When we last saw Lara Croft, she was battered, bruised and barely alive. Two years later, Crystal Dynamics invites to meet a very different kind of hero…
Aflare fizzes to life and illuminates dripping icicles that line the cave like drool-covered teeth. Its holder is not the human-shaped bruise we last saw staggering from Yamatai, but a glimpse of the raider she once was: the bright-eyed explorer with money to burn, who travels to the world’s most dangerous corners in maximum comfort. Bloodied rags are swapped for expensive climbing gear and two shiny ice axes promise swift ascent up the glistening walls. A wise investment, after her last model was dulled by all the skulls she thunked it into. Lara Croft looks ready for anything.
She even has company. Fellow island survivor Jonah beckons from above with the promise of an amazing view. And he’s right: sun rays bathe a glorious mountain range, far removed from the shipwreck graveyard that served as Tomb Raider’s grim welcome mat. For a second, Lara looks to be getting a well-deserved vacation. Then along comes a sadistic holiday rep, Crystal Dynamics, to say otherwise. In an intensely filmic sequence, cutting between direct control and cinematics, Lara comes under attack from leg-hugging snow, tumbling ice shards, collapsing cliffs, a surprise storm and, for a grand finale, a full-blown avalanche.
It’s the kind of out-of-the-frying-pan chain of events that so dazzled in the 2013 reboot. Bad things didn’t come in threes; they came in waves until they triggered a gruesome death animation. The game’s slogan, ‘A survivor is born’, was spot-on, but it left an odd premise to take forwards: isn’t it enough to survive? Where does a survivor go next? As Lara pulls herself from the snow, alone and stripped of her advantage, Crystal Dynamics begins to lay out its plans for the arrival of a new kind of hero: Rise of the Tomb Raider…
T h e J o u r n e y B e g i n s
Having survived the worst holiday ever, where next for Lara Croft?
To understand what drives Lara to the Siberian wasteland, you have to first understand what drives Crystal Dynamics. Staff namedrop great explorers – Jacques Cousteau, Edmund Hillary, Neil Armstrong – and talk of man’s desire to be first or go further. These aren’t the Saturday matinee larks of Indiana Jones. You can’t ride a magic red line round the globe and expect to make history. Lara is driven by something grander, something studio staff summarise with fellow pioneer Amelia earhart’s bullish creedo: “Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.”
Of course, Lara has already done things others should never have to do. She has killed, seen friends die and witnessed evidence of supernatural power. For us, Tomb Raider’s descent into magic weather control jarred with its grounded survival thrust, but maybe this was deliberate. “At the beginning of the last game she’s going to find lost civilisation and artefacts and bring them back to a museum – and that makes sense to someone fresh out of university,” explains creative director Noah Hughes. “But when she glimpses what she does at the end of the story, it really does change her world.”
In foiling an ancient queen’s bodytransference ritual, Lara discovers proof of immortality. “It’s a possibility that the myths she thought were just stories that gestured at these ancient cultures might actually be indications of truth about humanity that have been lost to the ages,” says hughes. “And validating this myth almost becomes an obsession. If it is, what does that mean? But she also goes into it with a sense of idealistic nobility, that she can make a difference. And that’s very different to being an archaeologist, so we see her at the beginning of this story starting to recognise that uncovering these secrets is what drives her on some level.”
Alas, the world is not necessarily in-step, with the events on Yamatai covered up by a shady organisation, Trinity (hinted at in the first game for those who diligently collected all the GPS caches), and Lara’s own account discredited. Undeterred, she sets her sights on a fabled tomb said to house the soul of an immortality-granting prophet. Which explains why she’s on her way to Siberia. Specifically the Lost City of Kitezh, a sort of 13th-Century Russian Atlantis that Crystal Dynamics plucks from the history books and embellishes for its own purposes. Bad news: Trinity has booked a ticket, too.
