The History of Legacy of Kain in Retro Gamer issue 240 (by Lewis Packwood)
- November 2022
- By Lewis Packwood, Jason Epps, Scott Krotz, Sam Barlow, Jimi Doss, and Retro Gamer
- Transcribed by Aevum
Profile[]
The first game in the series – Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain – was created by Canadian studio Silicon Knights, which developed the concept for what was initially called The Pillars of Nosgoth in around 1993. Key inspirations for the game included the Necroscope series of horror novels by Brian Lumley, which feature a vampire-dominated parallel world, and The Wheel Of Time, an intricately plotted series of fantasy novels by Robert Jordan. Game director Denis Dyack has also described the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven as a key influence, with its blurring of the lines between good and bad characters. The name itself was inspired by the title of Ken Follett's historical novel The Pillars Of The Earth.
Crystal Dynamics soon signed on to publish the game, and initially it was being considered as a 3DO title (the Californian firm was one of the 3DO's key developers, releasing titles like Crash 'N Burn and Total Eclipse). However, it was quickly decided that Silicon Knights should instead target Sony's new PlayStation console.It's fair to say that the development of Blood Omen was troubled. Jason Epps was hired by Crystal Dynamics as a lead designer around eight months into the project, and he recalls being sent up to Canada on regular two-week stints to sort out issues with the build. "We kept running into the same problem, which is – with no disrespect at all – a very big world with not enough in it," he says. "The game was really, really large. When we got the first playable build, it was just vast. I remember Denis Dyack saying at the time it was four times the size of the Zelda world." Part of Jason's mission was to bring this world down to a more manageable size, as well as to introduce more differentiation between the enemies and bosses. That included making sure each of the player's abilities was effective against a particular enemy type to encourage more varied gameplay. "I think the area that we wanted to push more but never quite got was the bosses," he continues. "I still think the boss mechanics in the end were a little weak and a little repetitive." That said, he thinks the bosses in the final game are a marked improvement on the original versions, which he reckons were "just a sack of hit points". He also remembers cutting out several minor characters that "just weren't pulling their weight narratively".
Jason is at pains to point out that the vision of the game and its complex lore was all down to Silicon Knights – although relations between the two companies became increasingly fraught. "Denis Dyack has always been a very strong personality, incredibly strong," says Jason. "It helps him a lot, because without certain fights, Kain would have been different, and he knew what to fight for. The problem was that at a certain point, he started to fight everything. And then it got really contentious, because we needed to ship. Crystal was not nearly as large as it is now, and not nearly as established back then, and we really needed to ship this and make it work."Denis wanted things to be perfect. And unfortunately perfect was not so much on the agenda, it was getting things the best we could, and he definitely got upset at that. And then toward the very end, it felt like things just entirely disintegrated."
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain launched on the PlayStation in November 1996, after around three years of development, and was ported to the PC the following year. The reviews were mostly positive, praising in particular its Zelda-like gameplay and intense story. Some of the biggest criticisms were about the loading times, which Jason says the team managed to reduce significantly during development, but they still remained fairly lengthy in the final game. "I think by the end, we came up with a good game that was solid," concludes Jason. "And I remember it sold a lot better than our anticipated sales."What happened next was messy. With the relationship between Silicon Knights and Crystal Dynamics in tatters, the Californian company decided to make a sequel without the involvement of Denis Dyack's team. Silicon Knights then filed a lawsuit claiming that Crystal Dynamics was plagiarising its concept for a Blood Omen sequel. The lawsuit was settled privately, but it marked the end of Silicon Knight's involvement with Legacy of Kain. The studio went on to develop games such as the critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem in 2002 and the critically bashed Too Human in 2008, but declared bankruptcy in 2014 after losing two court cases with Epic Games over use of its Unreal Engine. In the same year, Ken McCulloch, a lead writer, designer and artist on Blood Omen and a key member of staff at Silicon Knights, was sentenced on child pornography charges.
