almost impossible thanks to the camera which was looking the way you did not want or worse, was locked, not to mention the jumping sequences with Raziel were now almost impossible to do (also because the mysterious lack of crouching and thus much difficult to aim his jumps).
"We felt that there were a lot of 'legacy' elements left over from the SR games that no longer applied, and that overall the combat had become a little too tedious and tactical.“ (Amy Henning on Neoseeker)
On the other hand, I found the combat completely satisfying and tactical as a plus in the previous games in contrast to slashing enemies for five minutes and not being able to avoid battles most of the time.
"Rather than having a broad and shallow set of combat mechanics, supporting a variety of mundane weapons, we've focused instead on creating a deep suite of combat moves for Kain and Raziel's primary.“ (Amy Henning on Neoseeker)
Another element of the game which was criticized was that both characters have literally the same moves and are forced to use only one weapon all the time as opposed to the rest of the series where the player could choose any weapon.
Ritual Entertainment, an external collaborator helping Crystal Dynamics with Defiance, was basically in charge of the development and this might explain why the series took a more action oriented direction. If we look up their previously published games, they were making shooters such as SiN and Counter Strike ports. Why did Eidos choose them to co-develop Defiance and work on Dark Prophecy?
Defianceˈs sales were dissapointing for Eidos (the game sold between 500 000 to 1 000 000 copies as seen here). Defiance had hardly any publicity (nowhere near in league with Soul Reaver massive campaign). Eidos tried to make the game more player friendly the result was somewhat confusing for both fans and regular players. Even though the works began on a sequel to Defiance, now entirely in the hands of Ritual Entertainment, the game was canceled by Eidos only after a few months of development. Subsequently, Ritual Entertainment got bought out by MumboJumbo, a casual game publisher. The published screenshots found in portfolios of people who worked on Dark Prophecy uncover that the game was supposed to be in the same style as Defiance. When we return back to Dyack, he commented on this new approach to the series by Crystal Dynamics as follows:
If we summarize this topic,
there are many factors which gradually contributed to the premature end of the
series. Firstly, when looking at the scores which the games received various
magazines and sites, the score was lower with each new game. Legacy of Kain was
always regarded as series with great story but weaker gameplay. Crystal
Dynamics tried to reinvent the system for Defiance, but it only resulted in the
seriesˈ cancellation. Eidos blamed it on the weak sales, but with the
decreasing quality and not enough publicity (in comparison to Tomb Raider), the
series relied heavily on its fans. Acquiring new ones is a hard task for
games which focus heavily on complicated story and immersive storytelling as
the consumer market has changed over the years. There is a big demand for
shooters and action oriented games, which are easy to play, while games which
require more thinking are dying out. It seems that all these things caused that
publishing a new game which has certain audience nowhere close to the mass
market, was too risky. Will we ever get an official continuation to the series?
That remains to be seen, but as Crystal Dynamics are now fully occupied with
all those Tomb Raider games which are being released and released (latest one looks
pretty decent though), it might be possible for the LOK IP to be bought out by
some other company, like Ubisoft. However, it is questionable if Square-Enix
would let go of its IP. Kain concludes this article as follows:
„Our futures are predestined - Eidos foretold mine years ago. We each play out the parts sales have written for us. New game is an illusion.“
Saturday, 28 May 2011
Site redesign and other news
It was a quite long while that I kept the same design and background for my blog, so I hope this new look is fresh and interesting. I could not resist to not put Turel from SR1 on my site :) In the next few days I will be making some new videos for my channel, since I got my hands on the Dreamcast version.
I have joined LOK wikia page, and added articles for early and later beta versions of Soul Reaver.
Viper has started redesigning the Prodigal Sons website and I am looking forward to meeting new members and participating in discussions there.
Vincent has updated LOK: Revival, you only need to swap the original exe with the edited exe file.
Thursday, 19 May 2011
Nupraptor´s Retreat in Prodigal Sons
A new screenshot was published from PS! It depicts Lt. Raziel on the ledge which we could see in Soul Reaver. I have added the reference screenshots for comparison, except for this time in Prodigal Sons, it really looks spectacular in graphics as well! More info here.
