User blog:Baziel/Welcome to 2016

Welcome to 2016. I keep meaning to do these more often and spectacularly failing as real life catches up. Of course updates do continue in the meantime, it's just not always the best use of time to summarize big chunks of updates. So what's been happening? In short - a lot. The Wiki updates march on, with the Soul Reaver 2 articles and categories now slowly approaching completion. Pages that have been completed recently include the articles on the Planar portals, Reaver fonts, Air forge demo, Reaver bar, Health coil, Save altars, Sealed doors, Vampire Interview, Shadow bridges, Swamp (terrain), Ice, Rain, Vorador's Crows and Snow. With some scrutiny a new article - Valves - was also added dealing with the wheels turned in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Blood Omen 2

The completion of some of these articles themselves caused mini-quests to collate together images appropriate for them, resulting in large scale updates to our image library. For example, the page on Sealed doors resulted in a quest to track down images and textures for the Defiance quest items - meaning a lot of new screenshots and textures added that were relevant or simply in the same areas; similarly the article on Vampire Interview (the Soul Reaver 2 chapter where Raziel first meets Janos Audron) resulted in many new images of Janos Audron's Retreat and the Fire forge (SR2).

Other image updates include many new and revised images to complete major Defiance cutscene images, several Soul Reaver 2 pre-release images taken from various trailers a number of recently released concept images of the Legacy of Kain: Defiance comic and most recently a collection of extracted maps of all the Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain areas. There were also images updates in related games, with the LoK references in the Tomb Raider games articles captured and uploaded. In the real world there have been many interesting developments, including the creation of the Soul Reaver blade by the Man-at-arms team after years of requests by fans and the revelation of the Hylden Dimension's updated Raziel and Kain models. There was also big news of the revival and relaunch of classic LoK website Nosgothic Realm, complete with a brand new forum. The definitive map thread formally found at the now closed Eidos Forums and yuku Nosgothic Realm board has also been revived and updated on the Square Enix LoK forums, with several new additions including the new combined map of SR2 by Shrykull, links to the BO1 area maps and several Nosgoth area maps. The Nosgoth title itself has been pretty heavily concentrating on the implementation of a ranked league system with alpha, beta and three successive developmental league series underway or completed. Because of this there have been fewer gameplay or lore orientated updates, however there have been several teases of upcoming additions, particularly concerning the unknown sixth human class, the known vampire class (the Rahabim) and the next map (which appears as though it bears some of the hallmarks of the Silenced Cathedral). There has also been new information on the cancelled title Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun - effectively confirming the long rumoured that the alternate timeline of the piece was the result of a somewhat paradoxical pseudo-suicide whereby Kain murdered his past self ostensibly to restore Nosgoth. On top of that there has been the first churnings of another rumour mill - so take it all with a grain of salt - but a Crystal Dynamics employee has been quoted as saying it is a "50/50 chance" that there will be a new main entry LoK game this console generation. Only time will tell, but here's to the future. Happy editing. Baziel (talk) 14:33, January 1, 2016 (UTC)