Amy Hennig had contributed to Blood Omen, but she stepped up to the director role for the sequel, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. The game was based on a new IP that Crystal Dynamics had been developing called Shifter, which was loosely inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost. The story centred around a fallen angel who was being hunted by his angelic former colleagues, and who had the ability to shift between the material and spiritual realms, gliding on tattered wings. The dark hero of the story was on a quest to take revenge on the false god who betrayed him.Hennig's team were asked to take this concept and adapt it to the Legacy Of Kain world, which caused some consternation at first. But they rose to the challenge, and many of the ideas from Shifter made it into Soul Reaver. The main character, Raziel (the name of an angel in the teachings of Jewish mysticism), retains the tattered wings, and can shift between planes – which was something of a technical challenge. "I had to work on some of the collision tech that would allow the transition into the spectral realm without you falling through the world, which was a pretty common problem when we first started," says Scott Krotz, a programmer on the game.
The whole concept behind Soul Reaver was incredibly ambitious. Whereas Blood Omen was 2D, Soul Reaver made the jump to full 3D, and pushed the ageing PlayStation to its limits. "We used pretty much every byte on the PS1," says Scott. "We were always trying to figure out how to make things more memory efficient, and how to be able to get more efficiency out of the PlayStation 1 so that we could render the size of the environments that we wanted." Lead programmer Carl Stika developed streaming technology that Scott calls "pretty advanced stuff", and which enabled levels to be streamed straight from disc without the need for loading screens. He adds that some of the code and a lot of the theory behind the streaming tech made its way into subsequent Crystal Dynamics games, right up to Marvel's Avengers in 2020.Kain was shifted to the role of antagonist for the sequel. The opening shows him casting his vampire lieutenant Raziel into the Lake Of The Dead, only for Raziel to be revived as a wraith by The Elder God, an ancient entity who entreats Raziel to kill Kain. Raziel later acquires the Soul Reaver, a powerful soul-absorbing sword, and goes on to defeat a series of monstrous vampires, claiming their souls and gaining new abilities in the process.
Soul Reaver was released for the PlayStation and PC in 1999, and ported to the Sega Dreamcast the following year by Dutch company Nixxes Software. It was rapturously received by fans and reviewers alike, and the PlayStation version holds a 91% score on Metacritic, the highest mark of any game in the Legacy Of Kain series. Edge magazine called the shifting between realms a "complex and inspired piece of design".Following the success of Soul Reaver, Crystal Dynamics began work on two sequels simultaneously. Soul Reaver 2 would be directed by Amy Hennig, while a separate team led by Glen Schofield (who later went on to create Dead Space) would make Blood Omen 2. The former game continued the story of Raziel, while the latter cast the player once again as Kain.
Scott says there were a lot of debates at Crystal about whether to develop the games for the original PlayStation, or whether to target the soon-to-be-launched PlayStation 2. The latter eventually won out – much to the delight of certain team members, says Scott. "One of the 3D artists [was] so excited [they were] just running around the office yelling, 'More polygons! More polygons!'" he laughs. One of the big differences with the new console was being able to pull information from the disc much more quickly. "On Soul Reaver 1, if you ever encountered a door Raziel had to walk through somewhat slowly, that was often put in to help with the streaming, because it would ensure that there was enough time for the data to load," says Scott. "But I think once we got into Soul Reaver 2, there was less of that.Soul Reaver 2 picks up where Soul Reaver left off, in a cliffhanger ending which saw Raziel being cast back in time to 30 years before the events of Blood Omen. That cliffhanger was partly a result of the development team running out of time, says Scott. "[We] had a grander vision than we could kind of complete, I think, and we tried to fully flesh out the story in the subsequent games." The plot sees Raziel exploring both the past and future of Nosgoth, bumping into all sorts of time loops and paradoxes along the way (see Convoluted Timelines). Blood Omen 2, meanwhile, explores the events between Blood Omen and Soul Reaver, with Kain setting out to defeat a clan of vampire hunters and claim the stolen Soul Reaver sword.
