Soul Searching in GameFan volume 6 issue 6 (by VC)
"An in-depth look at Crystal Dynamics newest epic gothic adventure"[1]
Profile[]
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is the sequel to Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, the worldwide smash hit that sold over 500,000 copies on the PlayStation last year. Last year we hopped on the Kain bandwagon early and this year we're driving the bandwagon as we are not only fired up about this game but we'll sell our collective souls to play it early—it's that incredible. It looks beautiful with a very intense story and the potential to become one of the best action adventures ever created. Here is a taste of the back story and what you can expect when you sit down to play Kain 2 later this year:
Kain sits on high at his capital in the ruins of the Pillars of Nosgoth. Formulating a plan to become a dark god, Kain sets in motion a plan to conquer the world. To that end, he creates a cadre of six vampiric lieutenants.Raziel (the protagonist, so to speak) and Kain's other five lieutenants spread like a plague, devouring all that opposed them with vampiric armies and their massed might. Those that weren't devoured were changed to serve the ruling vampire tribes. Over the course of centuries, the human race was decimated and the world fell completely under Kain's sway. They erected Nosgoth (a temple), where they held court over the remains of the once-proud world. After a thousand years Kain grew bored and complacent—he and his lieutenants withdrew to the mountains to leave the vampire tribes to do as they wished.
"When you create a vampire in our world, it's a little bit different from Anne Rice. You don't just suck their blood and infect them with this vampire disease," said Jim Currie, marketing manager at Crystal Dynamics. "A vampire like Kain finds a dead body and breathes a little bit of his soul into it. It's the kiss of undeath, if you will. That little bit of soul animates the body and creates the vampire. Raziel was a dead body until Kain breathed a little life into him, or unlife, if you will."They enjoyed their esoteric life as high-order vampires. Things were good until one day Raziel had the audacity to evolve beyond Kain. In this Soul Reaver world, vampires mutate and evolve. Over the course of time, Raziel developed wings and that irked the mighty Kain. He didn't have wings and Kain felt it wasn't right for one of his lieutenants to get wings before he did. To punish Raziel, Kain ripped his wings off and threw him down into this bottomless vortex of water. Water and vampires don't mix; it's like acid and humans.
"Raziel was thrown down into the vortex and was screaming and melting—writhing in pain incarnate, if you will. When you are in that much pain, you lose a sense of time and reality," said Currie. "So who knows for how long he had been falling, when he suddenly realized he was no longer in pain and could hear the Elder speaking to him."The Elder is an ancient god who resides in the center of Nosgoth. Far older than Kain, far older than any vampire, he feeds on souls. Because the vampire empire in Nosgoth has trapped human souls in their corpses, the Elder isn't receiving any sustenance; he is enraged and very hungry. He strikes a deal with Raziel: He will let Raziel egress to the material plane if Raziel brings him some souls and takes vengeance against Kain. His other task is to rid the world of vampires so the Elder can eat.
"So Raziel thinks his first reason for living is payback and is on a mission of vengeance. His experience of self-discovery is unexpected and shocking or interesting depending on your perspective," Curries said. "As Raziel, you go throughout the game discovering more and more about who he was before Kain turned him into a vampire. Players discover [Kain's] first act was to recruit a cadre. Dipping into the underworld, Kain snared six souls and made them lieutenants of which Raziel, the character you control, was one."This time around there are no load times, the story is rich and there are plenty of new gameplay experiences that unfold. If you weren't afraid of the dark before, you will be after you play this game!
A good mix of technology, game design, and attention to detail will keep action adventure fans lining up to get their hands on Soul Reaver. This is one spine-tingling adventure that will enrapture your soul!INTERVIEW WITH THE KAIN TEAM[]
Crystal Dynamics: The philosophy that we had for this game is at the end of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain the players had two options: They could sacrifice themselves to restore balance and everything would be fine or they could choose to rule the world as dark gods. We decided that it would be more interesting if you could rule the world as dark gods. Okay, now you are a dark god, what do you do? You wake up the next morning and you are all-powerful. It didn't seem to us that it would make a very interesting adventure game. We didn't want to make it into a military or vampire sim-city-like game where we showed Kain conquering Nosgoth. We wanted to maintain the very eerie ambience that we built up with Blood Omen. Our solution for that was to move the game thousands of years into the future and let Kain's vampire empire shape Nosgoth—and to have changed and evolved Nosgoth into a very different world that would reflect the very different look and feel that the game would have. The technology that we are using right now is so different than the technology that was used in Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain that we felt that the story needed to evolve as far as the technology. That was one of our very big goals and I think we managed to achieve it.
