Yet Another Non-Pony Thing: Nosgoth (and Legacy of Kain in general) · 1:42am Jun 22nd, 2014
WARNING: THIS IS A VERY FANBOYISH POST FOR A LONG-DEAD FRANCHISE. THOU HAST BEEN WARNED.
There are plenty of franchises from my youth that have gone the way of the dodo. Many of them were adventure games, puzzle titles, old mascot platformers that weren't Italian plumbers that may be from Brooklyn, and otherwise standard titles that may have been good, but couldn't keep it going. But there were always a couple that saddened me with their loss. I've already ground Quest for Glory into the ground here, but this time we're talking about another series: Legacy of Kain. It started as a very dark Zelda-like action-RPG, then became a platformer/puzzle title with the Soul Reaver sub-series, followed by straightforward hack-and-slash for the last two titles. The gameplay was admittedly never the greatest, although all of the titles were fun in their own way and had a lot of innovative ideas for the time. But what made me love the series was its story and theme, as well as the protagonists.
Legacy of Kain setting is Nosgoth, a dark fantasy realm that, over the course of the franchise, transitions from a world of plague-ridden villages and decaying dungeons to a post-apocalyptic wasteland devoid of almost all life. The crux of it all is the land's signature landmark, the Pillars of Nosgoth, which are stewarded by the Circle of Nine. Each pillar represents a certain idea, element, or concept (Mind, Conflict, Nature, Energy, States, Dimensions, Time, and Death), and are bound together by the Pillar of Balance. The problem is that the Pillars are also linked to the mental state of their guardian, so when the super-powerful psychic Nupraptor's beloved (Ariel, the Guardian of Balance) is murdered, he decides to inflict the entire Circle with his paranoia and insanity. With their powers, they proceed to start tearing Nosgoth apart, and the Pillars are transformed into blackened, crumbling monuments. The only way to restore them and save the land is to kill each Circle member, so that new guardians can be born to replace them. And the one sent to do it is Kain, a petty nobleman who was recently murdered and has been resurrected by the necromancer Mortanius into a vampire.
Yes, you play as a vampire. You aren't pretty and you don't sparkle. In fact, Kain is one of the biggest bastards in video game history. Despite going on the quest solely to find a cure and avenge his death, he takes great delight in the power his new form gives him over humanity. Most villain protagonists can just shoot you or beat you up; Kain can melt you into a pool of disease, hyper-compress you until you explode, inflate your lingering dislike for someone into murderous hatred, strip your soul and sacrifice your body at dark altars for more loot, and that's just the Cliff Notes. It's a dark and violent game with a dark and violent main character, while also having a damn good story. The world is marvelously built, with each area lovingly described by Kain, and the voice acting is some of the very best in video game history. It's also one of the few games where the Bad Ending is the canon one.
Kain kills off the Circle and destroys the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere that was commanding them, only to be told that he was the new Guardian of Balance the whole time and needs to kill himself to save Nosgoth. And Kain, being the noble and proud hero that he is, decides to screw humanity (to be fair, what happens just before the end -and indeed, for much of the game - kind of justifies the sentiment), create a vampire army, and take over Nosgoth for himself. This undoes all of his work, and the Pillars collapse/explode. This begins the Soul Reaver series, set long after Kain and his Vampire Lieutenants had conquered the realm. Raziel, Kain's first-sired vampire and his favorite, shows up to a meeting one day to demonstrate a new gift: a pair of giant bat wings. This angers Kain; not only has Raziel gained a vampire gift before him (thus implying that he has surpassed his master), but he's dared to come in tarted up like one of those Hot Topic posers. He will not have his favored son looking like a Twilight character, so he rips the bones out of his wings and has him tossed into a swirling vortex used to execute traitors. Raziel spends the next thousand years burning (water is acid to vampires in Nosgoth), and by the time he reaches the bottom, he's little more than a stained-blue corpse with no flesh, no eyes, and no lower jaw. But then he's rescued by a being known as the Elder God, who resurrects him as a ghost-like devourer of souls and sends him out to get revenge on Kain. Because vampires do not die as they are supposed to, the Wheel of Fate (the endless cycle of life, death and rebirth) cannot continue, and Nosgoth looks to be mere hours from total death.