Darrell Gallagher, head of studios and, Lara aside, a lone Brit at Crystal Dynamics, sees a hero with a far greater sense of purpose. “She went into that first game not really knowing who she was or knowing her capabilities because she was so new to this,” he says. “Thrust into a journey of survival, she realised she had an inner strength that she never imagined she had. Where she once thought she was going to go and find old archaeological digs, there’s much more to it now that she’s a Tomb Raider – developing into that character was much broader than she imagined. It’s fulfilling her destiny.”
Croft has come a long way since those early days, where her evolution was defined by polygon counts rather than psychology. It’s certainly difficult to see this Lara lounging on the front of lads’ mags. And that’s a good thing. But as important as storytelling is to Crystal Dynamics – it has again enlisted the talents of writer Rhianna Pratchett and invested in full body and facial capture technology – we’re interested in how Lara’s new situation impacts her as an actual adventurer. As hughes describes it, Lara’s Bear grylls act is now less of a necessity than an enabling tool. “Her understanding of myths and her intellectual brilliance allow her to decipher these ancient mysteries, but her survival skills are what allow her to penetrate these harsh and hostile landscapes.” On this last point, hughes delivers a delicious hook: “The secrets of our world are hidden in the darkest places”.
Returning Lara to her traditional stomping ground is welcome after the largely tomb-free reboot – selfcontained box-pushing rooms do not a tomb make – but might it undermine that work’s attempts to define itself on its own terms? “It’s important for us to continue the arc we started with Tomb Raider 2013,” says gallagher. “We are folding in tombs and putting an emphasis on those – which is not necessarily going back to 1996, as it’s absolutely cast through the modern lens.” What this means is taking the survival action of the earlier game, and pushing it harder and further…
S u r v i v a l o f t h e F i t t e s t
Bears, blizzards and bows: this is Lara’s toughest adventure yet
Before talking about how ROTTR ups the survival stakes, there’s a silly thing you should know about Crystal Dynamics. Situated on the coast in a glass building, the studio is bathed in a blinding light, forcing its staff to cower below beach parasols. “Every new starter gets a hat or an umbrella,” says gallagher. It’s funny that Lara’s bruising struggle is built under such mildly irritating conditions, although it could be the secret to channelling her inner turmoil. One thing’s for sure: as she emerges postavalanche with her equipment gone, the night closing in and wolf-sized shadows in the surrounding woods, sunburn is the least of her worries.
Her first job? Rebuild a base camp, the site used to save and upgrade gear. For this, Lara scavenges wood and pelts. Plants and animals don’t spit out magic XP or the nondescript ‘salvage’ used to upgrade in Tomb Raider, but offer specific materials: wood from saplings, pelt from a deer half-finished by wolves. Leaves are used to heal wounds and common resources let Lara Craft special ammo, such as poison-tipped arrowheads. Gear upgrades require rarer materials, from animals that now respond to time of day. An alpha wolf only emerges at night, for example, bringing with him the hide for a nifty furred hood.
You also have choice over what equipment you improve. Your first DIY bow won’t be replaced by shinier models; it has its own upgrade path, should you prefer it to the Compound Bow Lara later finds. Hughes sees this range as key to bringing improvisation to the game. “All of this adds to player choice, and there’s now a side of our survival action that starts to say, ‘How do you want to leverage the world and the tools?’” he says. “We like [survival action] to deliver the pure baseline of ‘not dying’, but also starting to become powerful in the world because of your understanding and use of it.”
This really comes to the fore in combat. Previously you could get the drop on smaller groups, but when the game wanted it to kick off, it kicked off. Lara can still storm in all guns blazing, but she favours guerrilla warfare. Her first demo encounter, for example, begins not on the ground, but underwater, as a new diving ability (limited to a few seconds) lets her swim towards the bank, pull a Trinity soldier into the murk and drown him. Emerging from the pond she scampers up a tree and pounces on the guard below with a knife through the windpipe.
With the remaining patrol out in the open, Lara sneaks between bushes, throwing empty beer bottles (stealth 101) to distract them. It’s not Metal Gear Solid – it’s lighter on its feet, more about using Lara’s incredible mobility to deliver on the power fantasy of striking fast and playing dirty than waiting out tedious alarm cycles. Get spotted and it simply becomes the excellent cover-based shooter you enjoyed in 2013. Stay hidden and you can continue messing with the guards: our guide throws a downed goon’s crackling radio near a bonfire and waits for his friends to investigate before heaving a fuel canister into the flames. Ka-boom.
