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Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain cover
Developers
Silicon Knights
Windows Semi Logic Entertainment
Publishers
Retail Crystal Dynamics
Windows Activision
Digital Square Enix
Release dates
Windows August 1997
Taxonomy
Monetization One-time game purchase
Modes Singleplayer
Pacing Real-time
Perspectives Top-down view
Controls Direct control
Genres Action, Adventure
Themes Fantasy
Series Legacy of Kain
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain on HowLongToBeat
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain on IGDB
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain on MobyGames
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain on Wikipedia
Legacy of Kain
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain 1997
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1999
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 2001
Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2 2002
Legacy of Kain: Defiance 2003
Nosgoth Cancelled

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is a singleplayer top-down view action and adventure game in the Legacy of Kain series.

The PC version eliminates loading times which exist in the PlayStation version. However, compared to it, animations are slightly slower, and FMVs are of lower quality with mono audio.

The game suffers from crashes, low sound quality and other issues on modern operating systems; the OpenGL wrapper fixes them.

General information

GOG.com Community Discussions
GOG.com Support Page

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
Disc check (requires the CD/DVD in the drive to play)
North American physical copy protection causes bad sectors.
Windows
GOG.com
DRM-free
Uses GOG's custom DirectX wrapper
Windows
A free demo version is available from Archive.org.

Essential improvements

Verok's GL wrapper & patch

Windowed mode support, FMVs play without interlacing, optional unfiltered scaler, WinXP/7/10 compatibility fix, removed CD check, 60 FPS support like the PS1 version, optional PS1 FMVs support, HQ cutscenes with stereo sound, subtitles and more.

CubanRaul's Community Patch

Eliminates the need for a slowdown program for fast CPUs and fixes various crashes.
2.0 version requires Windows 2000 at minimum; 2.2 requires Windows 7 at minimum.
By express request of mod co-creator Wrace, PCGamingWiki is, for reasons known only to Wrace, forbidden from providing any direct links to the mod - including to the author's own official mod page. As such, please copy and paste the following search query/queries into any search engine:
Wrace Blood Omen Legacy of Kain CubanRaul's Community Patch

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\SAVED\[Note 1]
GOG.com <path-to-game>\Saves\
Config files are not in plain text format.

Save game data location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\SAVED\[Note 1]
GOG.com <path-to-game>\Saves\

Save game cloud syncing

System Native Notes
GOG Galaxy

Video

Graphics feature State Notes
Widescreen resolution
Only 640x480, 640x480i, and 320x240 pillarboxed.
The latter 2 are selectable by pressing F12.
Multi-monitor
Ultra-widescreen
4K Ultra HD
Field of view (FOV)
Windowed
Use Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
In the GOG.com version, the dxcfg.exe application can achieve this.
Borderless fullscreen windowed
In the GOG.com version, the dxcfg.exe application can achieve this.
Anisotropic filtering (AF)
In the GOG.com version, the dxcfg.exe application can achieve this.
Anti-aliasing (AA)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Vertical sync (Vsync)
In the GOG.com version, it can be forced through dxcfg.exe.
60 FPS
Capped at 40 FPS, FMVs at 15 and 18 FPS.[1]
Use Verok's GL wrapper & patch to increase the FPS.
120+ FPS
Gameplay is tied to the frame rate. Above 60 FPS makes the gameplay too fast.

Input

Control options.
Control options.
XInput prompts - Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
XInput prompts - Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
DualShock prompts - Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
DualShock prompts - Verok's GL wrapper & patch.

Audio

Audio options.
Audio options.

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Sound & music
Surround sound
Possible via OpenAL with Verok's GL wrapper & patch
Subtitles
Possible with Verok's GL wrapper & patch
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
Losing focus causes black screen. Use Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
EAX support
Possible via OpenAL with Verok's GL wrapper & patch
Royalty free audio
English subtitles.
English subtitles.

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English
Subs possible with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
French
Included with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
German
Included with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
Hungarian
Included with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
Italian
Included with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
Japanese
Included with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
Polish
Included with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
Brazilian Portuguese
Included with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
Russian
Included with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.
Spanish
Included with Verok's GL wrapper & patch.

Issues fixed

System Locale/Language Check Failed

Error message for an "invalid locale".
Error message for an "invalid locale".
On modern versions of Windows, this error occurs at game startup when the language for non-Unicode programs is set to something the game does not support.
Change language for non-Unicode programs
  1. Open the Control Panel and set View by: to Category.
  2. Click Clock, Language, and Region and then Region.
  3. Under the Administrative tab, click Change system locale....
  4. Set the system locale to one the game supports, such as English (United States) for the US release.

Notes

Exact steps vary slightly depending on your Windows version. The above refers to Windows 8.1.
Use Verok's GL wrapper & patch

Crashes When Loading a Save or After Playing the Introduction Cutscene

Disable Data Execution Prevention for KAIN.exe
  1. Open the Control Panel and set View by: to Large icons.
  2. Click System and then Advanced system settings.
  3. Click Settings... under Performance.
  4. Under the Data Execution Prevention tab, set Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select:.
  5. Click Add..., then go to the game directory and add Kain.exe to the list.

Notes

Exact steps vary slightly depending on your Windows version. The above refers to Windows 7.
Use Verok's GL wrapper & patch

Freezes after Kain's speech in the tavern or mausoleum

if the PC specs exceed the game requirements, this will trigger a freeze after Kain's speech in the tavern or mausoleum.
To avoid this issue, the FSB (Front Side Bus) frequency must be decreased to a value that does not cause problems with the game; usually 100Mhz or 66Mhz.
For all those who do not have the possibility to configure this option, it's necessary to rely on 3rd party solutions such as "CPUKILLER" or "Verok's GL wrapper & patch".
Use Verok's GL wrapper & patch (Windows 7 and later)
Use CubanRaul's Community Patch (Windows 2000, XP, and Vista)

Other information

API

Technical specs Supported Notes
Direct3D
GOG.com version uses custom DirectX wrapper
Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows

System requirements

Windows
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) 95
Processor (CPU) Intel Pentium 100 MHz
System memory (RAM) 16 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 12 MB
Video card (GPU) SVGA
1 MB of VRAM
Sound (audio device) Sound Blaster compatible
Other 4x CD-ROM


Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below %PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).

References

  1. Verified by User:MetalPlateMage on 25 July 2015
    Tested using ShadowPlay.