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!"Īs you'd expect, implementing the real-time morph between the two environments - that is, figuring out how to store two sets of data for the spectral and material realms - was also a challenge.īut the "ultimate challenge", Hennig said, was schedule and scope - a common challenge in video game development.
"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. "I think we were one of the first developers to tackle this problem (along with Naughty Dog, on Crash Bandicoot)," Hennig said. The biggest challenge, "hands-down", was getting the data-streaming working to allow the game to have a seamless, interconnected world with no load events.
Hennig and the development team pared back on some secondary features during the making of Soul Reaver, including a plan to include shape-shifting as well as plane-shifting. "When we were asked to adapt this concept into a sequel to Blood Omen, our challenge was to take all these ideas and merge them creatively into the Legacy of Kain mythos." 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. We conceived the spirit realm as a twisted, expressionistic version of the physical world. 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.
The Shifter concept was "the genesis" of Soul Reaver. "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," Hennig said. Initially, Hennig revealed, Soul Reaver wasn't supposed to be a sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, rather a new IP called Shifter that was loosely inspired by Paradise lost. Manage cookie settingsīack in 2012, Hennig talked Soul Reaver secrets in a post on the PlayStation blog. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies.
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