GF: What type of a game is Soul Reaver?CD: It's an adventure with some strong role-playing game elements. The line between adventure and role-playing games is always tough. A lot of time on console games, role-playing games are only RPGs because you don't have interactive combat. We have interactive combat, so does that make us an adventure game? It's tough to say, but there is character development like in an RPG, there is also real-time combat. We have a unique combination of the two, depth with some arcadey twitchy action.
There's a couple of different things about the combat in Soul Reaver. First of all, you can pick up weapons in any environment. For example, Raziel has a spear and you can use the weapons you find to defeat the vampires. The vampires are wily, they're tough and they are smart. You can't just beat them senseless and absorb their souls. You have to use things in the environment—like weapons, or sunlight or water—to help overcome them. In a sense, fighting is like a puzzle: You have one vampire boss—how do you defeat him? You figure it out and deide you have to pick him up and throw him in the water, then you have to figure out a way to use the elements in the environment, like break a fence and use a piece of the fence as a weapon. The environment is interactive in this game and you have to be on the lookout. There are a couple of different elements to combat. There's hand-to-hand grappling: Raziel can throw people, he can punch themm, he can pick up objects in the environment, like spears, rocks or blocks and he can push them on people or throw them at the vampires; he can use tools and weapons. He also has the ability to cast spells when he progresses throughout the game; for example, he comes to these glyphs (symbol or rune). Once Raziel obtains the glyph he can then use it to cast a spell, he draws it in the air and that evokes the power and the spell is then cast.GF: Can you talk a little bit about the technology and the advances that you have made in Kain 2?
CD: Crystal Dynamics has had many years of experience with 3D games. Our first 3D product was a baseball game and our learning curve for 3D started way back then in 1984. That game gave us an advantage and the knowledge on how to do things well. For example, the single skin technology that we are utilizing with this game was the catalyst behind it and that was 3D Baseball. What the single skin allows us to do is eliminate the sorting problem with the joints so it looks like an organic creature, not crappy little polygons all strung together. Raziel has a skeleton and his skeleton is divided into two parts—the upper body and the lower body—and both body parts can be shifted independently which gives them a very natural look and feel. When he picks up a weapon, the weapon becomes a bone that is attached to Raziel so it is very easy to interact with objects, we just have to code them correctly. Obviously the software Z-buffering is something that comes with experience with 3D products. Variable lighting and all of the those effects are a function of our technology but they are also a function of how we are building the team and building the game. The game designers on Soul Reaver are architects, literally. We have taken people who have just finished school as architects or people from architectural firms and hired them and they are building the game. We also have people from art school who act as the designers, so the team was built that was good with art and visual stuff.GF: How then are you able to take the designers' artistic abilities and marry that with the technology?
CD: The tools that we have enable us to do that. If you look at Tomb Raider 2, their tools only allowed them to build blocky areas. We use tools that allow us to create any type of environment, notice all of the arches and all of the columns with smooth corners and no jagged edges. If you can imagine something, you can build it with our tools and it's giving our designers that level of freedom that has allowed them to realize their visions in this environment.GF: What will gamers notice besides the look of Soul Reaver and what type of feedback did gamers have as far as some of the common themes they wanted addressed in a sequel?
