This gameplay element is critical to the game’s story-telling and plays in heavily for puzzle-solving elements.
To complicate the technical challenges further, the game features dimensional shifting, letting players jump between the material and spectral planes of the game at will. Some other PS1 titles pulled off a similar strategy, but Soul Reaver was one of the first and most impressive in its execution. This avoidance of loading time overcame one of the most common drawbacks of the 2X CD-ROM based PS1/Saturn compared to the cartridge-based N64. Since the CD-ROM gave developers more storage than they needed for the game, multiple copies of textures were loaded on different parts of the CD-ROM so that they were slightly quicker to access depending on where the disc was already reading.
We ultimately got it working by the skin of our teeth, but I wonder if we would’ve embarked on such an ambitious plan if we’d known how difficult it was going to be!” “It proved to be way more difficult than we had initially anticipated – if I recall, we were still struggling to get the textures to dynamically pack correctly, just a couple months before release. Soul Reaver’s Game Director, Amy Hennig admitted that the data streaming was their biggest challenge during development: (In addition to the two Gex titles and Soul Reaver, the Gex engine was use used on Akuji). It kept the player’s current section and the two adjacent sections in memory to keep loading to an absolute minimum.
The Gex engine chunked large levels into sections and then streamed the level data as needed to the system memory.
Soul Reaver ran on Crystal Dynamics’ proprietary Gex engine (which was originally used on Gex and built on top of what they learned while working on Tomb Raider) along with some code for character animation that they developed for 3D Baseball (which was ahead of its time in terms of motion capture, but lacked the benefits of an MLB license). While the development drama of Soul Reaver is fascinating, we will focus on the technical achievements that came to fruition from all the long nights and drama. However, Crystal Dynamics’ labor of love ended up being possibly the biggest technical achievement of the Playstation’s library while sharing an ambitious interactive storytelling experience. Runs are 512×240 – target 30pfs with some occasional slowdown.īeing released in August of 1999 (after two and a half years of development) Soul Reaver was up against the upcoming US release of the Sega Dreamcast and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had redefined gamer’s expectations of action adventure titles.“Dimensional Shifting” gameplay element that utilizes quick switching between two alternate game environments.Data-streaming techniques to produce seamless worlds without load times.Character animation that was well ahead of its time.Ambitious worlds with a great attention to detail.
I hope you find them all fascinating as well! Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver There are so many great stories of developers trying new things and accomplishing impressive feats. One of my other goals in this piece is to try to present diversity – not only in the types of games, but also in the ways developers worked around the limitations of the PS1. Square will indeed get some mentions below, but you might be surprised by a few developers and games that somehow stayed under the mainstream radar. Not to downplay some of the stunning visuals that the likes of Square’s art direction and pre-rendered elements, but there is a LOT of competition on the PS1 for some truly impressive coding that really maxed out what the Playstation was capable of.
Even though it did have some limitations (especially in terms of memory), the Sony Playstation hardware was well-crafted and made it easy for developers to quickly learn how to maximize performance results compared to the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 ( read our full technical comparison). See Other Entries of the Games That Pushed The Limits SeriesĪs somebody that has a computer science background, I’m always fascinated by games that are the work of skilled developers that learned the intricacies of a console’s hardware to squeeze every last bit of performance from the machine or use some limited resources creatively to accomplish things you didn’t think was possible. Games That Pushed the Limits of the Sony Playstation (PS1)