Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver turned 20 years old on the 16th August 2019.
Crystal Dynamics' influential PSone, PC and, later, Dreamcast classic was one of the best single-player adventure games on Sony's console, and is credited with influencing the genre and its subsequent standouts, such as Uncharted.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver was praised for its story, characters, world design, evocative atmosphere and the mechanic of shifting between two world states, which at the time was hugely impressive.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver was directed and written by Amy Hennig, who took to Twitter to say it “holds a very special place in my heart”. Hennig, of course, would go on to play a key role in the Uncharted series at Naughty Dog.
Back in 2012, Hennig talked Soul Reaver secrets in a post on the PlayStation blog. Initially, Hennig revealed, Soul Reaver wasn't supposed to be a sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, rather a new IP called Shifter that was loosely inspired by Paradise lost.
“The protagonist was essentially a fallen angel of death, a reaper of souls hunted by his former brethren, and now driven to expose and destroy the false god they all served,” Hennig said.
The Shifter concept was “the genesis” of Soul Reaver. “… the core ideas were all there. The hero was an undead creature, able to shift between the spectral and material realms, and glide on the tattered remains of his wing-like coattails. We conceived the spirit realm as a twisted, expressionistic version of the physical world. The hero was bent on revenge after being betrayed and cast down by his creator – like Raziel, he was a dark savior figure, chosen to restore balance to a blighted, dystopian world.
“When we were asked to adapt this concept into a sequel to Blood Omen, our challenge was to take all these ideas and merge them creatively into the Legacy of Kain mythos.”
Hennig and the development team pared back on some secondary features during the making of Soul Reaver, including a plan to include shape-shifting as well as plane-shifting. The biggest challenge, “hands-down”, was getting the data-streaming working to allow the game to have a seamless, interconnected world with no load events.
“I think we were one of the first developers to tackle this problem (along with Naughty Dog, on Crash Bandicoot),” Hennig said.
“It proved to be way more difficult than we had initially anticipated – if I recall, we were still struggling to get the textures to dynamically pack correctly, just a couple months before release. We ultimately got it working by the skin of our teeth, but I wonder if we would've embarked on such an ambitious plan if we'd known how difficult it was going to be!”
As you'd expect, implementing the real-time morph between the two environments – that is, figuring out how to store two sets of data for the spectral and material realms – was also a challenge.
But the “ultimate challenge”, Hennig said, was schedule and scope – a common challenge in video game development.
“Conceived as an open-world, Zelda-esque 3D adventure game, Soul Reaver was incredibly ambitious,” Hennig said.
“Crystal Dynamics' Gex engine gave us a leg-up on the 3D technology, but in essence we were writing a game engine from scratch, while developing a new IP. These days, a developer wouldn't think of attempting such a thing in less than three years (minimum), but Eidos wanted the game in less than two. In the end, we shipped Soul Reaver in under 2.5 years, but not without some unfortunate 11th-hour cuts which still pain me today. The scope of the game was definitely too ambitious, but if we had shipped the game that fall, instead of that summer, I think we could have reduced the scope of the game more elegantly.”
Raziel, Soul Reaver's anti-hero.
To hit the August 1999 release date, the developers had to cut the last few levels of the game, and end on a cliffhanger to set up Soul Reaver 2.
“Originally, Raziel was going to hunt down and destroy all of his former brothers as well as Kain – and then, using his newly-acquired abilities, he would've activated the long-dormant pipes of the Silenced Cathedral to wipe out the remaining vampires of Nosgoth with a sonic blast,” Hennig said.
“Only then would he realise he'd been the Elder God's pawn all along, that the purging of the vampires had devastating consequences, and that the only way to set things right would be to use Moebius' time-streaming device to go back in time and alter history (in the sequel).
“So the story would have arrived at a similar place, just by a different route. In the end, as much as I hated its bluntness, Soul Reaver's ‘To Be Continued' ending probably turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I think it opened up more interesting story options for the sequels.”
And sequels came. Soul Reaver 2 launched on PS2 and PC in October 2001, Blood Omen 2, which was directed by Dead Space co-creator Glen Schofield, came out just a year later in 2002 as a sequel to the first game in the series, before Hennig returned to direct 2003's Legacy of Kain: Defiance.
Since then, Legacy of Kain has remained dormant. The ill-fated Nosgoth, a free-to-play multiplayer action game developed by Rocket League maker Psyonix, didn't make it out of open beta. Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun was a more traditional Legacy of Kain game, developed by Climax Studios for Square Enix Europe, but it was cancelled in 2012 after three years of work. (For the inside story on Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun's demise, check out our in-depth report.)
So, 20 years after Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver came out, it remains for many fans the best game in the series. And with no new Legacy of Kain in sight, perhaps it'll stay that way for years to come.
During the latest Sea of Thieves weekly stream, a Rare developer accidentally mentioned fire will make its way to the game.
This isn't the first time James Thomas, lead engineer at Rare, has inadvertently let some secret info slip. Back on a stream in January he revealed parrots were a pet coming to Sea of Thieves, leading to a six month ban from the weekly streams.
“Somehow the parrots have learned to be aquatic,” he said while discussing how the team had designed pets not to follow you into the water. This is quickly followed by a quiet “parrots confirmed” from Joe Neate, executive producer at Rare.
This week, about an hour and four minutes into his first stream back after the ban, Thomas cheerfully begins to tease the fire mechanic, which players hadn't actually been told about yet.