Monday, 18 April 2011
New screenshot from Prodigal Sons
Jake updated his development journal and posted a new screenshot from his game. Depicting the cutscene which we have never seen, Kain decents into the Tomb of Sarafan to resurrect the long dead corpses of the Sarafan warriors.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Final Release of LOK Revival and other stuff
The final version of LOKR is finally out and I hope you all will enjoy it. Besides that Divine Shadow uncovered the pictures from the deleted Pillars area in Defiance, shortly after their collapse. With the work for Vincent done, there are new projects emerging of which I will be part of, so when they will be announced I will post it here. All of them are very interesting and I am looking forward to improve my skills as an artist.
Thursday, 23 December 2010
Legacy of Kain: Revival released!
The fan game by Vincent Chevalier is finally released. You can download the full version here.
I hope you will enjoy the game and leave a feedback on Vincent´s site or my blog! Thanks.
Saturday, 30 October 2010
Legacy of Kain: Revival announced!
I proudly present you Legacy of Kain: Revival, a 2D game by Vincent Chevalier. He has worked for almost two years on it and a beta should be released at the end of 2010. I have helped him with drawing the characters and items. Be sure to check the LOK:R site and visit this site for more info about the game and become a member! Video available here.
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Legacy of Kain - Released art
The developers of Legacy of Kain had released previously unseen artwork, screenshots, models, etc. Huge thanks to Divine Shadow who found about this. I have compiled all the links to make it easier to access.
Dan Cabuco
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Soul Reaver Galleries
I have finally uploaded the screenshots which I have made from all of the versions. Soul Reaver Beta Gallery, Soul Reaver Later Beta, and Soul Reaver Retail are now available. I also uploaded some of the textures from SR.
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Soul Reaver 1&2 Soundtracks now online
Tenaya, the owner of Nosgothic Realm was so kind to host the soundtracks for SR1 and SR2 which I have finished recently. I hope you all will enjoy the great music of Legacy of Kain :)
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
The Dark Prophecy - new screens and info
Jason Muck, who worked on The Dark Prophecy for 3 months before it was cancelled, has updated his site with new screenshots. Most of them appear to be from Malek´s bastion so check them out.
A small note: the OSTs from SR1&2 are done, so be sure to check out Nosgothic Realm for an update:)
A small note: the OSTs from SR1&2 are done, so be sure to check out Nosgothic Realm for an update:)
Sunday, 16 May 2010
New year, new projects
Hi everybody (if somebody actually reads this :D),
I didn´t have much time to post anything new here. NC got postponed cause it consumes a hell lot of time and did not fit into our schedule so far (school, work). We haven´t abandoned it, we just need more time for preparation.
So what´s new?
I´ve started to work on my third version of Soul Reaver soundtrack which means completely re-recording each track into ogg vorbis format. When it´s done, you can look forward to Soul Reaver 2 complete soundtrack (if I get the damned game working..)
Other news is that I´m collaborating with Vincent on his 2D game LOK Revival (drawing character´s animation) and so far the project goes good. There is no news from Ascare, the creator of Fall of Nosgoth, but I hope he is doing fine.
So what´s new?
I´ve started to work on my third version of Soul Reaver soundtrack which means completely re-recording each track into ogg vorbis format. When it´s done, you can look forward to Soul Reaver 2 complete soundtrack (if I get the damned game working..)
Other news is that I´m collaborating with Vincent on his 2D game LOK Revival (drawing character´s animation) and so far the project goes good. There is no news from Ascare, the creator of Fall of Nosgoth, but I hope he is doing fine.
Sunday, 4 October 2009
Nosgoth Chronicles announced!
The day has finally come. I have the honour to present you the Nosgoth Chronicles project, a 3D-animated sieres based on Legacy of Kain. Visit the Nosgoth Chronicles website for more info, pictures, videos and forum. I am looking forward to meet you all there!
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Soul Reaver Screenshot Comparison - Beta vs Retail
I decided to make this comparison so that everybody could see the various differencies between the versions of Soul Reaver. The arrangement of the screenshots is as following, from left to right - the early beta, later beta and the retail version. Sometimes, there are just two comparing screenshots - this indicates that such location/object does not exist in one of the versions - in this case, the early beta. Some changes are really obvious, some not, but by taking the screenshots from the same location it makes them easier to spot. Changes include different lighting, objects, location of enemies, distinct textures, etc. I hope you will enjoy it.
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