by manipulating history. While Soul Reaver was still in development, Crystal Dynamics initiated another project - a successor to Blood Omen - and when the Soul Reaver team had started work on their follow-up in late 1999, two Legacy of Kain games were in simultaneous development. Blood Omen 2's "creative seeds were sown" in 1999, and the finished product was released in 2002, six months after Soul Reaver 2, for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, Microsoft Windows and GameCube. It was not produced with the involvement of the Soul Reaver crew, instead being created by a new team at Crystal Dynamics under the direction of Glen Schofield. A key point of focus for the developers was the main character, Kain; Crystal Dynamics had "a huge investment in Kain as a character". Shifting the focus of gameplay towards action, gore and combat instead of puzzle-solving, it retains several of the qualities which made the previous games popular, but was criticized for lacking innovation. Despite middling critical reception, it was released on four platforms and sold well. The setting, an enormous industrial city, is a departure for the series. While the game was released after Soul Reaver 2, the events of the game actually happen after Blood Omen but before the events of Soul Reaver, in an alternate timeline created from the Soul Reaver 2 events. In Blood Omen 2 players control a younger Kain after an unsuccessful campaign to conquer Nosgoth, as he is opposed by traitorous vampires and a new enemy. Legacy of Kain: Defiance, the most recent entry in the series, was released in 2003 on the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Microsoft Windows. First conceptualized as Soul Reaver 3, it represented a combined effort from the Soul Reaver 2 and Blood Omen 2 teams to consolidate and re-balance the storytelling, puzzle-solving and combat aspects of its predecessors, fusing elements from the two sub-series into one game. They chose a new title under the Legacy of Kain banner to reflect this new focus. The player alternates between control of Raziel and the Soul Reaver 2 incarnation of Kain in each of the game's chapters, under the premise that only one of the two will survive—emphasis was placed on cinematic presentation. The story concludes on a hopeful note, but without full resolution; during production, Hennig departed Crystal Dynamics to work for Naughty Dog, and Defiance did not meet Eidos' sales expectations. Following