Both games were developed in a remarkably short time. Soul Reaver 2 was released in October 2001, only two years after the previous game, and Blood Omen 2 launched just a few months later in March 2002. Both games came out on the PC and PlayStation 2, but Blood Omen 2 was also released on the Xbox and GameCube. Soul Reaver 2 was deemed to have a good if sometimes confusing plot, although otherwise it was highly similar to its predecessor, and earned a lower Metacritic score of 80% on PS2. Meanwhile, IGN praised Blood Omen 2 for its story, but criticised its slow pacing, awarding it 7.7 out of 10.Crystal Dynamics then began work on what would turn out to be the last game in the series, Legacy Of Kain: Defiance, which finally brought together the stories of Raziel and Kain, both of whom were playable. "It was Amy who was the main creative vision... and that was her idea of the franchise coming together," says Scott. "There was a lot of tech to work on to have the dual characters. And we were looking for different ways to experiment: the game Ico was a touch point in terms of doing some of the cameras." Scott also developed a new lighting system for the game.
Defiance features a complex plot that resolves many of the unanswered questions from previous games. The differences between playing as Raziel and Kain also added some variety, with the former's levels mostly based around puzzle solving, and the latter's around combat. It was released for the PS2, Xbox and PC in late-2003, anf received mostly positive reviews, with a Metacritic average of 75% on PS2.Crystal Dynamics had been bought by Eidos Interactive in 1998, and following the disastrous critical reception of Core Design's Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness in 2003, the publisher decided to hand the franchise over to Crystal. "We took the team that was working on the Legacy Of Kain stuff and just transitioned them to work on Tomb Raider, says Scott. "So the Soul Reaver team was the one that did Tomb Raider: Legend, basically." By this point, however, Amy Hennig had departed for Naughty Dog, where she became head writer and creative director for the Uncharted series.
Eidos handed over the reins of Legacy Of Kain to Ritual Entertainment in Dallas, Texas, the studio behind SiN. It began work on a sixth game, Legacy Of Kain: The Dark Prophecy, but it was abandoned just a few months into development. Studio founder Robert Atkins says the cancellation was down to lower-than-expected sales figures for Defiance, as well as the fact that the PS2 was nearing the end of its life cycle. If you consider that Tomb Raider: Legend sold around 4.5 million units, whereas the combined sales figures for all five Legacy Of Kain games are somewhere in the region of 3.5 million, you can start to see why Eidos put the series on ice.But in 2009, Eidos was acquired by Square Enix, and the Japanese company decided to revive Legacy Of Kain. The firm approached various developers, eventually settling on Climax Studios in the UK, which had just released the critically acclaimed Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for the Nintendo Wii. Sam Barlow, the designer of Shattered Memories, was appointed as director and writer of the new game, which was initially titled Legacy Of Kain: Savage Messiah, but later renamed to Legacy Of Kain: Dead Sun. Sam's idea was to set the game in the far future Nosgoth with a new set of characters, thus avoiding becoming embroiled in what he calls "the world's most complicated time-traveling chronology nonsense" (see The Lost Sun).
Not long after, Square Enix appointed Psyonix in San Diego, California to create the multiplayer component of Dead Sun. "We were working on Bulletstorm with EA, which is actually, I think, how we got Legacy Of Kain," says Jimi Doss, who joined Psyonix in 2010. "There was all this, 'Oh yeah, that little Psyonix group, they can do a multiplayer game' – because that's all we were, we were kind of the multiplayer component people."All the attention was on Climax at the time, so we were able to run hog wild with our own stuff. We were allowed to go and play in a sandbox with no adult supervision." However, Square cancelled Dead Sun in 2012, and what was once meant to be the game's multiplayer component ended up becoming a standalone game called Nosgoth. Its existence was leaked in 2013, and a closed beta was launched in early 2015 – but the reception was lukewarm. "You get these people just bemoaning the fact that it's a multiplayer game and not a campaign, not a single-player," says Jimi. "And I get it: as a fan of many games out there, when they don't make the game that I wanted them to make, I get hurt."
The game never got a full release, and the Nosgoth servers were shut down in 2016, thus marking the final chapter of the Legacy Of Kain – although there are encouraging signs (see Kain Resurrected) that the series might be stirring once more.CONVOLUTED TIMELINES[]
The time-travelling storyline of the Legacy Of Kain series can be difficult to follow, even for the most dedicated fans. It all starts when Moebius The Time Streamer sends Kain back in time to kill William The Just, who would later go on to become the Nemesis, leading massacres with his fanatical army. By killing the young William, Kain kick-starts a new timeline.
