Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun - Cancelled Soul Reaver sequel

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lefantome

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Feb 22, 2015
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBN8N2NXfi4

32 minutes of video.

From the video description:

The video contains some of the opening story sequences, exploration, combat and an array of gameplay mechanics from Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun. The game was cancelled by Square Enix in 2012 after three years of development at Climax Studios, with Crystal Dynamics acting in an advisory role. The game was not projected to meet Square Enix sales projections, and was scrapped, to the enormous disappointment of staff who had dedicated a lot of work to the project. One source recalled that staff came in at weekends to continue working on the game, while higher ups already knew it was cancelled. The game had included a multiplayer component, an online asymmetrical deathmatch mode completely disconnected to the story and era of the single-player campaign. This was the only part of the project to survive the cancellation, and has now been heavily expanded upon and released as Nosgoth.

The story of Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun seems to be along the lines of the following (with some information from insider sources and some from my knowledge of the franchise): Kain and Raziel's time-travel throughout Legacy of Kain: Defiance appears to have stabilised Nosgoth's far future. Humans spread across the land once more, and plant life began to re-appear. The vampire monsters returned to more elegant vampiric forms, though some maintained their bestial ancestors' hunger for souls. The vampires continued to block out the sunlight using huge ever-burning smoke stacks. The conflict between predators and prey continued as it always had done. Humans were able to regain enough control of the wilderness to re-establish trading towns, and became enamoured with worship of the obscured Sun.

The respite faded, and mass sterility plagued the human race. Asher, a human, was able to achieve a miracle and father an unborn child. From unseen machinations, a Saradin Soul-Eater vampire is sent to kill Asher and his family (with orders form on high to make the assassination purposely look like a massacre) but something goes wrong: As the vampire attempts to consume the human?s soul, a freak occurrence results in Asher taking complete control of Gein's body - leaving Gein?s vampire spirit impotent as ghost that only Asher can see and hear.

Their journey together across Nosgoth's future would have initially explored who sent Gein to kill Asher, and why. It would later link to the wider Legacy of Kain mythos. There would be substantial connections to The Elder God, the Spectral Realm and a mysterious vampire child. The large theme running throughout the story would be the religious beliefs of Nosgoth. Climax were instructed by Square Enix to introduce a new protagonist to the series (as Crystal Dynamics had done thirteen years ago with Raziel in Soul Reaver), but the events were to be a continuation of the established Legacy of Kain storyline.

The area shown in the video is The Wetlands. It acted as a gigantic hub, connecting the different areas in this region of Nosgoth together. Such areas would have included: "dungeons", huge boss encounters, intense use of shifting between the Spectral and Material realms, masses of exploration, combat and hidden/earned upgradable abilities. The game was described as being intensely story focused, and inspired greatly by Soul Reaver and Zelda (to quote a source: "think if HBO did Zelda"). The game was at one point envisioned as a small project (possibly downloadable?), and then expanded to be a XBox 360/PS3 retail release (note the use of XBox button icons in the video). In its final form, the game was strongly considered to be PlayStation 4 launch title.

The unnamed source that provided the video explained that the game was in a pre-alpha state when it was cancelled. Any abrupt framerate drops and jumps would have likely been tidied up before release, as the game still had a lot of development to go. Also, I have had to connect multiple videos together and upload them, this is not something I have done before, so any jarring jumps or drops in quality may be due to my inexperience at this video joining process.
 

DayDark

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Oct 31, 2007
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It looked interesting, at least more so than the nosgoth game, even if the nosgoth game is a good game for what it is. I'm just more interested in games like this. I would have liked a more eloquent manner of speech, similar to the previous games, but alas the game is crapped so.
 

SinisterDeath

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Nov 6, 2006
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http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=997613
This has some additional information on Dead Sun that isn't in the Youtube Video.
I really wish Escapist would put this on the front page... But then that youtube video is.. 2 months old now?
 

Seishisha

By the power of greyskull.
Aug 22, 2011
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I remeber reading about this some time ago on another website that im not sure if linking to is allowed so i wont. Suffice it to say i was both intrigued at the premise and disapointed that kain and raziel, arguably the two most important characters to the LoK universe seemed to be completly absent. You could certainly argue that raziel's story ended but kain was still alive.

After watching the video back then i came to the conclusion that although it was a shame this was canceled during development as it certainly had potential to be a unique story, we are probably better off without it, somthing about the overall presentation just seemed off to me i can't put it into words but when i look at that footage i dont see a legacy of kain game.

As a slight side note, what's up with the character design for the female hunters, i would love to hear the justification for that outfit.

I guess it'd go somthing like this:

"We realy wanted to convey the gender of the hunters to the player so showing the ladies boobs seemed like the best bet, they all dress the same because in the lore this is a standard uniform, it has nothing todo with wanting to put exposed bouncy tits into the game honest."
 

DoPo

"You're not cleared for that."
Jan 30, 2012
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Seishisha said:
I guess it'd go somthing like this:

"We realy wanted to convey the gender of the hunters to the player so showing the ladies boobs seemed like the best bet, they all dress the same because in the lore this is a standard uniform, it has nothing todo with wanting to put exposed bouncy tits into the game honest."
Correction: it's a single exposed boob. Which makes it that much more baffling, really.

OT: I saw this before. I was thinking of making a thread about it but...well, there was no thread. I can't remember why - I was probably just lazy (curse you laziness - you foiled me again!). I think it looked like an interesting game. Sure, a shame it's separated by the rest of the lore but it seemed made by love - I caught a lot of throwbacks to the LoK franchise including the story start: the main character dies and is then resurrected, thus tieing this thematically with both BO and SR's starts. Made even stronger by the fact that the character mirrors both Kain and Raziel's transformations - he is turned into a vampire, like Kain, in fact an adult vampire, but he also has access to the spectral realm and feeds on souls like Raziel. And like many of the games (everything aside from SR2 and Defieance) it's set much further in the future from previous major events, again thematically linking to the franchise.

I think that despite not continuing the previous ark, it would have been a good addition to the LoK franchise - it showed some interesting mechanics and even more of the spirit realm, which itself has changed. It showed it knew and respected the franchise. It looked quite fun, in fact. I'd have definitely played it.

It's a shame it got canned, really.
 

Gray-Philosophy

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Sep 19, 2014
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I'm sure it could have been an interesting game, but the asethetic of it really irks me. It has a kind of Final Fantasy-esque look to the character design, which I just don't happen to care much for, and it didn't really look to me like the vampires I know from the previous LoK universe. As a stand-alone game it could've probably been a great thing, but as a successor to the LoK series it just doesn't feel right for me, so I suppose in that regard I'm not really upset about it being cancelled.
 

Smooth Operator

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Oct 5, 2010
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For about 5 minutes I was completely into it, then my excitement wore off and I noticed this shit doesn't seem Legacy of Kain related at all... more to the point compared to the madness that was LoK this shit is ordinary and lame.
And when it comes to gameplay it looked 95% automated, I know that is the new golden standard to solve everything with a singular Win button and watch the pretty pictures move... but I don't intend to call that good design, or good anything for that matter.

It is probably for the best this rests with the fishes, I won't miss not having another check-box filling brawler that happens to borrow a popular name.
 

lechat

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Dec 5, 2012
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damn that looks like alot of content for a cancelled game.
much as i love soul reaver it was always about the puzzles for me so if they couldn't focus on that i wouldn't be interested.