Legacy Of Kain Defiance, the latest and seemingly final entry in the series, has been released almost 17 years ago, but it can be made to look almost like a modern game with the right tweaks.
YouTuber Sanadsk recently shared a video showcasing Legacy Of Kain Defiance running at 4K resolution using Pascal Gilcher RayTraced Global Illumination shader for ReShade. While the shader doesn’t introduce real ray tracing to the game, it makes it look quite a bit better, improving the game’s gothic atmosphere a lot.
There have been rumors of multiple new PS5 titles, including the Legacy of Kain series. It sounds like there is a good chance we will be getting a Soul Reaver remake sooner or later! In this video, I bring you my own 4K “remake” using Ray Tracing filters and mods!
Legacy of Kain: Defiance is just one of the few older games that can be improved considerably with the ReShade ray tracing shader, which uses path tracing to create an effect that looks as close as possible to real ray tracing.
What I’m doing is ray tracing in screen space, tracing rays against the depth buffer (a data buffer that contains the information how far an object is away, as opposed to the color buffer which tells you what color the object has and what you usually see in any game). When compared to DXR, it has several limitations: anything behind another object does not contribute, anything outside the screen does not contribute, backfaces do not contribute. The benefits of this shader is that it can run on every game and GPU and it’s a step up from regular SSAO. I hope this serves as a sneak peek at what DXR ray tracing can do and why everyone in VFX can’t wait to get real ray tracing for their games.
Legacy of Kain Defiance can now be purchased on Steam.