CD: I think a fairly universal issue was load times. People weren't too keen on all of those load times and neither were we. When we built this game, we wanted to make sure that we eliminated load times.A key part of this engine is streaming—all of the data is streamed off of the CD, so there is seamless loading between all of the areas. You don't have to worry about any intrusive stops—where the ominous loading phase takes place—and that philosophy, we carried throughout the game. People were pretty keen about the story elements of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and we think story is important. However, we don't want to have the disc being accessed in the middle of gameplay to load full-motion video or animation and pull the gamer out of the story. In the beginning of the game we will have full-motion animation to set the story. At the end we'll have full motion animation to conclude the story, the story will be delivered to the players with voice-overs and the in-character models. They never have to leave the world that they are in to get part of the story and that is very important to us. An extension of that thought is player death. Raziel is immortal, you cannot kill him. Our thinking behind that was, you are playing an adventure game that is very large and epic and you die. What do you do? Do you go to the memory card and go to three or four different load screens—hitting the disc all of the time... That is a bunch of BS. It's an artificial constraint that we didn't think needed to be there, so we decided to build Raziel's immortality into the mythology. The main reason Raziel is immortal is so you don't have to load.
He needs energy, energy from souls. For him to exist on the material plane—that takes energy. In order to survive, he needs to go and get some souls to eat. As long as he does that and maintains that energy he stays in the material world, as soon as he loses that energy he is pushed down into the material plane. Now the spectral plane gives the player a couple of advantages. First of all, it effectively doubles the gameplay area. Every area that exists in the material realm has a corresponding area in the spectral realm and Raziel can go between the realms at will. The player sees that as a real-time morph or shift between the planes, a very cool effect that doubles gameplay, and it allows Raziel to have that immortal role. So he gets all of his energy knocked out of him in the material world and goes to the spectral plane. If he has even more energy knocked out of him, he goes to the Elder (the guy who allowed him to exist as an avenging angel).GF: What is the object of the game?
CD: The object of the game is to extract vengeance from Kain and it is an experience of self discovery for Raziel. A couple of interesting dynamics of the game: A new mechanic of the game is what I like to call the "Glide Mechanic." Raziel used to have wings, but Kain ripped them off before he threw him down the vortex, but the sad remnants of wings remain. You can get Raziel to grab the stubs and jump off a high place and parasail or glide through the air. We spent a lot of time tuning the physics so it doesn't only look good, but if you perfect this technique you will be able to use this dynamic to get to places you will need to reach.All of the abilities that you get in this game will become innate. You will gain new skills when you go through an area. For example when you defeat a vampire boss, you will gain a skill when you inhale their soul. Much like Highlander or the weird cannibal theory—according to mythology, if you ate the brain of your enemy, you gained their knowledge. In this case when you inhale their soul, you gain their special skill. In this case when you inhale their soul, you gain their special skill. In this game you will come across a race of vampires that can live in water and on land. Once you suck the soul of that boss, you can swim. When you can swim, you can go back to areas of the game that had water and suddenly go into that area again and have a new gameplay experience.
A hub system we're using keeps players going back to places that they have been before because they realize that they can do something new. That was not evident in the first product and we brought that new dynamic into this game. There are no menu screens or loading screens; all of the skills that Raziel obtains become innate. For example, once you can swim, you don't have to cast a swim spell. Once you can cast a glyph spell, you have to flip through several glyphs to get to the one that you want, but they are a button press away.Like most spells the glyphs seem to be elemental—focusing on one basic building block of life. A water-based glyph will allow you to have a water-based attack. You don't have to go into a special menu and then another menu. These spells are right at your fingertips. It's not like you have to worry about your spell or your magic meter, it's not keeping track of your mana or anything like that. They are based on elemental powers: learning the sunlight glyph so that you can summon this area-effect spell that binds all of the enemies in the area and stuns them momentarily—that kind of thing. There are no layers, we wanted the game to be very intuitive and easy to use. I think that it's more accessible than the original Kain gaming interface.
