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Archive The Making Of... Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver in Play UK issue 248 (John Robertson)

"It was the game that developed many of the techniques that would go on to be employed in both Uncharted and The Last Of Us. John Robertson speaks to senior designer Richard Lemarchand about what made Soul Reaver so special"[1]

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Did you know that 1999 was the year that the Euro currency launched? It's also the year that Glenn Hoddle was sacked as England manager and the London Eye was unveiled. A year of new ideas and new beginnings in the face of the new millennium.

New ideas and new beginnings is exactly what characterises Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver. The game launched late in the summer of the 1999, bringing with it a host of revolutionary design and production processes that would go on to become best practice for the industry going forward. It brought a new maturity to the action game, a genre that had up until that point been predominantly dominated by games overtly aimed at children and teenagers.

Here was something not only mature, but literary and thought-provoking; a game that featured violence and conflict, but backed it up with a narrative and characters that harboured genuine engagement and depth. It's the kind of game that grows in your mind even when you're not playing it, each interlinking thread becoming more meaningful as you meditate on it. Interestingly, however, what we now know Soul Reaver to be actually started life as Shifter, a game loosely based upon the themes of John Milton's poem Paradise Lost. Soul Reaver's senior designer Richard Lemarchand explains.

"I wasn't actually on the project during its Shifter incarnation," he tells us. "I believe that concept was something Amy Hennig [director/writer] came up with while working with Seth Carus [designer/writer]. From what I understood from talking with them about Shifter, it was very close to the game that Soul Reaver eventually became."

Shifter was based upon the idea that there existed two different realms, the material and the spectral, and that a tortured protagonist could move between them. That protagonist was written as a fallen angel of death, a victim of injustice with tattered, humbled wings now hunted by his peers and former allies. All of these ideas would make it into Soul Reaver in the form of playable character Raziel and his ability to shift between planes of existence.

"I think the guys were somewhat inspired by the light and dark worlds in Zelda: A Link To The Past," continues Lemarchand, when probed about the concept's origins. "Amy and I are on record as saying it's one of our favourite games of all time. The idea was that you could move between these two worlds (planes) that would have structural connections, but would have unique sets of attributes that you could use in mechanical ways to draw out the story. Aside from the narrative re-skinning when the game took on its Legacy Of Kain mantle, there weren't fundamental changes to what was originally designed as Shifter."

The plane-shifting mechanic is core to the experience Soul Reaver delivers, providing not only aesthetic and thematic diversity but forcing you to take into account an added dimension when trying to solve a puzzle or traverse the world. Creating this level of complexity on the original PlayStation's hardware was no easy task.

"Both technologically and artistically it was very challenging," explains Lemarchand. "Although, in my memory, the plane-shifting mechanic came together quite early in production... I wasn't the one that had to program it, though!" he laughs.

"Something that really drew me to the plane shifting was its connections to – and I hope this doesn't sound overly pretentious – German Expressionist cinema. Amy was very clear about her inspirations, especially when it came to The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (a key German Expressionist movie). You only have to look at Cesare from that movie to see the connection to Raziel: the sunken eyes, the Robert Smith haircut, the scarf around his mouth and neck.

Cesare wasn't the only inspiration from the movie; however, the odd angles that existed across its sets and backdrops served as further artistic fuel for Soul Reaver's spectral plane. "What was vertical and horizontal in the material plane would become diagonal in the spectral plane," continues Lemarchand. "In cinema, that is a very classic way of heightening the psychological tension and recreating the feeling of being in a dream or a nightmare.

"That was very hard to get right. It's one thing to change the lighting from white and yellow in the material plane to a spectrum of blues in spectral plane, but it's another thing to find ways of deforming the ground, the walls and the architecture so that it looks sufficiently different. With a single design decision, we doubled the amount of work."

Soul Reaver's visual impact is just one of its strengths. Equally impactful is its approach to sound, the team dedicating themselves to implementing processes that were far from commonplace at the time. Shamefully, many of these processes remain underused today. As Lemarchand explains, audio design is paramount to providing the player with the strongest experience possible.

"Historically, videogames have been very orientated towards the visuals and less towards the audio. That's a big mistake when you're trying to create an emotional experience. They say the visuals go in through the eyes and impact your rational and intellectual understanding, but the audio goes in through the ears and somehow gets routed straight to your heart. Just as in a movie soundtrack, you understand what's happening because of what is going on on-screen... but you feel the way that you do because of what you're hearing."

Soul Reaver featured an adaptive audio system that was among the very first of its kind, allowing the music to change depending on events the player is encountering and interacting with during gameplay. Nowadays, this kind of thing is standard in character-driven games, but during Soul Reaver's development in 1998-1999 it was almost unheard of. This approach to sound design led to constant discussion with the game's audio team, with everyone encouraged to throw in their own ideas.

