[ Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds ]
 
Happy birthday, TLW!

The Lost Worlds will officially be five years old in two days. This new version you are seeing is its birthday present, which I've been working on since last year. Some of the changes you might notice are:

  • A brand new design, including reorganized navigation.
  • Nearly all of the content has been rewritten and updated.
  • Nearly every screenshot has been recreated at a higher resolution or better quality.
  • Concept art no longer has watermarks.

What you may not notice immediately is the entirely new system I'm using to build and maintain the site, which will make it much easier for me to keep it up to date and add new information.

Oh, who am I kidding? You're here to see the deleted material from Defiance. I've finally revealed everything I know to have been planned for that game but which ended up on the cutting room floor. Maybe when you're done looking at that you'll have time to see the other improvements.

Speaking of Defiance, there is no official imagery currently available to go with the newly-published information. So I am announcing the first ever opportunity to have your fan art displayed on The Lost Worlds. I have always liked fan art, but couldn't think of a way to work it into the theme of the site. If you would like to illustrate some of the Defiance deleted material as you imagine it, please send a copy in PNG or JPG format to fanart@thelostworlds.net.

A few areas and articles are still unfinished. The Library and the Technical Documents section are offline while they are rebuilt. Some of the lesser material from each game is still being reworked into new articles, although this is mostly limited to things like demo versions which do not contain anything not present in the full game. The archived update posts have not been imported into the new site yet. There will be additional updates in the next week or two to help fill in the gaps and provide some new information as well.

Along with the overhaul of the site are two things you should be aware of:

  • The new contact form. My old benlincoln@speakeasy.net mailbox is going away in the next week, so if you want to get in touch with me and don't have my new address yet, please use the form.
  • The Download Policy is no longer just a suggestion, there is now an automated system in place to protect against the small minority of visitors who abused the ability to freely download files. This will not affect the vast majority of visitors, but please read the policy to make sure you're not inadvertently violating it.

I hope all of you enjoy the new Lost Worlds as much as I have in creating it.

 
Some new software for Blood Omen 2 fans

I just finished a utility for the PC version of Blood Omen 2 which allows for a whole bunch of cheat and debugging options to be configured: Blood Omen 2 Control Station. This utility replaces the older BO2 Hax0r and BO2_INVCHEAT programs, as it includes all of their functionality and much more.

 
Some Defiance fan art

I've added the first of the fan art to the Defiance section - two excellent pieces by CharletDukaine in A Shield for Raziel, and one less than excellent piece by myself in Placing the Soul Reaver in Avernus. Be warned - if no one else submits art, I may be forced to use my own for some of the other articles.

 
Lots of New Material

This much-delayed update is now (mostly) ready. The Library is now back online (with the exception of the magazine lists), including a number of "Special Exhibit" articles. The article on German Special Editions includes a number of previously-unavailable pieces of artwork, and the Retail Action Figures article covers all of the released figures including NECA's Kain.

There is new fan art in the Defiance section - Edge of the Coin shows us what The Resurrection of Vorador and Umah might have looked like, Raina Audron envisions The Sanctuary of The Clans, and A Return to the Soul Reaver Era is depicted by Asrael Shannara.

I have also released the first version of a Soul Reaver 2 Trainer that I wrote in .NET with a bit of help from Andrew Fradley. It allows access to The Debug Menu and Camera Control in the English 1.02 PC version of the game. There are a bunch of wallpaper-sized screenshots in the camera control article to show off what it can be used for.

 
More Belated Updates

I wasn't able to add all of the new content I had on my list last night, so here is most of the rest.

Andrew Fradley has been hacking Blood Omen, and has provided a savegame for the PC version which will start the player in the Developers' Level Select room.

Delejes emailed me to point out that the Defiance bonus material includes some concept art of the Avernus Cathedral Deleted Areas, which is now part of that article. I have at least one image for nearly all of the Defiance articles now, but please keep the fan art coming. It's really great to see how everyone imagines the way things might have turned out.

Abbas and Rick emailed me some additional information for the Character Names article.

 
A New Trainer by Andrew

Andrew Fradley has just released a really powerful piece of software: the Blood Omen Trainer. It allows PC gamers to use nearly all of the cheat device code effects in Blood Omen.

 
A New Texture-Extraction App

I've just added the first release of a new content-extracting application: Only Skin Deep, which can extract the texture maps from the PC versions of Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance, as well as all versions of Soul Reaver.

 
Amy Hennig's New Game

At this year's E3, a new trailer for Uncharted was released. This is the game that Amy Hennig and Richard Lemarchand have been working on at Naughty Dog. There is also a familiar voice at 00:48 in the video.

 
Scales of Anarcrothe

Scales of Anarcrothe is a new utility by Andrew Fradley. It allows objects to be switched around in the PC version of Soul Reaver.

 
Only Skin Deep v1.1

I've just finished Only Skin Deep version 1.1, which supports exporting the textures from the Playstation 2 versions of Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance, and fixes a bug with some of the textures exported from the PC versions of those games.

 
Uncharted and two new Raziel Figures

Uncharted - the Playstation 3 game that Amy Hennig and Richard Lemarchand have been working on at Naughty Dog - was released today in the US. I was fortunate enough to see it a couple of times while it was in development (more on that later), and those of you who have PS3s are in for a treat. I'm going to be picking one up shortly so I can play through it myself. This game has so much going for it that it's almost ridiculous - Amy and Richard brought the cinematic storytelling style of the Kain games with them, it is visually stunning, it has an action element that would make it worth playing even without the cinematic aspect, its score is by the same composer as Firefly, and it has Simon Templeman in one of the key roles.

Several readers have also written to let me know that NECA is releasing two new Raziel action figures this month. I have them pre-ordered, but don't yet have any specific recommendations as to where to buy them yourself, so if you are interested you are probably best off doing a Google search for a store that will sell to you.

Andrew Fradley has released a couple of new patches for Soul Reaver and Blood Omen. I haven't had time to update the information here, but you can find out about the Soul Reaver patch and the Blood Omen patch in threads over at the Eidos forums.

 
 
[ Page Icon ]