“I think the biggest thing we've announced that we have coming soon is fire, so hopefully there'll be something for you-” James starts, before quickly being interrupted by co-streamer Andrew Preston, senior designer for the game.
As for this newly teased fire mechanic itself, we don't actually know anything yet short of the fact it exists. Seeing as pets were announced quite a while ago now and still haven't appeared in the game, it'll likely be a little while before we're able to set anything ablaze in Sea of Thieves.
We hope James Thomas isn't feeling too burnt up about his mistake, and that Rare lets him off for his accidental act of pyrocy.
Supergiant Games' roguelike dungeon crawler Hades will soon be available on Steam (as well as the Epic Games Store) when it hits early access on Valve's platform on 10th December.
The developer made the announcement as part of the celebration of its 10th birthday, also revealing the entire catalogue of Supergiant Games are up to 80 per cent off in its anniversary sale on Steam.
(1/6) Guess what? Supergiant Games is turning 10 years old!! It's like we're a Kid again. Here's a brief thread with FOUR exciting announcements to mark the occasion!
The latest Minecraft Java edition update is chock full of bugs – bees!
Bees are a brand new neutral mob that will quite happily bumble around, gathering pollen from their favourite flowers and flying back home to their nests to make honey.
They won't hurt you unless you hurt them – but if you do hurt the bees and provoke them into stinging you they'll leave their stinger behind and die, and won't even drop any items for your trouble. You monster.
Bee Nests naturally spawn in Flower Forests, Plains and Sunflower Plains biomes. They have favourite flowers (aww) and like sharing the location of their favourites with other bees (AWW). Do not just whack a bee nest to try and collect the block though! You'll need to use a tool with silk touch to safely get the block with the bees stored inside, otherwise the nest will be destroyed.
During the nighttime or if it's raining, your bee pals will chill in their nests. If you want to keep them in chill-mode during the day, you can place a campfire under the nest or hive.
These new mobs will help with your farming by pollinating your crops when they're on the way back to their nests. You'll also be able to build a beehive to have your very own colony right on your doorstep, allowing you to harvest their honey and keep them nice and close to your farm.
There are five levels of honey (the amount contained in the nest), and once it reaches level five you're able to harvest it using an empty glass bottle. You can also harvest honeycomb by shearing a full-honey hive or nest, and you'll need the honeycomb if you want to create an artificial hive to house your bee friends.
You can check out all the details for the latest update on the Minecraft website. There's no word just yet when bees will migrate over to the game's cross-platform Bedrock edition.
It turns out that Minecraft is getting a visual update after all, just not the one that was originally promised. Overnight, graphics card makers Nvidia announced a new update for the game that will add Minecraft to the growing list of PC games that support real-time ray tracing.
“Ray tracing is one of the key innovations that we think is next for Minecraft,” said Saxs Persson, the game’s creative director, in a video announcing Nvidia’s update. “In normal Minecraft a block of gold just appears yellow but with ray tracing turned on you really get to see the specular highlight, you get to see the reflection, you can even see a mob reflected in it.”
In a brief trailer, you can see how much more vibrant and organic Minecraft’s world feels. Lava glows against nearby blocks, streams of water shimmer and show reflections of what’s nearby, and sunlight filters through a series of vines to create a soft, warm glow on the ground. Of course, players will need Nvidia RTX graphics card if they want to see any of this in their own version of the game.
While Nvidia has also announced that ray tracing support is coming to a bunch of upcoming games including Control and Watch Dogs: Legion, Minecraft is interesting because the game was originally due for a much broader graphical update called the Super Duper Graphics Pack. Announced at E3 2017, the pack was supposed to add much more detailed and realistic lighting effects to the game, as well as other enhancements, including support for 4K.
The update improves the way light bounces around game scenes to make Minecraft environments look more “realistic”.
However, the graphics patch will only be available to people with an Nvidia RTX graphics card.
Microsoft said it would be released in 2020 but gave no firm date.
Hefty price
The RTX graphics cards use a technique called “ray tracing” to do a much better job of working out how light bounces around the virtual scenes in games.
It can make on-screen visuals look more realistic as shadows, colours and the play of light in game environments will look more like the real thing.
“Ray tracing sits at the centre of what we think is next for Minecraft,” said Saxs Persson, creative director of Minecraft at Microsoft, in a statement.
“In normal Minecraft, a block of gold just appears yellow, but with ray tracing turned on, you really get to see the specular highlight, you get to see the reflection, you can even see a mob reflected in it,” he said.
The prices of Nvidia cards vary widely across online retailers, but low-end cards typically cost more than £300, The most expensive in the range can cost thousands. The update will also only be available on Windows 10.
As the update is being developed, Minecraft-maker Mojang said it would be added as an option on the settings screen so players could test it out.
It also added that it was working on a more general overhaul of Minecraft's graphics engine. This, it said, should bring some visual improvements to people who do not possess an RTX card or who do not run the game on a PC.
“Not all devices will support ray tracing, but we will have some graphics enhancements on most devices,” said Mojang. No date has been given for when this general update will be available.
Both announcements were made on the eve of the Gamescom gaming show, which runs this week in Cologne.
News about the RTX release came less than a week after Microsoft announced it was cancelling what it called the “Super Duper Graphics” update for Minecraft.
Announced in 2017, this promised to improve the look of the game on every gadget on which the game was available.
The update was cancelled after two years of development, because the “technical challenges” of producing it had proved insurmountable.
