Early Dark Gifts - Blood Omen 2 - Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds

Early Dark Gifts

Kain's "Dark Gift" special abilities evolved in a number of ways over the course of Blood Omen 2's production - in particular, three of them underwent significant changes, and Fury wasn't present at all in early versions of the game.

Berserk was originally called Speed, and would have functioned similarly to the "bullet time" in The Matrix (or the effects based on it in videogames like Max Payne and BloodRayne). An old HappyHippo article describes Speed as making Kain move at one-and-a-half times his normal rate of movement, while enemies are slowed to half speed. This would have given the player an effective speed advantage of three times, without excessively skewing it in either direction from a control perspective.

Speed (as opposed to Berserk) would have been a much more accurate depiction of the vampire who Kain obtains it from (Sebastian), but it would also likely have dramatically unbalanced the game in the player's favour. Unrestricted "bullet time" - while an entertaining and visually appealing effect - essentially removes all of the challenge once it is obtained in BloodRayne, for example.

It is possible to simulate the Speed effect using cheat device codes on the Playstation 2 (see Codes (Playstation 2 Cheat Device)).

Mist was also substantially different in early versions of the game. It was called Stealth, and was not restricted to being used in foggy areas. Again, it seems likely that this was "nerfed" for issues of game balance - particularly with regards to the ability to perform stealth kills virtually anywhere.

The Stealth dark gift would have been a separate feature from the other planned Stealth aspects of the game.

Finally, Immolate began as the Rupture Dark Gift. The same HappyHippo article mentioned above describes its effect as "[causing] Kain's enemies to explode in a most bloody manner", but using it would have meant that Kain was unable to drink their blood afterwards.

The loss of the enemy's blood would have counterbalanced the instant-kill ability (similar to the behaviour of the Soul Reaver in Blood Omen), but it would have introduced a new problem: in order to level up correctly, it is necessary to drink the blood of essentially every enemy in the entire game. Although this is the most logical reason for its modification, it is also of course possible that "[exploding] in a most bloody manner" was deemed too gory an effect.

Like Speed, Rupture is truer to the ability of its original owner - Magnus, who uses it to blow up stone statues - than the fire-based Immolate.

Rupture is the only Dark Gift of which there are no known screenshots depicting its use.