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Boogie Knight: *applause*

The confrontation between Janos and the leader of the Hylden was one of BO2's good ideas that was poorly executed, (even though it was SR2 and Defiance that made the Hylden interesting and gave them relevance to LoK by weaving them into plot elements like the creation of the Pillars, the origins of vampirism in Nosgoth, the philosophical antithesis to the Elder, the disappearance of Turel in SR, and the tales of human possession in BO.) Unfortunately, I only ever saw that scene once in all these years--while it was so bugged up that the camera wasn't even on the right character that was talking. Because by that point I was so pissed off about the scene where Umah was murdered--as an LoK fan, as a woman, and as a person who tries to consider ethics--that I was only finishing the game for the sake of keeping up with the fan community. I wanted a sequel to Blood Omen so badly that I honestly tried to take everything with a heap of salt through all the warning signs while BO2 was in production, through the opening cinematic that showed evil, snarling vampires with walrus-tusk fangs attacking Lego towns and fighting ridiculously attired soldiers with absolutely no fighting skills, through poorly written metaphors like "shards of tattered dreams", and lines like "revoltingly alive" that contradicted the root of the pre-existing main character's personality, which encompassed the strength of his will to live. But by the end of chapter 1, my suspension of disbelief had been obliterated. Perhaps Umah shouldn't have taken the nexus stone from "Kain" and left him in peace after apologizing to him. She *should* have tied an anchor to his scrotum and pushed it into the nearest lake at the very beginning of the game, when he first started addressing her as "girl" and getting creepy without knowing anything about her or showing her any respect. Sorry, but trying to pass that character model by Ranjeet Singhal off as the Kain I know and love would be enough to ruin a future game for me. (Not because of its quality, but because of its concept.)

Tell you what, I'll identify the *good* things about BO2 that I would honestly love to see incorporated into a future game

-the programmed responses of the NPC's was great. Citizens would run away from acts of violence, guards would inspect corpses, enemies had different lines while they were looking for you than when they saw you. That was a definite improvement over the lack of non-hostile NPC's and enemies who waited their turn to be fought in SR2 and Defiance.

-The puzzles were much more believably integrated into the environment than the notorious block puzzles of SR and the busy-work that the Ancients apparently left for their messiah and scion in SR2 and Defiance. It made sense that water would have to be redirected to progress through sewers and that machinery would need to be moved to clear a way through a packing facility.

-I loved the NPC conversations that were triggered as the main character approached. They helped flesh out the story by giving you different perspectives of it and made the setting more immersive. A great application of an idea from Blood Omen to modern technology.

-Any ecosystem requires a much larger population of prey organisms than predators. While the heroes of LoK's story are supernatural creatures, it only makes sense that humans would make up the majority of Nosgoth's humanoids, and therefore shape much of the world around them, as humans tend to do. The diversity of environments in the games directed by Amy were beautiful, and I would want to see environments like that in a future game. But I felt there was an absence of human presence in those games. The brief pass through Uschtenheim in SR2 left me wanting more. BO2 didn't do a bad job at this aspect.

-No assumptions could accurately be made about what positions a character took based on her/his race. There were vampires selling out to the "Seraphan", there were humans helping the Cabal, and even the Hylden were shown debating how to perceive Nosgoth's natives.

As for the Hylden, I'm not convinced that vengeance was the primary motive for their actions outside of BO2. It may have simply been the icing on the cake. Their destruction of the Pillars and their assault on the Guardians was a desperate act of self defense. They were trying to free themselves from millennia of wrongful imprisonment, and I can only expect them to have some very hard feelings about it. Whether the Ancients knew the physical form of the being they worshipped or not, they were just as responsible as anyone for exercising their own common sense when the Elder commanded them to do things that were wrong. The Ancients assumed Kain would ascribe to their ideology purely on the basis of his newly-acquired race, leading the Hylden to mistake him for one of their attackers. Fortunately Kain possessed the common sense they lacked--even before he physically saw the Elder. He just needed Raziel to show him where to swing the Reaver.