Blood Omen was originally created by Silicon Knights and published by Crystal Dynamics.

Later on, EIDOS bought Crystal Dynamics and got the IP in the same deal. Crystal Dynamics went to expand on the game universe with creating the following games in the series.

I'm not 100% accurate on how the acquisition went, but generally Blood Omen is not that well tied to the rest of the games.

I'll echo the sentiments of others in wishing for Blood Omen. My friend had Blood Omen and I had Soul Reaver for my Playstation, so while I have only played a portion of Blood Omen I have finished Soul Reaver at least a dozen times. (propably more than 2 dozen now that I think about it) I still have it and play it, but I may just pick it up here as well.

How is this compared to the PS1 version, anyone played both?
There isn't much in the way of extras here so I'm leaning towards getting it on PSN so I can play it on my PS3 or PSP.

If you wanna get technical, the game was on the DreamCast, which was briefly a part of the 6th gen until Sony shat out the Ps2, which murdered the system...


I already had the disc version. There is controller support built in. I don't know how compatible it is, but I used my original Xbox controller to play the game.


After lookin' at the Avatars, I'm actually more hopeful that we'll see the rest of the LoK titles here. The Avatars are from the entire series.


Ugh... How to put this... I'm terrible at explaining things... Blood Omen is the most standalone game in the series, Soul Reaver and Soul Reaver 2 on the other hand >.> they end or rather cruel cliffhangers >.< You can get by with just playing Soul Reaver, Soul Reaver 2, and Defiance, but it'll just make an already mindwarping story that much more difficult to understand, and you fscking owe it to yourself to play Blood Omen if given the opportunity.


What the hell took you so long?


No, it's tied in very well. It's Blood Omen 2 that gives fans of the series pause.

Thank you so much for releasing this!
This is just one of the greatest games I have ever played.

I meant in the business/IP sense.

Though whatever was written in the sequels, was written mainly without the consensus of Silicon Knights so one might argue it's not in the original canon.

Well the big diffrence is better draw distance, no cheap fake fog, and higher resolution the PC port is on par with the dreamcast version and the dreamcast port was considered the best version of the game on consoles.

I know how you feel. But sadly, Blood Omen is somewhat the mutant child of the franchise that is locked away in a cuboard and is fed fishheads from time to time.

It's releasy just went by somewhat unnoticed (at least I don't recall there ever being a hype about it in any huge magazine around here).
As I mentioned in my review for Soul Reaver, same was the game which brought LoK into the limelight of gaming, since it was gory, was one of the first games on the original PSX which had as good as none loadtimes despite looking brilliant for its time and was praised for story etc.

ONly after the release and Success of Soul Reaver people startet to get courious about its predecessor, hearing that you could play Kain and that t explained his origins etc.
But for most the couriosity ended when they saw that the first game was a 2D somewhat isometric view Hack'n Slash cross rpg-ish hybrid thing with poor cgi cutscenes and a very unforgiving difficulty curve.

Underneath all that was a pretty good game, but still it's understandable that some people where put off after expecting something in the likes of Soul Reaver. The game was frigging huge, with a vast variety of weapons, spells, armors to find, lots of places to explore, secrets to find and a very interesting and compelling story, brought to life by some great voiceactors and a great score. And who doesn't get a kick out of your hero yelling "Vae Victus!" while laughing like a madman?

But I guess the main problem in releasing it today isn't the vast difference to its successors, but rather a licensing issue. As far as I know the only person of the "LoK Team" who was involved in the creation of Blood Omen was the writer Amy Hennig, while the game itself was created by Silicon Knights and published by Activision. As with Soul Reaver and so on it was Crystal Dynamics who created and Eidos (now Square) who published the games. Guess that's why the Collectors Box which is mentioned by another user here lacks Blood Omen.

God knows who owns the rights to that. The last time I heard something of Silicon Knights was when they made "Eternal Darkness" and together with Konami "Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes" both for the gamecube. Also Activision never did something with Blood Omen ever again. No Platinum Series release for the PSX, no bargain bin release for the PC, nil, nada, niet, null.(as far as I know)

The PSX version of Blood Omen is somewhat findable around here. If you're lucky you'll find it on a fleamarket or in a used games store (other than gamestop "shudders") and you'll almost never have to pay more than a ten, since most people don't know about the series or just don't care.