Then Raziel is sent back in time at the end of Soul Reaver, and the subsequent game sees him travel backwards and forwards through Nosgoth's past and future. He is destined to kill Kain, but resists the forces of destiny and spares him, kicking off another timeline. Later, in Soul Reaver 2, Raziel kills his former human self, and his soul begins to be absorbed by the Soul Reaver – until Kain intervenes to pull out the blade, thus triggering yet another timeline.Trying to follow all the events and their repercussions is enough to make your brain melt, but it essentially boils down to this: all events in Nosgoth are predestined, but Raziel is an exception to the rule, and has the ability to change history. Plus Raziel is inextricably linked with the Soul Reaver, so if two versions of the sword ever meet, timey-wimey things happen.
KEY CHARACTERS[]
KAIN
In Blood Omen, the vampire Kain is given the task of purging the corruption afflicting the Pillars Of Nosgoth by hunting down their Guardians. But his refusal to sacrifice himself at the end unleashes corruption across the world, and he returns as an antagonist in Soul Reaver.
The vampire Raziel is murdered by Kain at the start of Soul Reaver, but is resurrected as a wraith by The Elder God, giving him the ability to pass into the spectral realm. He acquires a soul-devouring sword, the Soul Reaver, and sets out to take his revenge on Kain.
MOEBIUS THE TIME STREAMER
Moebius was one of the Guardians Of The Pillars Of Nosgoth. He repeatedly sets out to thwart the plans of Kain and Raziel across the series, in an attempt to modify the timelines and wipe out the vampire race.
The tentacular Elder God has more than a little of the old HP Lovecraft about it. This ancient being revives Raziel as a wraith after Kain casts him into the Lake Of The Dead at the beginning of Soul Reaver, and it becomes a central antagonist as the series progresses.
THE LOST SUN[]
Sam Barlow was the director and writer for Legacy Of Kain: Dead Sun, which ended up being cancelled by Square Enix after around three years in development. His idea was to ignore the convoluted time-travel plot lines of previous entries, and instead pick up on an abandoned ending for Soul Reaver. The finale for that game ends with a cliffhanger in which Raziel travels back through time – but in the original storyline, Raziel would have returned and activated the Silenced Cathedral. This was a giant weapon built by humans that would unleash a 'deadly hymn' to purge all vampires across the world.
"I love that ending of actually wiping out the vampires," says Sam. "So we were kind of doing our version of that story." Dead Sun would be set many years after this event – but where a devout order of vampires has managed to survive by training their bodies to shift into the spectral realm, something only Raziel had hitherto been able to achieve."Then one of them leaves the order and becomes an assassin [called Gein]," continues Sam. "So he's your badass main character that you put on a box with all the shades of grey and everything, but the sleight of hand was [that] the actual main character would be this very cynical atheist priest human [called Asher]. The launching point for the story is he gets killed by this badass spectral assassin, who then consumes his soul – but somehow when this happens, his soul takes over the body of the assassin.
"A lot of the narrative was delivered by having the soul of the assassin still present, and he walks around like a kind of imaginary friend – I think at the time we pitched it as [being like] Number Six in Battlestar Galactica."A key part of the storyline was going to be this ... woman who was a human concubine to essentially the vampire JFK. He dies in the vampire wars, and she's pregnant with his baby, which is unheard of because humans and vampires cannot normally reproduce together." In an act of defiance, she kills herself, but her body does not decay, and she's kept in a temple and revered as a saint. Asher discovers he has the ability to reanimate people by pulling souls from the spectral realm back into the living world, and he brings her back to life. But as soon as he does, she goes into labour and gives birth to a child who has been alive inside her for 300 years thanks to his vampiric blood. Sam concludes that, "[The child] has developed super-advanced telepathic pwoers, and has actually been controlling all of the people in this strange monastic order. And he becomes ... the main antagonist."
KAIN RESURRECTED[]
Back in May 2022, the Swedish firm Embracer announced it was purchasing Crystal Dynamics and two other Western studios owned by Square Enix, in the process securing the rights to franchises including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and Legacy Of Kain. Commenting on the deal as part of the company's fourth-quarter earnings report, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors said, "We see great potential, not only in sequels but also in remakes, remasters, spinoffs as well as transmedia projects across the group."
