User blog:LoK-Aevum/Amy Hennig discusses Soul Reaver

Ardeth Silvereni, the creator of our ever-superlative fellow fansite, Dark Chronicle, notified the community that the PlayStation Blog has a new interview with Amy Hennig concerning Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.

Some of the information has been covered in earlier sources, but Amy has also revealed a few all-new facts:


 * Amy makes her first public acknowledgement of the original Shifter project.
 * Shifter's lead character "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". This character was not necessarily one and the same as Raziel; he was to "glide on the tattered remains of his wing-like coattails" (in contrast to Raziel's organic wings).
 * Shape-shifting was supposed to be a major component of the game rather than a minor feature, but was "pared back" due to all of the technical risks it raised.
 * Amy repeats that she and her team were asked by other company members at Crystal Dynamics to move Shifter into the Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain universe (as opposed to the old murmurings that they had plotted to hijack the IP from Silicon Knights). According to Amy, the team was actually resistant at first to the notion of adapting Shifter into a Blood Omen sequel - they had been "very invested" in the Shifter IP, and the idea "caused a bit of consternation" - but they later saw the bright side of this creative constraint.
 * Kain's empire/Nosgoth’s dystopian future was intended to convey "a decaying 19th-century industrial aesthetic".
 * Amy emphasises how difficult the data-streaming engine was to develop, saying that the programmers were still working to get textures to dynamically pack correctly only a couple of months before the game's release.
 * The texture-morphing feature was abandoned due to time and PlayStation memory constraints.
 * A sequel had been planned even before the game's ending was changed - and the early concept for Soul Reaver 2 was not very different to the final product. In the "original" storyline, having destroyed Kain and his brethren, Raziel would realise in Soul Reaver 2 ''"that 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. So the story would have arrived at a similar place, just by a different route".
 * Amy feels that "in many ways", Soul Reaver is "still the most well-designed game [she's] worked on".
 * The voice acting and performance process in Soul Reaver significantly influenced the techniques Naughty Dog use today on the Uncharted franchise.
 * Amy prefers the character of Kain to Raziel, but feels it's "impossible" to choose which of the two is closest to her heart.

The full interview is available at the original source here.