More than two decades on from their original launches, a remaster of Soul Reaver 1 and 2 has been released, with development having been led by a fan who had already remastered the game themselves.
Despite never reaching the heights of Tomb Raider, the Legacy of Kain series has always had somewhat of a cult following, and that's especially true of the two Soul Reaver titles, both of which have been upgraded bit by bit thanks to a dedicated modding scene. One developer and fan of the series had done such good work on their own remaster, that developer Aspyr hired them to direct the official one.
A recent documentary from YouTube channel Noclip discusses the history of Soul Reaver from its beginnings in the late 1990s to the 2024 remaster, revealing that director Monika Erősová, better known in the community as Raina Audron, had been recruited to head up the remaster after she made her own fan made HD remaster of the first Soul Reaver title.
"To properly modernize these games, Aspyr didn't just reach out to the fan communities for advice or help, they actually employed them to do the work," explains the host of the documentary Danny O'Dwyer, and the name that immediately stood out was Audron's. "Raina Audron was instantly introduced to me as, effectively, the sort of de facto leader of that community," explains Crystal Dynamics developer Frank O'Connor. "[An] old school fan who loved the game, loved the series, knew an encyclopedic amount about it but was kind of a collaborator and cooperator with the rest of the community."
This is not the first time Audron's modding exploits have landed her a job, as she previously worked as an environment artist on another Tomb Raider I-III remaster, another Aspyr-led project, that was released in early 2024 following her development of an HD texture pack for the game. Between this and her role as a kind of figurehead for the Legacy of Kain modding community, Aspyr saw fit to bring her back for the Soul Reaver remaster.
Despite her experience, the process of remastering the games was far from an easy one. The original games were developed for the PS1 and PS2 respectively, representing a huge gap in technology that meant updating them simultaneously proved difficult. This was especially true when it came to visuals, as the two games handle textures in different ways, though thanks to Audron's existing HD texture pack, helped the team some of the way there.
"Because I already had these original textures assembled, it saved so much on the whole process," Audron explains. "I showed [the artists] the original textures which were fully together, one piece, and then I took the finalized texture and cut it into squares again and inserted it in the game." All in all, Audron and the team had to update roughly 4,500 textures for Soul Reaver 1 and 2,800 for Soul Reaver 2.
Thankfully for the team, it was not just down to Audron's modding experience that the remaster eventually came together. A mammoth archiving process detailed earlier in the documentary led to two terabytes worth of data from the original development period, including some complete levels, vastly speeding up the process.
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