The deal was finalised in August, and in late-September, Crystal Dynamics released an online survey that posed a number of questions about the Legacy Of Kain games, such as asking respondents whether they have heard of the series and what they enjoy about vampire games. Most interestingly, the survey asks respondents whether they would be interested in potential remasters, reboots and sequels, and whether they would want them to be single-player or multiplayer. We asked Crystal Dynamics whether this means the series will be returning, and their response was, "We don't have anything to announce regarding future plans for Legacy Of Kain." Still, at least we know the developer is thinking about the potential of resurrecting the franchise: perhaps we could see Kain et al return from the (un)dead at some point in the future.Captions[]
- [PlayStation] Chained prisoners serve as tasty, health-giving snacks for a vampire on the go. ombat.
- [PlayStation] Whereas later games in the series were in 3D, Blood Omen has a top-down 2D viewpoint.
- [PlayStation] Rather than drinking blood like Kain, the wraith Raziel absorbs souls.
- Jason Epps worked as a lead designer for Crystal Dynamics during the making of Blood Omen: Legacy Of Kain. He left the company towards the end of that game's development, but recently returned to work on the future of Tomb Raider.
- Jimi Doss worked as a designer on Nosgoth at Psyonix, and later contributed to the development of Rocket League. He now works as a senior producer at PlayStation Studios, and is currently working on MLB: The Show.
- Sam Barlow was the game director and writer of Legacy Of Kain: Dead Sun at Climax Studios. After the game was cancelled, he left Climax to go independent, creating the acclaimed FMV games Her Story, Telling Lies and Immortality.
- Scott Krotz worked as a programmer on Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver, Soul Reaver 2 and Legacy Of Kain: Defiance. He remains at Crystal Dynamics, and most recently was the technical director for Marvel's Avengers.
- [PlayStation] Thrusting the Soul Reaver into a bonfire imbues it with the power of fire.
- [PlayStation] When in the spectral realm, Raziel can phase through bars that are impassable in the material realm.
- [PlayStation] After Raziel discovers the Soul Reaver, it shatters to release what's known as the Wraith Blade, which bonds inextricably to his arm.
- [PlayStation] The Sluagh are scavengers that prowl the spectral realm, feeding on souls.
- [PlayStation] Raziel's tattered wings allow him to glide for short distances.
- [Dreamcast] The Dutch firm Nixxes handled the Dreamcast port of Soul Reaver, which is graphically far superior to the original.
- [PC] Raziel starts Soul Reaver 2 without the Soul Reaver, but luckily there are some regular boring old swords lying about.
- [PC] Triggering a heavy attack can launch enemies into the air.
- [PlayStation] The Elder God revives Raziel as a wraith at the start of Soul Reaver. His emaciated body is missing a lower jaw – something that he hides with a shawl.
- [PC] The beginning of Soul Reaver 2 sees Raziel being sent back in time to before the events of Blood Omen.
- [PC] Blood Omen 2 tells the story of how Kain reclaims the Soul Reaver, and is set between Blood Omen and Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver.
- [PC] The dingy slums in Blood Omen 2 have a distinct Industrial Revolution feel.
- [PC] Kain appears more youthful in Blood Omen 2 when compared with his grizzled appearance in Soul Reaver, which is set later in the timeline.
- [PC] The vampire Umah guides Kain during Blood Omen 2 after he loses his memories.
- [PC] A cinematic at the start of Blood Omen 2 depicts Kain being defeated by the Sarafan Lord, the leader of an army of vampire hunters. The game begins with Kain waking up 200 years later.
- [PC] Kain has to regularly feast on blood to keep his health topped up.
- [PC] The first section of Legacy Of Kain: Defiance casts you as Kain, but later on you can also play as Raziel.
- Artwork for Nosgoth, a multiplayer game developed by Psyonix that pitted vampires and humans against each other. A closed beta was launched in 2015, but the game was never officially released.
- [PC] Only a handful of screenshots survive from the cancelled game Legacy Of Kain: The Dark Prophecy, which was being made by Ritual Entertainment.
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