Lara Begins
The series grows older and Lara younger when Crystal Dynamics presses the restart button and return to Lara’s origins in the new Tomb Raider.
Emil Kraftling
It’s not the same old Lara. It’s a young Lara, 21 years old and newly graduated archeologist. She’s onboard the salvage ship Endurance on an expedition to search for lost relics at an unnamed mystical island outside the shore of Japan. But suddenly they get caught in a storm and the ship is torn to pieces. Lara is tossed into the dark ocean and loses consciousness.
When she awakens and the player gains control, it’s not the same confident, cocky and invulnerable Lara from the previous games that we meet. She hangs upside-down in a dark cave, tied up in thick ropes and old burlap and only her head is free. She trembles, shakes, she’s terrified. You can see the fright in her eyes. Next to her hangs another captive in the same fashion, only he’s no longer alive. The panic comes crawling and Lara exclaims hysterically that she doesn’t want to die, not like this. The player is in control, but can’t do much more than to swing her gently back and forth.
Another Lara
As early as here we have gotten a radically different picture of Lara compared to the one we’ve lived with since the original from 1996. Crystal Dynamics speak a lot about how they’ve wanted to remove the feeling of teflon that existed over the old Lara. She always had control over things, survived the worst gunfights without a scratch and never seemed to get frightened or worried. She was a James Bond of the gaming world in that regard. She would wind up in the worst case scenario but always managed to come out with her coolness intact. At most she showed a wrinkled brow when faced eye to eye against a living Tyrannosaurus Rex. The similarity to James Bond gets even more relevant when you speak of the fresh start that Tomb Raider is. According to Crystal Dynamics it’s not about remaking Lara completely, but to make her culturally relevant. If you for instance look at franchises such as James Bond and Batman, their fresh starts haven’t meant a fundamental change of the characters. James Bond is still James Bond, only he’s been modernized and made relevant.
The scene continues and Lara eventually swings into the dead captive beside her, bumps into him and makes a nearby candle light his burlap on fire. The fire spreads and soon ingests the dead neighbor’s rope whereon the corpse falls to the ground. The solution has revealed itself to both Lara and the gamer. Further swinging is needed to get in contact with the flames. “This is going to hurt”, Lara tells herself when her own burlap ignites. Then she screams of pain as the fire works its way through the ropes but simultaneously licks her skin. When the ropes rupture, she falls down and gets punctured in her side by a metal nail that sticks up from the rubble below. Another cry of pain. In just a few minutes, Lara has shown more vulnerability than in all previous games together.
Tomb Raider is a story of survival. The developers goal is to take a very humane character, someone you can relate to, and break her down before building her back up, thus creating a heroine who’s still humane. But it’s not only Lara’s inner self that gets affected. The metal nail leaves a visible wound where it entered and exited. She’s muddy and dirty, with lank hair and marks of sweat and tears on her face.
It’s not just characters that need to develop over time. Franchises needs to change in their entirety if they are to survive and it was of that reason that Eidos and Crystal Dynamics decided to restart the series. But the franchise is still named Tomb Raider and just like for the character Lara, the changes won’t mean anything entirely new, just something different. There will still be tombs to explore, but the motivation behind is not the same as before. Everything you do, you do so that Lara will survive.
Violent development
When Lara has pulled the nail out and continues to try and find a way out of the cave, she comes out in an open room filled with lit candles, where a body is stretched in front of what seems to be an altar of sacrifice. The room is filled with relics and remnants, but Lara pays them no heed, picks up a torch and scurries along. The path is blocked by rubble and burlaps and the earlier experience has taught the player how to move forth. Lara lights the rubble on fire with the torch and the path is soon cleared. Distant sounds tell that she’s not alone in the caves.
