Square Enix have announced that they are cancelling Nosgoth [official site], the free-to-play humans vs. vampires multiplayer game vaguely connected to the Legacy of Kain series. It entered beta in January 2015 and will close down in May without having properly launched. It wasn’t popular enough to keep going, Square Enix say, which always invites a lot of finger-pointing. Squeenix will keep the servers online for people to play until May 31st, when Nosgoth will suffer final death.

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Each week Marsh Davies sinks his teeth into the hot, pumping artery of Early Access and drains its sweet lifegiving essence, leaving only a ragged skein of flesh when he s done. This week he s played (or free-to-played) Nosgoth, a team-based multiplayer game in which heavily-armed non-consenting blood-donors clash with the fanged forces of unlife.>

The general mood has been less than charitable towards this project. It s a multiplayer spin-off of Legacy of Kain, traditionally an action RPG series, a demo of which I think I brushed past on a PC Format coverdisk once, back in the days before games had invented a way to render the male nipple. But, I m told, it had really good storytelling for the time, and how dare anyone decide to use this important and sophisticated fiction for something so trivial as a thirdperson asymmetric multiplayer game? Yet dare they have. And it seems they ve made quite a well-considered one, in which deft movement and exact coordination trump headshots and button mashing, and the two teams of which, vampires and humans, offer very different play but surprising parity.

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Fighty multiplayer vampire title Nosgoth (official site) has gone even more free to play than it already was. I.e. anyone is now free to play it, as it’s just moved into open beta. I hadn’t really been paying attention to this, because the words ‘Legacy of Kain universe’ cause me to question the purpose of human consciousness, but now I’ve finally had a look at some footage it looks kind of fun. There’s a lot going on – grappling hooks, crossbows, flying dudes…. Don’t know how it hangs together, but it’s a spectacle. … [visit site to read more]

Nosgoth, as you may remember, is “a solid-looking free-to-play multiplayer shooter set in the Legacy of Kain universe”. A closed beta has been in operation for a good while now and this time next week – that’s Wednesday the 21st, 6pm GMT if you’re reading this in the future – the dark world of Nosgoth will open its doors to everybody>. I don’t have any stakes (HAHA) in the Legacy of Kain series, but Nosgoth has my attention because it has humans doing boring human things like capturing points of the map, and vampires hunting and eating them.

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