BUt that's not what most fans want. THey want the PC release, with the big cardboard box, the coloured manual and the huge map of Nosgoth. It's rather rare and some blokes on Ebay made a living of fooling fans into buying the thing for enormus prices and sometimes it just were fakes.

A release on GoG could never replace the feel of having the box with all that stuff, but it would give the diehard fans the chance to at least own an original copy of the pc game instead of a PSX version as a substitude or an image of the net.

Getting the game to run shouldn't be the problem, the fans managed that kind of by themselves. One community made an unofficial patch that not only fixes some issues, but comes with an own installer for the whole game (of course requiring to have the original disk in your drive) which bypasses the old installer that would glitch up on modern OSs and allowing the game to run mutch better on such, but a russian fancommunity even made a Bink patch wich converts all cgi vids into...well...the bink format so that they don't glitch up anymore because of missing legacy codecs and whatnot.

It also will run on widescreen Monitors pretty well. Yeah, the old 2D sprites may look blodgy and whatnot, but it's upscaled in ratio, so Kain doesn't look fat or flat (at least not more flat than a 2D sprite can look) and overall it looks more enjoyable since the huge hud know doesn't take op almost half of the screen, but instead is tucked away to the far left, giving away much more of the map.

OH man, this is getting tl;dr. ^^"
Bottom line, somebody already made it compatible, it's just a question of who is holding the right and if the fansites are ok with including their efforts into a official GoG release.

Great release GOG. Hopefully you can get the other games in series too.

Agreed, especially since Soul Reaver and Soul Reaver 2 both end on cliff hangers.

Ah ok then. Just as well get it here eventually.

Well hopefully we get Kain 2, Soul Reaver 2, and Defiance here at least if the original Kain has too many issues.

this is what voice acting should be.

a VERY fine game and an amazing story!

I am going to buy this and play it, as I was just recently looking into how I can re-play this fantastic series of games. I played the original Legacy of Kain when it first came out, it was the first game I ever bought with my brand-new Playstation way back in 1996. I've since bought that game and this game from PSN and played them on my PSP.

But I really want to play Defiance, Soul Reaver 2, and Blood Omen 2 again. I would love for GOG to release all of those. To my knowledge, none are available anywhere in any kind of digital form. GOG, make it happen! All 5 games would be amazing, but at least those 3 would be truly special because they cannot be downloaded from PlayStation Network.

Yep (as mentioned, around = Poland ;). You can get that green shiz off, so it looks ok as well.

I suggest you give it a try, if you get the chance that is. I already wrote somewhere in here a tl;dr about the shortcomings and benifits of that game.
Ironically enough I played Blood Omen much more than Soul Reaver, despite having heard of the first after the latter, just because of the simple fact that I had lend Soul Reaver from a friend, completet it until Rahabs domain, got a new graphics card, which glitched out because of a driver error, reinstalled my windows, forgot to backup the saves beforehand and then was pissed and never touched the game again. ^^" (Mostly because of the fact I gave the copy back to my friend since i wasn't in the mood to do it all again and then forgot about it, since i saw the end a bit later when he showed it to me) .
Soul Reaver and Blood Omen are the only two games of the series missing in my collection, on the pc that is and since I own all the other games on the PC and the PC was the platform that hooked me to the games, the PSX versuions are just poor substitutes to me. :(
I'll wish you much fun with you aquisition. :) I'm a bit jealous since I'll have to wait till next month until I can grab it here, this month of releases here on gog really emptied my gaming-purse quite a bit. ^^"

Another thing...would you mind telling me if the intro cinematic of the game is intact in this version? Or causes any problems? The old PC release had a problem where the cutscenes could glitch out or entirely wouldn't work because of some codec issues on the new windows versions.

A russian fan community created a fix for that and the same problem in Blood Omen.
Would like to know if the guys from GoG already fixed that in their release. :)

PS: Geesh, I feel like I'm spamming this thread. Sorry in advance, it seems that I get quite talkative when it's about a gameseries that truly meant something to me. :o