Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

"Kain is deified. The Clans tell tales of Him. Few know the truth. He was mortal once, as were we all. However, his contempt for humanity drove him to create me and my brethren. I am Raziel, firstborn of His lieutenants. I stood with Kain and my brethren at the dawn of the empire. I have served Him a millennium. Over time we became less human and more . . . divine. Kain would enter the state of change and emerge with a new gift. Some years after the master, our evolution would follow, until I had the honour of surpassing my lord. For my transgression, I earned a new kind of reward... agony. There was only one possible outcome – my eternal damnation. I, Raziel, was to suffer the fate of traitors and weaklings: to burn forever in the bowels of the Lake of the Dead." Kain: "Cast him in!" Raziel: "Tumbling, burning with white-hot fire, I plunged into the depths of the abyss. Unspeakable pain...relentless agony...time ceased to exist. Only this torture and a deepening hatred of the hypocrisy that damned me to this hell. An eternity passed and my torment receded, bringing me back from the precipice of madness. The descent had destroyed me, and yet I lived." Elder God: "Raziel. You are worthy.""

"Kain: "...and that is why, when I must sacrifice one of my children to the Void, I can do so with a clear heart". Raziel: "Very poetic, Kain"."

"Raziel: "Am I reduced to this? A ghoul? A fratricide?" Elder God: "Elevated, Raziel. Not reduced.""

"Raziel: "These apparitions and portents... what game are you playing now?" Kain: "Destiny is a game, is it not? And now, you await my latest move...""

"To Raziel, as the earth shakes beneath his feet: "This world is wracked with cataclysms – the earth strains to shrug off the pestilence of Kain's parasitic empire. The fate of this world was preordained in an instant, by a solitary man. Unwilling to martyr himself to restore Nosgoth's balance, Kain condemned the world to the decay you see. In that moment, the unraveling began...now it is nearly played out. Nosgoth teeters on the brink of collapse. Its fragile balance cannot hold"."

"Deep in Nosgoth's northern wastes, the hushed silences embrace an ancient enigma."

""Beware - those blind with rage are by destiny ensnared"."

""Far in the eastern mountains, a stifled titan stands in mute surrender - unwilling host to a parasitic swarm"."

"Kain refused the sacrifice. The Pillar of Balance, corrupted to its core, stands as a monument to his blind ambition. Now these pillars serve only to bind me here -- my prison and eternal home, thanks to the avarice of your master, Kain..."

""Like a corpse in a shallow grave, corruption rises to the surface... Beyond these Pillars, the defiled victim mutely screams its outrage"."

""Raziel - Redeemer and Destroyer, Pawn and Messiah. Welcome Time spanned soul, Welcome to your destiny"."

"Where time is but a loop, A loose stitch in the Universal Cloth, A Streamer might seize upon a chance, a fatal slip And plunge the fate of planets into chaos..."

"Elder God: I know you, Raziel. You are worthy."

"Raziel: Show yourself, creature!"

"Kain: Raziel."

"Zephon: The prodigal son! There is no returning for you, Raziel."

"Rahab: Raziel..."

"Dumah: Unbound at last! I thank you, brother."

"I don't know how many people know this, but initially, it wasn't actually a sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain at all – our original proposal was a concept for a new IP we named "Shifter", loosely inspired by Paradise Lost. The protagonist 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. The "Shifter" concept was the genesis of the game that would become Soul Reaver; the core ideas were all there. The hero was an undead creature, able to shift between the spectral and material realms, and glide on the tattered remains of his wing-like coattails. We conceived the spirit realm as a twisted, expressionistic version of the physical world. The hero was bent on revenge after being betrayed and cast down by his creator – like Raziel, he was a dark savior figure, chosen to restore balance to a blighted, dystopian world."

"There were so many different inspirations, it's hard to just name a few… As I mentioned earlier, the original idea was very loosely inspired by the rebellious angels of Milton's Paradise Lost. The spiritual structure of the world was based on the philosophy of Gnosticism, the belief that the cosmos is ruled by a malevolent "pretender" god, that humans are prisoners in a spiritual lie, and that mankind's struggle is a fight for free will in the face of seemingly insurmountable Fate. We wanted to give Nosgoth's dystopian future a decaying 19th-century industrial aesthetic, while the look of the spectral realm was inspired by the twisted architecture and disorienting angles of 1920s German Expressionist cinema. Regarding the dialogue, we obviously took a cue from Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, with its florid language and ornate monologues. We wanted to carry a similar style into the sequels. I also drew inspiration from the dense, literate dialogue of historical dramas like A Man for All Seasons, Becket, and A Lion in Winter."

