Legacy of Kain: Defiance is back, and the camera finally stopped defying us

Fate is at it again. The long-awaited remaster of Legacy of Kain: Defiance is coming, and the stars have foretold it will arrive later this year.

Much like the remasters of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and its sequel, the Defiance redux boldly reimagines key elements of the original game. One of these deviations, a complete overhaul of the game’s camera system, has convinced me Destiny’s wheel isn’t as unstoppable as it seems.

Legacy of Kain: Defiance’s camera made Kain’s last journey hard to follow

Most fans of Crystal Dynamics’ Shakespearean vampire fantasy saga look back on Legacy of Kain: Defiance with fondness. The game brings Kain’s bloody battle against the forces that shaped his fate to a satisfying finish, answering almost every philosophical riddle raised throughout the series with grace and nuance. Sadly, the game’s camera system was a few clowns short of a circus.

In their eagerness to showcase the game’s impressive graphics and atmospheric level design, Defiance‘s development team drew inspiration from Resident Evil and opted for a fixed camera system. While this setup lends the tortured world of Nosgoth a cinematic flair rarely seen in games of the time, it can make actually playing the game quite an unpleasant ordeal.

Defiance‘s core gameplay boasts a healthy mix of platforming, puzzle-solving, and combo-focused combat, and the game’s camera has a knack for messing up all of them. Paths forward, puzzle solutions, and enemies readying to hit you all have a nasty habit of hiding just out of frame, and even when they are visible, the wonky perspective can make it hard to gauge how close or far they are from you. Automatic lock-on in combat and less-than-ideal collision detection don’t make things any easier.

The “bold” decision to immobilize Defiance‘s camera tarnished the game’s reputation for years after its release. Legacy of Kain‘s fans love Defiance‘s story, but they hate its camera with a bloodlust worthy of the man himself, if Reddit posts like this one are anything to go by.

Defiance Remastered’s new camera system blesses classic Kain with a modern perspective

While showing Definace: Remastered off during Thursday’s State of Play, Crystal Dynamics made it painfully obvious they didn’t brush aside players’ opinions of the original’s camera. The remaster trades fixed camera angles for a free-floating camera that the player can control independently. From what little we’ve seen of the remake’s gameplay, this change could fix everything wrong with Defiance.

Terrible as the pun may be, Kain fans are eating well right now. Not only do we now have a complete, remastered version of the Soul Reaver saga, but we also have Legacy of Kain: Ascendance, a side-scrolling prequel that brings back most of the original cast. Sometimes, fate smiles on us mere mortals.

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While Sony has been porting many of its games to the PC platform, especially in the last few years, the Xbox hasn’t had as much luck. Despite Microsoft’s embrace of a multiplatform approach, Sony seems to prefer exclusivity and the PC at most. Or so Insomniac Games would love to believe, firmly denying that its Spider-Man games would ever be ported to Xbox.

As per tech4gamers, Insomniac Games very bluntly stated that in an exchange on X, telling a fan that an Xbox port of Spider-Man is “not likely.” Naturally, Insomniac’s Marvel games are a Sony powerhouse, funded, produced, and published by the Japanese gaming giant, which unsurprisingly prefers to keep its first-party games in-house and available on its own platform.

However, Sony has increasingly played with multiplatform releases, porting games or even launching them on the PlayStation and PC simultaneously (i.e., the case of Helldivers 2). Insomniac itself once believed that Spider-Man would remain a first-party PlayStation exclusive, given that it’s backed and published by Sony, only for the games to eventually come out on Steam.

Microsoft’s embrace of multiplatformity seems to have also triggered similar sentiments at Sony. After the massive success of Helldivers 2‘s simultaneous launch (that, too, was published by Sony), the company seems more eager to do multiplatform releases. Microsoft, as I’ve said, only helped grow those sentiments, porting its own major first-party franchises over to the PlayStation, likely in anticipation of Sony doing the same.

It remains to be seen whether the Marvel games are part of this deal. A while ago, Sony did say that some franchises were console sellers first and foremost, and that porting them over would adversely affect PlayStation sales.

While that might be true, franchises don’t sell so well all the time, and porting even the most valuable games would be a smart move after some time spent in exclusivity (after sales start dipping).

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