Blue Chalice

The Blue Chalice in the artifact room

The Blue Chalice item is a placeholder item used in the development of Legacy of Kain: Defiance. In the finished game it can be found within the secret debugging "artifact1a" room.

Profile

The Blue Chalice in the inventory

The Chalice is one of several secret items that were used for test purposes in the course of the development of Legacy of Kain: Defiance. Using Debug menus the chalice can still be found in the final game among the menagerie of items in the secret debugging room "artifact1a".

The artifact itself is positioned to the far side of the room along with its sister placeholder 'chalice' artifacts the Mystical Gold Chalice and the Crimson Chalice of Evisceration. Visually the object consists of a simple flat blue colored block sculpture that resembles a cross-section of a cup. The item can be collected which causes it to rise in the air and appear in the inventory but it can be put to no discernible use.

Notes

• The Blue Chalice is named as such in its inventory screen. Texture files refer to it as "bluechalicekey"
• The Blue Chalice is featured in game files as a simple blue square labelled as "bluechalicekey". A texture resembling the full chalice is present among the effects for several other artifact locks including "av_altarlock" (Dark Scripture), "pillars_gate_lock" (Bronze Disc), "pillars_sconce_lock" (Blood Omen era Stone Disc shrine), "shold_lock_two" (Malek's Sword), "shold_lock_three" (Malek's Shield).
• Whereas many Defiance textures are made up shapes that are reflected or rotated to make up complete object textures to save memory, the chalice items have some of the smallest texture files in the game, consisting only of a single small square of the main color that is wrapped around the object.
• The chalice and its sister 'chalice' items were inspired by the chalice items from the classic Atari 2600 game Adventure which was one of the progenitors of the action-adventure videogame genre. The chalices in Defiance are visually identical those in Adventure - whose items served among some of the first item carrying and lock-door mechanisms in videogames - the only difference is that the Defiance items are a single solid color where those in Adventure rotated colors.
• When selected in the inventory the blue chalice plays a piece of audio associated with Special attacks with Kain saying "Nightmare's Hammer". Similarly the Mystical Gold Chalice uses the name of "Sanguine Censure" when selected in the inventory. By contrast, the Crimson Chalice of Evisceration uses a piece of unused dialogue saying "medallion piece" - it is unclear what this relates to but it may be to do with another cut artifact.

See Also

• File:Wiki-Icon-TLW.png The Artifact 1a Room at The Lost Worlds (by Ben Lincoln)