"Our biggest challenge, hands-down, was getting the data-streaming working, to allow us to have a seamless, interconnected world with no load events. I think we were one of the first developers to tackle this problem (along with Naughty Dog, on Crash Bandicoot). It proved to be way more difficult than we had initially anticipated – if I recall, we were still struggling to get the textures to dynamically pack correctly, just a couple months before release. We ultimately got it working by the skin of our teeth, but I wonder if we would've embarked on such an ambitious plan if we'd known how difficult it was going to be! Our second challenge, of course, was figuring out how to store two sets of data for the spectral and material realms, and how to implement the real-time morph between the two environments. Our initial plan was over-ambitious, involving texture-morphing as well as geometry-morphing, but we realized pretty early on that our texture memory (and time) was too limited to achieve this. We came up with the idea of leveraging the 3DS Max animation timeline to attach spectral values to the vertices in the geometry – i.e., frame 0 was the material world, and frame 1 was the spectral realm (or vice versa; I can't remember for sure). This way we could alter the x,y,z coordinates of each vertex, as well as its RGB lighting values, to create a twisted, more eerily lit version of the physical realm. Our ultimate challenge, though, was schedule and scope. Conceived as an open-world, Zelda-esque 3D adventure game, Soul Reaver was incredibly ambitious. Crystal Dynamics’ Gex engine gave us a leg-up on the 3D technology, but in essence we were writing a game engine from scratch, while developing a new IP. These days, a developer wouldn't think of attempting such a thing in less than three years (minimum), but Eidos wanted the game in less than two. In the end, we shipped Soul Reaver in under 2.5 years, but not without some unfortunate eleventh-hour cuts which still pain me today. The scope of the game was definitely too ambitious, but if we had shipped the game that Fall, instead of that Summer, I think we could have reduced the scope of the game more elegantly."

"To hit the August '99 release date, we had to cut the last few levels of the game, and end on a cliffhanger that set up Soul Reaver 2. Originally, Raziel was going to hunt down and destroy all of his former brothers as well as Kain – and then, using his newly-acquired abilities, he would've activated the long-dormant pipes of the Silenced Cathedral to wipe out the remaining vampires of Nosgoth with a sonic blast. Only then would he realize 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 (in the sequel)."

"I hope it's remembered as a well-constructed game with an original vision and an engaging story, and as groundbreaking in terms of what we were able to achieve on the PlayStation at the time. Our approach to voice acting and performance was also innovative for the time, the way we brought the actors in to record their dialogue together rather than in isolation. The performance capture process we use on Uncharted today – where we involve the actors as collaborators, and have them play the scenes together on the stage – owes its origins to the techniques we established for Soul Reaver fifteen years ago."

"In today's video games, the open world is now commonplace - a single, continuous gameplay area that offers a vast canvas for developers to populate, to varying degrees of success. At the most fundamental level, what makes these sandbox games work is their ability to stream in world data on the fly as you play, with no loading whatsoever to disrupt the flow during traversal. What is now the norm was once the most ambitious of gaming concepts - one that initially came to fruition in the console space with the classic Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver for the original PlayStation."

"So how does it work? Essentially, the game is broken down into a series of units, with each unit representing a room, hallway or path to other rooms. Once the game is running, Soul Reaver stores three of these units in memory at any point - the room the player is standing in and the two adjacent units. As the main character moves into a new unit, the furthest one from the player that resides in memory is cleared and the next one loaded. Maps are designed so that loading a new unit into memory requires less time than it takes the player to cross the current unit. Clever, right?"

"Further complicating level streaming, the design for Soul Reaver also called for dimensional shifting. During gameplay, players swap between the spectral and material planes - a key gameplay concept that ties in closely to both puzzle-solving and storytelling. Loading two different versions of the map would have placed too much strain on an already heavy system, but Crystal Dynamics' solution was elegant, innovative and efficient. The same basic map data is utilised, but geometry is mapped to different coordinates in each version of the level. Shifting between planes interpolates from one set of geometry to the other. Per-vertex colour data is also modified when shifting between planes, adding further to the illusion."

"Michael Bell as Raziel"

"Tony Jay as the Elder God"

"Simon Templeman as Kain"