As 2023 draws to a close lets look back at the past year.
Anyway here’s what’s been going on this year:
As part of the Raina Audron channel I’ve been posting several YouTube videos on the series. Roughly we’re beginning to split into three threads for videos: ‘Arcane Tomes’ for lore details and explanations, ‘Developer Chronicles’ for behind the scenes and game details and ‘Nosgoth News Network’ for real world news and updates related to LoK. This year The Arcane Tomes has covered Moebius’s People’s Army, The New Sarafan, The Vampire Hunters of the Soul Reaver era and the Silenced Cathedral. Developer Chronicles has a video on the links between Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain and a detailed deep dive expose on the development of Dead Sun. Where necessary these videos have been added to appropriate articles on the wiki.
Pleasingly there’s also finally starting to be enough news to make a current events series semi-viable so Nosgoth News Network had two updates in June covering various updates and Embracer news, One in July covering the return of Gex and one in September covering the Tomb Raider remastered announcement and SR1’s brief (failed) return to Gog.
To briefly summarise, most of the news this year revolved around the new Embracer/Crystal Dynamics stewardship of the franchise and what it means moving forward. Unfortunately the news for Embracer hasn’t been great. They were responsible for a couple of big flops and then news broke that a major investment deal had fallen through leaving them with a massive funding gap. Since then there have been a number of job cuts across the board as Embracer works out how to steady the ship. Our thoughts go out to all those in the industry who were affected by this or lost jobs. It’s unclear how this will change things going forward, but word is they may be trying to focus on their marquee names - which may or may not include LoK
There have also been some fan led moves on getting more stable versions of the games running. Alongside Verok’s patch for Blood Omen, we now have Gemini’s Soul Fixer to help run SR2 and Revamped to run Blood Omen 2 - which can be used in tandem with Pebble in the Pond’s Blood Omen 2 conceptual edition to allow both ‘2’ games to run smoothly.
Tragically, the news isn’t great for the return of SR1. We know that it was removed from sale due to legal, technical and ethical issues resulting from the inclusion of a somewhat ropey fan patch in 2012 when the game first went on digital sale - and that it was planned for Gog to strip out the patch and put it in a new wrapper. However early in 2023 the game was completely delisted at publisher request. The wrapper project was briefly put out live in September - apparently by accident - before they realised and stopped it, commenting that they had been told by the publisher not to put it up… such a statement could imply other things are being worked on, but there’s no official confirmation of that.
Sadly we also lost Earl Boen who played the Sarafan Lord in Blood Omen 2, who passed away in January 2023. Requiescat in pace
On the wiki you may have noticed that there are some major changes going around as we seek to update things for the new year, so keep an eye on those. Most of what’s been going on in the wiki world in the past year has been on the subject of Blood Omen with completed articles on Spirit forges, Secrets and a drive towards completing the enemy articles with the articles on Demons (Blood Omen), Army of the Last Hope (enemies), Brides, Brigands, City guards, Dolls (enemies), Gypsies (enemies) and Laborers also completed and the Gypsies faction page also given an update.
Additionally there has been a fair amount of Dead Sun info appearing as of late. This has fed into the Dead Sun video previously mentioned but we’ve also updated the Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun article with this info. And we now have functionality for interactive maps working along with the return of Slideshows As we roll into the new year, I wish everyone the best of luck and hope that 2024 brings all that you could wish for ;)