The other thing you can do because you are a creature of spirit is take material form. You can't carry a bunch of inventory with you, instead you have to use what is at hand. If you need to impale a vampire, you will need to find something to impale him with. You can't do it with your bare hands—well I guess you can, but when you take them out, the vampire will no longer be impaled. You have to search out impaling elements. There's going to be staves around as well as other weapons. Against fire monsters, you can use water... For example, if you see a picket fence, you can break the fence, grab one of the pickets and skewer a vampire with it. If you see a lightning rod on a building, you can use that too. The game is interactive in a sense that you can use elements from it as weapons that you can carry around and you can carry them throughout the game or you can use it against an enemy and discard it. You can also pick up the enemies and grapple with them and throw them into fatal elements. That same fence is sitting there crooked on the ground, you can grab a guy and fling him off of a rooftop and impale him on the fence. If you find a torch, you can carry it around and use it as a weapon, as vampires are very flammable. Even better you can throw your enemy onto a bonfire, if you have that opportunity. You can also grapple with them and move them into the sunlight so they burn.[Also], there are seven glyph spells with six Soul Reaver forges.
GF: How many hours of gameplay does Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver have?CD: It's tough to say, right now the game is going to be bigger than Gex, plus there's the spectral plane which doubles the play area and gives you an entirely new element to explore. Maybe 40 to 80 hours; if you burn right through the game it won't take you that long at all. But if you go and explore it could take you longer. I think you have seen with Tomb Raider and with Gex that it really depends on the player and his gaming preferences and experiences as to how long it will take someone to finish a game. There's a couple of things you will need to look for. First of all you will need to find things that will enable you to continue with the quest and keep you moving forward in the game. There are also other things you can look for. The game has a lot of rich detail, graphically. But if you look at it and study it, the look of the game also tells a story. You will find out what type of person or creature Raziel was before he became a vampire. It's a very rich game and there are many levels that you can play at it. There are five vampire bosses and Kain is the final boss.
GF: What is different about the artificial intelligence in Soul Reaver?CD: In a lot of games, you tend to have stupid enemies. The enemies become aware of you, they rush towards you and you kill them. I'm not saying Spawn (for the PlayStation) is like that kind of game, but in some games the enemies are a little weak. What we wanted to do with our game is we wanted to build some mystery and suspense into it. Let's say you come upon the weakest vampire there is, a Skinner. The vampire sees you, he doesn't do a stupid suicidal frontal attack, he turns and runs away. You think, "Right on, I am going to catch up to him, beat him and steal his soul." As it turns out, he runs into a room where he knows there are two of his buddies. So now there are three vampires to defeat. They don't run awy, they attack you and they don't do frontal attacks. They surround you from all sides and attack you like hyenas they are smart. That's the AI we are programming in.
We want them to behave like pack animals, like crafty dangerous animals... not like a bunch of deer caught in someone's headlights or zombies. Something else we are doing that is pretty damn cool is what we like to call "Reap what you sow." There are only a few humans left in this world living in weird little communities. They are very scared because vampires have not been kind to them. Raziel can go into that village and interact with the humans, get their souls very easily, and feed on them or you can kill vampires that are attacking them and be nice to the humans. If you are nice to the humans and protect them they will be nice to you, they will actually worship you as a god. But if you start killing them, the humans will attack you.GF: What is the boss structure, how did they evolve, and how did you come up with them?
CD: There are more boss encounters than there are individual bosses, probably because you encounter Kain a couple of times in the game. Like any good nemesis, he usually shows up more than once in the game. There are five clans of empires that have broken into different factions; they have different characteristics and different abilities. You have to battle four vampire clan leaders of the five clans—one is no longer in the picture—and there is one human boss that you encounter. You see Kain three times in the game. In all, there are 12 individual boss creatures you encounter.GF: What are some of your interests? Are you into vampires? How did you arrive at this totally complex story?
CD: We have great deal of other artistic pursuits and our interests are incredibly varied. We have a massive library that isn't just art reference which includes horror, science fiction, mythology, symbology, Biblical mythology, all of that kind of Joseph Campbell-like swamp of mythological reference that we draw on. A lot of it is different art styles like expressionism and all of the different artistic pursuits that we share that has brought us into this centrifuge. We are good sounding boards for each other, we bounce our ideas off of each other and if we both have this empathic experience where we smile and both go "Yeah!" then we are pretty sure we are onto something.GF: What games have you played that have influenced you in the making of Soul Reaver?