And so the franchise spun in a new direction. The Soul Reaver games focused on Raziel, who is still an asshole but is a lot more focused on doing the right thing than Kain ever was. He initially still believes that vampires are the superior race to mankind, but then discovers his past and realizes the scope of what Kain has done. He's presented as Kain's opposite, more agile and intelligent compared to Kain's brutality and cunning. Kain, meanwhile, has become a total fatalist and seems ready for death, and his other sons have mutated into monsters as their "gifts" began going out of control. The second game was focused around time travel, as Raziel discovers more about Nosgoth and the nature of his mission, Kain struggles to prevent his destined death, and we learn that the Elder God is not a benevolent cosmic horror as the first game had us believe. That one ends with the two changing history, but instead of fixing everything like Kain had wanted, it causes the events of Blood Omen 2, where Kain's empire is nearly destroyed before it could really begin and he's forced to fight a new threat: the Hylden, a race of immortal demons who the vampires banished to another dimension using the Pillars, and who really want to get some much-belated revenge on the world. Finally, there was Defiance, which rapped up Raziel's story while still leaving Kain's role unresolved.
As you can probably surmise from that paragraph, things got insane and complicated really, really fast. Much of it was caused by production issues; Soul Reaver was a technical achievement but was taking too long to develop, and about a third of the planned plot and content was cut while leaving things on a cliffhanger. Soul Reaver 2 and Blood Omen 2 were at least finished, but the former still ended on a cliffhanger and the latter violated canon so freaking much that it might as well have ended with nothing resolved. Defiance was planned to be the grand finale, but yet more cuts, concerns over sales, and development issues caused important scenes to be lost (including the resolution for a HUUUUGE plot hole BO2 created) and there were still plenty of unresolved issues. Low sales of Defiance killed the franchise, and Tony Jay's passing (he played Mortanius in BO and the Elder God in the rest of the series) finished it off.
Nevertheless, I loved the franchise's atmosphere, presentation, fantastic writing and voice acting, and the examination of destiny and fighting fate. The whole story eventually becomes a massive battle to control the one person in existence who can alter Nosgoth's doomed fate, and trick them into making things go their way. As Raziel sums up, "What game is this, where every player on the board claims the same pawn?"
So what does this have to do with Nosgoth, the new game? Well, a couple of years ago, Square Enix (who inherited the franchise from Eidos) trademarked "Nosgoth." This actually got me really excited. I knew we wouldn't get a conclusion to the old series, but the franchise was full of potential just waiting to be updated and exploited for a new generation of consoles and gamers. A reboot seemed the most logical choice, but information that has come out since has implied that the game would have been a continuation of the old series, only set far in the future. Okay, so it changed a lot of stuff around and had a lot of new interpretations, but just going by what the developers have said and the concept art and renders that have come out, it sounds like it would have been an interesting and fun title.
The problem was that SE also demanded that there be a multiplayer portion. Eventually, they decided that since the game probably wouldn't sell very well, they'd just dump the single player portion entirely, focus everything around the multiplayer, and turn it into a F2P PvP title with a paywall. Hence, we have Nosgoth, where a team of humans and a team of vampires square off in something that has jack and squat to do with LoK. It was on sale as part of Steam's eternal quest to bankrupt gamers everywhere, and I finally caved in and took a look. And it's...serviceable, I suppose. It's still Early Access, but outside of the concept, it comes across as very generic in a market already flooded by similar titles. Plus, the paywall sucks and is freaking obscene right now, and with each of the sides having different abilities, it is going to be a pain to keep this thing balanced.
