More than two decades after their original releases, a remaster of Soul Reaver 1 and 2 was released, and development was led by a fan who had already remastered the game.
Despite never reaching the heights of Tomb Raider, the Legacy of Kain series has always had a cult following, and that's especially true of the two Soul Reaver titles, both of which have been slowly updated thanks to a dedicated modification scene. A developer and fan of the series had done such a good job on their own remaster that developer Aspyr hired them to direct the official one.
A recent documentary by YouTube channel Noclip looks at the history of Soul Reaver from its beginnings in the late 1990s to the 2024 remaster, and reveals that director Monika Erősová, better known in the community as Raina Audron, had been hired to direct the remaster after she made her own HD remaster of the first Soul Reaver title.
“To properly modernize these games, Aspyr didn't just ask fan communities for advice or help, they hired them to do the job,” explains documentary host Danny O'Dwyer, and the name that immediately stood out. The one that came out was Audron's. “Raina Audron was immediately introduced to me as, effectively, sort of the de facto leader of that community,” explains Crystal Dynamics developer Frank O'Connor. “[An] “An old-school fan who loved the game, loved the series, knew a ton about it, but was kind of a contributor and cooperator with the rest of the community.”
This isn't the first time Audron's modding exploits have landed him a job, as he previously worked as an environment artist on another Tomb Raider I-III remaster, another Aspyr-led project, which released in early 2024 after its development of a HD. Texture pack for the game. Between this and her role as something of a figurehead for the Legacy of Kain modding community, Aspyr saw fit to bring her back for the Soul Reaver remaster.
Despite his experience, the process of remastering the games was not easy. The original games were developed for PS1 and PS2 respectively, which represented a huge gap in technology that made updating them simultaneously difficult. This was especially true when it came to visuals, as the two games handle textures in different ways, although thanks to Audron's existing HD texture pack, it helped the team in part.
“Because I already had these original textures assembled, I saved a lot in the entire process,” explains Audron. “I showed [the artists] “The original textures that were completely together, one piece, and then I took the finished texture, cut it into squares again and inserted it into the game.” In total, Audron and the team had to update approximately 4,500 textures for Soul Reaver 1. and 2,800 for Soul Reaver 2.
Fortunately for the team, it wasn't just thanks to Audron's modding experience that the remaster finally came about. A mammoth archiving process detailed earlier in the documentary generated two terabytes of data from the original development period, including some completed levels, greatly speeding up the process.
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