Not much is revealed about the island’s inhabitants, but they seem to be nasty raiders and fanatics. Lara’s first meeting with them occurs when she tries to crawl through a narrow passage. Suddenly she’s pulled back by a man grabbing her legs. With the help of the player, Lara can fight and kick her way free. If you do not succeed, the lunatic will hold her down while hushing and telling her not to struggle against him. He only wants to help her. Then he stabs Lara in the chest with a knife and closes her lifeless eyes. The scene is very unpleasant, but according to Crystal Dynamics it’s important that Lara is vulnerable and human, and that the player will have a strong feeling for and want to protect her. They have consciously chosen to make a more realistic and violent game and in America they aim for a Mature age-limit (17 years old) unlike the predecessors Teen (13 years old). If the battle is won, Lara kicks the man away and gets through the passageway, which then collapses. After that she goes through a narrow, water filled corridor where she has to struggle to keep both her head and torch over the surface.
Laws of physics
Fire, water and physics are three constituents that is very basic for much of the problem solving in Tomb Raider. Where the previous games puzzles in many cases were built around mechanisms, ancient as well as modern, there is less of that here. You won’t be pulling ledges to launch antique gears that will lead you forward. You will use more earthbound things and obey believable laws of nature.
When Lara enters the next big room you can notice influences from games with a physics-based puzzle solving like Half-Life 2. It’s a larger cave room where the waves of the sea enter through an opening in the wall. The water is filled with crates, barrels and other rubble that has been brought there by the tide and bobs on the surface. The raiders seem to use the cave to search through debris for materials. A couple of explosive barrels stand in the way of the estuary that leads to freedom. Lara’s torch could blow them away, but not without her blowing up with them. She could light fire to some of the floating rubble and let it be carried away to the barrels by the current, but a waterfall in between would extinguish the fire.
The solution is instead in an old cage rigged to work as some sort of crane. With it, Lara will be able to transport the burning rubble to the explosive barrels from a safe distance. When the barrels explode the cave begins to cave in and the player must run with Lara towards the opening. When she has managed to get out of the collapsing cave, she’s met with a sight that doesn’t exactly invigorate the prospects of getting away. Around the shore of the island are masses of wreckage from ships and aircraft and other things the island has attracted through centuries.
Lara however, will not be alone in the exploring of the islands mysteries and the pursuit for freedom. A part of the crew from Endurance has survived and particularly the captain, Conrad, will play an important role for Lara’s development. He works as a mentor for the young a archeologist but will not be a companion. The wreckage has left him badly damaged and he stays in the group’s base camp, while Lara is the one who has to go out on the island to solve its mysteries.
Free aim
A major part of the game will obviously be about battles. The first change here is that the series lock-on aim is now removed in favor of a free aim, and a lot of time has been spent on creating good fights. Any twin pistols have not been seen anywhere, but more primitive weapons like the longbow, a machete and the mystical ice pick. But don’t count ordinary weapons out yet. There are a lot of things that Crystal Dynamics does not want to tell, and development is still in a stage where everything is tested and changes happen all the time. One thing they are very secretive about is how the structure of the missions will look like. It will not follow the same design as prior. “You can basically go in whatever direction you want and create your own way to the finish instead of being guided”, Crystal Dynamics head Darrel Gallagher has told the American game magazine Game Informer. But Tomb Raider will not be an “open world”-game in the words fullest sense. You will probably have single goals at a time, but the way to solving these goals depends on your choices as a player. There will also be room for exploration and food and water will apparently also play a part in Lara’s survival. The idea, however, is not to make it an obligation, but that the exploration will be an interesting bonus for those who like to explore, while those who like action can focus on something else.
So much better
Lara will also become better at everything as the game proceeds. She becomes stronger and better at survival the more she goes through and can find and use objects as well as her improved physique to reach places she couldn’t earlier. The goal is to tie Lara’s mental journey together with the player’s own and also see a character development that the player sees and feels. Weather conditions will also change and make revisiting old areas more interesting.
You can tell that the developers have high ambitions and would like to give Tomb Raider a fresh start. The structure looks promising, with a more adult image and a more credible Lara. From a visual point of view the game looks amazingly well and everything from lightning and models to animations makes one drool. Sure there are some question marks for old fans. It’s not yet decided whether or not Lara will be able to swim and even though the developers say they want to avoid quicktime events, there are still indications that many of the games more dramatic moments will use that type of directed and more linear input. Overall are the impressions very positive and we completely agree that the series need a fresh start. No release date has yet been set, but we would think that it’s closer to 2012 than 2011.