Nosgoth

» see nosgoth.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Legacy of Kain I knew by reputation, the way you know a series you watched other people care about a great deal. Nosgoth I did not know at all until I went looking for it, and that turns out to be most of the story. It was assembled out of the parts of a different game that never came out.

Climax Studios spent roughly 2009 to 2012 building Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun, a single player action game set in the same world, with Psyonix attached to build a multiplayer mode alongside it. Square Enix cancelled the single player game in 2012. Footage leaked in 2014 and showed how far along it had actually been, which did not help anyone feel better about it.

What survived the cancellation was Psyonix's multiplayer mode, and Square Enix decided to publish that on its own. Leaks forced an acknowledgement in June 2013 and a proper reveal followed that September. Closed alpha ran through 2014, and open beta opened in January 2015, free, on Steam.

The setting was recognizable and the premise was not. Nosgoth had been a place for slow gothic vampire narrative since Blood Omen in 1996. Now it was a class-based team shooter with a scoreboard.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it played ~

Four humans against four vampires, and the two sides did not play alike at all. Humans fought in third person at range with crossbows and firearms. Vampires fought in melee, fast and mobile, built entirely around closing that distance and getting inside it. Each side had its own classes, every match swapped you from one side to the other partway through, and the score compared how well your team did as humans against how well theirs did.

There were two modes and not many more later. Deathmatch, and Flashpoint, which was control points. That thinness was the complaint that never went away in sixteen months.

~ the decline ~

Reviews landed around six out of ten. The combat itself worked and people said so plainly. What they also said was that there was not enough of it, and that almost nothing about the game connected to Legacy of Kain beyond the place names on the map.

The audience it needed was two audiences that did not overlap. Series fans had been waiting on a single player Legacy of Kain since 2003 and were not going to be talked into a team shooter instead. Meanwhile a free competitive shooter in 2015 was walking into a market that already had more free competitive shooters than anyone had time to install. It got neither group in the numbers Square Enix wanted.

~ the postmortem ~

On 8 April 2016 the community manager posted the end of life notice. Servers would go dark on 31 May and the forums would close on 14 June. The stated reason was that the game had failed to captivate a broad audience and that continuing development could not be justified financially. It had been in open beta for a year and four months, and it closed without ever having been released.

The strange part is where Psyonix was standing while this happened. Rocket League shipped in July 2015, six months into Nosgoth's beta, and turned into one of the largest games of the decade. The studio that could not make vampires against crossbows work made cars playing soccer work at a scale nobody had predicted, and Nosgoth closed ten months after that.

~ what got buried with it ~

Legacy of Kain has not had a new game since. Nosgoth was the last thing anyone shipped in that world, and it was not the thing the audience had been asking for. When it closed it took the last active piece of the series with it. Dead Sun stayed cancelled.

What eventually came back was the old work rather than anything new. Aspyr and Crystal Dynamics put out Soul Reaver 1 and 2 Remastered on 10 December 2024, timed to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first one. A series whose only forward motion in twenty years was a beta that got switched off now moves by being restored.

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