CD: If you look at Metroid and Zelda and games of that sort, there is a structure. Those designers kept their games very organic and expansive. Those games evolved on their own. Instead of sending a player out on a linear path, we are giving them a hub of a world with spokes coming off of it. Some of which they can approach now or they can choose to approach later, just like Metroid and Zelda did. As you grow as a character inside the game, you get new abilities and you can utilize those abilities to help your character out of precarious situations later as you proceed in the game. The spokes coming off become new hubs and you have this organic growth that stems from the character's growth.The goals of the game are similar to those of other action RPGs. The first goal you start with is similar to your goal in Kain: You've been wronged, you're pissed off and you want some payback and you are given the means to do it. And not only that, you are driven, as Kain was in the first game, by this new intense hunger. In this case instead of a hunger for blood, it's hunger for souls and you can't continue to survive without it. Driven by those first two things you start out on your quest. Along the way you have to work your way through the various clans of vampires to get to Kain. That is your ultimate goal. By defeating the clan leaders you acquire new abilities by defeating them and ingesting their souls: if that boss had the ability to scale walls, swim, become transparent and be able to walk through walls or barriers. Just like in Zelda, [where] Link would get the running shoes or the flippers. All of these things help you to get to your ultimate goal and that is a showdown with Kain.
At a point in the game you actually win the Soul Reaver from Kain and it becomes your primary weapon. It gets altered in your altercation with Kain, so it's different than it was in the first game. It gets destroyed in your battle with Kain. You, being a creature of the spirit world, are able to use it in its spirit form, in its wraith form, and it becomes your soul weapon. It becomes tied to you—it's an energy blade, a default power—and it becomes available to you when you are at full energy, otherwise it is dormant. What you can do with it throughout the game though—and this is an example of secondary areas that you don't have to visit but you can—you can find these elemental forges and forge the primal blade with these element's sunlight forge and you can basically baptize the blade with sunlight, which allows you, later, whenever you find a source of sunlight, to recharge your blade. There are multiples of these elemental forges strewn throughout the game, including stone and fire. They are off the beaten track; you might even play the game all the way through without finding them. They are not gating items, they don't impede your progress, but they allow you to complete the game with more variety and more power.GF: What message do you want gamers to come away with after they experience Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver?
CD: The shock value, with gore and blood that we had in the first game, isn't what we are after here in the second game. We aren't after a media message either. Look at any classic art painting and you are left with a message that the artist wants you to explore, and they leave it open-ended. It's free expression, we aren't trying to send any messages. What we want to provide for the player is an experience where the story, the symbology, the environments and the voice-acting combine to provide a vicarious experience of being this character with an interesting back story, not just being a gun-toting murderer. Being in these environments that use symbols to evoke a kind of religious symbolism that evokes associations with the player. The music in the game comes from middle eastern influences so we are really trying to give it a non-traditional game play experience in a traditional genre. We are trying to create an immersive experience where they can become this intriguing character and within that be moving, suspenseful, frightening and symbolic—all of those things as well as being a good game.We don't want to overstate this to the point where gamers think they are getting a treatise on man's inhumanity to man. We aren't going to be packing this game with overt philosophy or anything like that. It's just taking a more proud aesthetic approach to our work as opposed to us just hacking it out. We are taking it very seriously and are working very hard to create a game with a cool story that is fun to play. We want gamers to come away feeling that they got their money's worth. The same type of feeling when you walk out of a good movie as opposed to the feelings you have when you walk out of a crummy movie. We want them to feel like they have memories of places that they wouldn't have otherwise seen or experienced. We want to capture gamers' imaginations and make them feel part of a world and, in a perverse way, we want them to feel sad that it's done. We want them to want more, like when you read a really good book and you don't want it to end and you get pissed off when its over. That's how into this game we want players to be.
Captions[]
- Steve Groll
public relations manager - Jim Currie
marketing manager - Steve Groll, pr manager, left and Jim Currie, show off Soul Reaver
- Amy Hennig and Seth Carus