User blog:Baziel/Winter 2016-17: 20th Anniversary and more

Well once again we have the traditional waiting period. I had intended to post this in time for October, but well this has been a tough year and things have once again gotten away from me. Apologies for that. So what's been going on? Well although the community has died down a little since the cancellation of Nosgoth, time marches on and there are still a number of ongoing fan projects and work, news and other source of interest for LoK fans:

On the official side, Glyph X artist Boyd Lake has finally updated his website with his completed models for the vampires Dumah and Zephon as seen in the SR1 intro - these accompany those already released of Melchiah, Rahab and Turel. Denis Dyack has also been taking fans questions on Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain in a series of 'Deep Dive' videos, which are very informative on the origins of the series - these can be found in three parts 1,2 and 3. Among the revelations is that there is apparently a legitimate way to access the HMCS Bitter through four invisible switches... good luck anyone who manages to find those. Among the more interesting news was the revelation that statuette company 'Gaming Heads' is working on a new line of Legacy of Kain statues and they've released a preview of a Raziel statue based on a piece of Soul Reaver 2 promotional artwork. Unfortunately no official news round up is complete without mentioning that another of the LoK family has passed away, with the death of casting director Gordon Hunt just before Christmas.

Moving onto the more unofficial stuff, over at the Hylden Dimension, Patrick 'The Hylden' Johnson has been hard at work producing several high definition updates to the characters we know and love, with updates to Wraith Raziel, Ariel and Kain coming in over the last few months - as well as a change of host, with the site moving to xx. There have also been updates to fan games with Blood Omen remake Blood Omnicide releasing a new demo and teases of a new update for Dark Renaissance (formerly Prodigal Sons)

Onto the wiki, well work never really stops here. First off there are new images, with a set of new Defiance maps added - although these will be noticeably lower quality than the maps of other games because model cannot be extracted from Defiance at this time and these were instead captured from the official guide. In terms of completed articles, a vast swathe has been cut through the Terms category, with completed articles on Switches (after a reworking of its subsets earlier in the year), Ugly statues, Doors, Standing Stones, the Reaver-convergence, the First paradox, the Second paradox, the Third paradox and Constrict objects; and also completed articles on Soul Reaver 2 chapter Epilogue and Soul Reaver ability Constrict.

There were also a couple of interesting dates in October/November, with October 31st marking the 15th anniversary of Soul Reaver 2 and November 1st marking the 20th anniversary of Blood Omen and the series as a whole. Unfortunately these went off largely without official notice (probably due to being overshadowed by the franchise of a certain Ms Croft who debuted at the same time). Our plan was to have finished the Soul Reaver 2 article project for them although once again this ended up being delayed until later in the year - so if you're looking for 400 page of SR2 goodness look no further than here or here. Other features were also planned but either didn't come into fruition or were delayed significantly - with one being me publishing my magazine archive - that's still ongoing at my tumblr blog if you wanna check that out.

Of course now we are back into the quiet times with no working title to concentrate on it's back to the uncomfortable business of the rumour mill and taking everything with a pinch of salt... Latest being another rumour from a legal eagle than SE has plans for the series... but of course don't take that as gospel.

Happy Editing until next time. Baziel (talk) 10:54, January 16, 2017 (UTC)