But that doesn't matter, because the game has nothing to do with LoK. At most, you get some lip service to how the vampires belong to different clans (including Raziel's clan, which makes no sense because they were FREAKING DEAD by the time the clans all became mutants). The setting is just generic dark fantasy PvP environment #4977, with no flair and almost nothing worth examining. About the only good thing I can say is that the graphics are quite nice (even if I had to scale them down - the thing was planned to be a PS4 launch title) and it's one of the few in this genre to be in third-person instead of a FPS, but that does little to take the sting out.
Still, perhaps I can take solace in the fact that someone out there wanted Legacy of Kain to come back. Looking at the trailers and comments the developers made about the single-player portion, it appears that they genuinely like the series and were working hard on making its return a great game, even if it fell victim to executive meddling. And even if LoK has indeed been staked, that doesn't mean that something else can't come along and take up the torch, so to speak. So even though Nosgoth pisses me off and represents some of the worst practices in gaming today, it's keeping the name and series out there. To quote the final line of Defiance:
"The first, bitter, taste of that terrible illusion: hope."
So that's the series this pic is referencing:
th02.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2013/095/5/3/princess_celestia_kain_vector_by_bob401-d60hv1f.jpg
2225025
Yep, that would be it.
2225085
And I'm guessing you enjoyed the picture
2225106
Yep.
Thanks for sharing it.
2225115
You're welcome. Protect Celestia on DA found it a while ago, and the artist apparently has quite a few pics done that is ponyfing the LoK series. I'm not exactly a fan of dark and gory games, but I have to admit that picture is one of the more badass I've seen of Celestia.
For a supposedly scathing rant, that's still a pretty optimistic summation.
Thanks for the heads-up about Nosgoth. I'm a long-time fan of the franchise also, and I had seen that game on Steam, so I was a little curious. I might have actually bought it if not for this blog. It's a real shame that the world I fell in love with isn't represented well, but maybe the franchise has a little life in it.
Perhaps in the future, they'll just reboot the series (S-E seems to like doing that) and treat it properly, but that's probably too much to hope for.
Wow. I had a friend who was super into this game, but he REALLY sucks at describing things. I had never been all that interested in the series. Now I might have to go give it a looks-y.
The mental image this gives me is hilarious.
Also, never enough Quest for Glory, as far as I am concerned. Indeed, you have yet to actually give people the run down on that series. *Hint Hint*
2225147
Back when he reviewed Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, SF Debris mentioned the term "Eternal Flame Nostalgia," in that something you love has come back in a very flawed form, but you're just happy that it's still there. LoK vanished out of existence very quickly after Defiance was released; the Eidos Forums dumped them into the "Classics" category (for franchises that were no longer having new games released), the team quickly split to new projects, and for a long time there was almost nothing released about the planned sixth entry in the series. If that's not dead, I don't know what is.
So when a team does try to bring it back, even if they failed, I can take some heart in that someone, somewhere, is perhaps experimenting to see if there is still life in these old bones. In a small way, I'm glad that anything was released, even if I think it didn't fit with the franchise at all.
2225171
I hope so, too.
2225234
'Tis coming, good sir.
2225301
If I seem a tad obsessive, it's only because that series is easily my favorite game series.
Ever. Warts and all.
Its seem that for all franchises that go dormant for 10 years (sans Deus Ex Human Revolution) flopped.
Brothers in arms, Xcom (financially), duke nukem, etc.
Its a shame the series dropped so, the LoK game itself was a blast. But i've been pretty viewed on what nosgoth is, and well, it is and isnt a direct paywall. You can unlock something temp, or pay for what amounts, 2 or 3 weeks rental to get it as a permanent unlock. Though, yup, its a dark fantasy pvp on lip service alone. Its more a LoK setting with l4d2 and options to fix how you wanted to play, instead of being locked to the class/type.
the only thing i know about the legacy of cain is that is that it's a really good franchise that's under....known? i forget what the name is for underrated franchises which isn't for it's rating but it's viewership.....
and i don't know what this nosgoth thing is
i skimmed through this , is there anything in here that i wold understand if i actually read it?.....