"As a designer, I always work as closely as possible with the audio people on any project I am on," Lemarchand goes on. "That collaboration on Soul Reaver was more intense than any that had preceded it. We would constantly be in each other's cubes and offices, talking not just audio but about the overall design of the game. I'm a big believer as a game designer that everyone on the team is a game designer. In design, everything matters. There's no detail in something that you're making that does not in some way impact the audience."

This design philosophy extended to how Soul Reaver used and recorded the voices of its actors. Hennig and Lemarchand would go on to design and direct all three of the PlayStation 3's Uncharted games, but it was on Soul Reaver that they developed many of the practices that would help bring Nathan Drake and company to life.

One of the most important elements of capturing Soul Reaver's acting performances was a simple one: get all the actors in a room together and reading their lines as a group. "That was very unusual for videogame recording at the time and, unfortunately, it still is. In many cases, actors are still brought in to record lines individually," renounces Lemarchand.

"On Soul Reaver we worked with Gordon Hunt, a great director with many years of wonderful work in theatre, television and movies. Gordon was the director of performance capture for the Uncharted games, too, and I think the very strong relationship that he and Amy have is part of what has made the performances in Uncharted and Soul Reaver so strong.

"All of the experience that Gordon brings to the process has worked so well with the talents of the amazing actors. They say that 'acting is reacting', so it would make sense that we would get the very best performances by putting them within an emotional environment where they could act with one another.

"I think Soul Reaver marked a turning point in the way people think about performance in videogames. Although, I think it's only very recently that those ideas have begun to catch on across the industry. I think the fact that we begun work this way 15 years ago is testament to Amy's vision for best practices in creating this kind of game."

Soul Reaver is one of those rare games upon which you can look back and identify very specifically the beginnings of ideas and elements that we highlight as 'best in class' in videogames today. The pacing, the weaving of game mechanics into the narrative, the performance capture and the adaptive audio blend to form a whole so complete that few games have managed to achieve something similar in the 15 years since its launch.

"We have a huge amount to learn from past games," Lemarchand tells us. "I do think people are now learning the lessons that are there to be learned from the design of historical games, but perhaps we could all stand to look back to the history of games a little bit more than we do."

―John Robertson[1]

BLUFFER'S GUIDE[]

Everything you need to know in five facts
  1. Amy Hennig and Richard Lemarchand went on to create the Uncharted games.
  2. Soul Reaver began as Shifter, a game about a fallen angel that can travel between realms.
  3. Michael Bell, the voice of Raziel, also acted in Diablo, Metal Gear Solid and Warcraft.
  4. Many of the game's themes are taken from Milton's Paradise Lost, the epic 17th Century poem.
  5. While it shares the same name, it is not a direct sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain.
―John Robertson[1]

FURTHER READING[]

OLDER – Blood Omen: Legacy Of Kain

Playing Blood Omen again is interesting because it demonstrates just how much a branded series can change from one game to the next.


NEWER – Uncharted

Many of the elements that started life in Soul Reaver would go on to inform and develop the Uncharted series, helping it attain its revered status.

―John Robertson[1]

STANDOUT MOMENT[]

Writing the conflict

No one is simply 'good' or 'evil'

Due to the excellence of the writing throughout, it's pretty difficult to pick a single best moment within Soul Reaver. The opening sequence, with its expert telling of a lengthy and complicated backstory of the events to come, is a prime example of this. Not only does this section draw us into the world and its primary characters, but it forces us to question their motives and morals, creating a world that is not confined to the simplicity of 'good versus evil'. It's this intrigue surrounding complex characters that remains core to Soul Reaver's appeal.
―John Robertson[1]

NOT A SEQUEL...[]

But Soul Reaver was not the first Legacy of Kain

Soul Reaver might have been marketed as a sequel to Silicon Knights' Blood Omen: Legacy Of Kain, but in reality very little inspiration was taken from it. Richard Lemarchand explains.

"Because we were a completely different team, other than Amy Hennig and Seth Carus who had worked on Blood Omen, I think we did feel that we had a completely different and unique identity," he tells us. "Of course, the characters of Soul Reaver are drawn from Blood Omen. But in terms of the origin of the themes, the plot of the story and the game mechanics, we were starting with a completely blank page."
―John Robertson[1]

Captions[]

  • Kain is the primary antagonist of Soul Reaver and the final boss that you must face as Raziel.
  • All of the character design is still awesome today. Good luck rendering this guy on PSone, mind.
  • It may not look so impressive today, but at the time Soul Reaver's animation was genuinely outstanding and among the best seen on the PSone.
  • Soul Reaver's detailed gothic environments we some of the most impressive on PSone so far.
  • Levels had to be designed to accommodate Raziel's ability to switch between two different dimensions.
―John Robertson[1]

Gallery[]

References[]

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Archive The Making Of... Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver in Play UK issue 248 (by John Robertson)

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