The major difference between this and the previous game is what hughes refers to as “pro-activity” on Lara’s part. “Previously, Lara wanted to escape, so she was heading that direction [points outwards], but in this story she’s seeking to unlock the secrets of the place, so she doesn’t have to be trapped in order to confront its hostilities. That’s not to say she doesn’t get past the point of no return and can’t easily fly back to London on a whim.” While it’s sad we won’t get a level set on an easyJet flight (a fate worse than Yamatai), that change of circumstance is a refreshing angle after the grim necessity of the reboot.
One such point of no return involves a very angry bear. Having already dined on a Trinity patrol – Lara hears their screams over her radio – he takes a page out of our mum’s dinner-party playbook and ends the soirée with a posh dessert. As he gallops from the cave, our hero bounds up a nearby tree to avoid swiping claws before legging it down a forest path. What’s meant to happen is Lara reaches a tangle of tree roots and performs a nimble QTe to stab a climbing axe into its paws. What actually happens is she fumbles and sees her head gnawed off in one of those death animations that we all pretend to be too grown-up to enjoy.
Striking a neat balance of scripted intensity and a freedom to enact your own escape, it’s a good taste of how Crystal Dynamics is pushing its survival ideas. Funnily enough, a pointy parasol would have probably come in handy. Maybe the staff have the right idea.
N e w W o r l d. B e B r a v e
In search of secrets, Lara laughs in the face of the beaten track
Some critics found Tomb Raider too guided, whether it was the hand-holding of push-forward-to-win set-pieces or the general urgency of objectives that made casual exploration feel like you were doing something wrong. When you’ve an angry Scotsman yelling for help, it seems misguided to stop and smell the daisies. Rise of the Tomb Raider’s Siberian climate rules out any hot nose-on-daisy action, but does show interest in Lara wandering from the beaten path. Hughes is keen to point out that environments aren’t merely backgrounds to a story, but rife with threats; vicious predators and weather conditions that conspire against her. But the landscape boasts secrets that make the threats worth facing.
“Certainly when we’re talking about the critical path we want to make sure everyone understands what they need to do,” he explains, “but we want to cater to that feeling that you’re discovering things that not everybody can, so we create a spectrum of challenge as it relates to exploration and signposting.” In Tomb Raider the spectrum began and ended with GPS caches and diary entries. These asides return, but in a pleasingly organic fashion, such as when Lara happens across a mysterious stone obelisk and begins to theorise out loud about its purpose. “At some point Lara will decipher the monolith and it’ll take her somewhere interesting,” says hughes, relishing his role as treasure-hider.
We do spot odd throwbacks to Tomb Raider’s softer touch, specifically the white scuffs denoting a climbable ledge. That said, our demo is showing key story moments – that critical path Crystal Dynamics is keen to underline – and hughes says we can expect acrobatics with a little more bite. “My hope is that we maintain a certain intuitiveness and ease to the platforming controls, but what the environment asks of you keeps you on your toes,” he says. “I don’t want to be mean, but I’ll be happy if we see a greater equalisation of deaths from the environment as in combat.” That the game’s director, Brian Horton, plummets to his doom in the opening avalanche escape suggests the team has nailed the sweet spot.
As well as these improvements, Crystal Dynamics is expanding on Tomb Raider’s brilliant underlying structure - the drip-feed of gear unlocks that saw Lara reappraising territory to find new routes. Okay, so emptying her pockets with an avalanche is a tad extreme, but the sense of progression should be worth it. “We liked that relationship between these hubs that you come back to with more gear and gaining new gear. To be honest, there’ll be some old favourites, but we set out to make sure that this adventure is fresh, so whether she’s finding or crafting new gear, we will expand on her repertoire,” says hughes. Finishing secondary tasks will even earn ‘exotic’ kit. Yes, it does get more exotic than a bow made from deer guts.
A short demo can’t do progression justice, so we hop forward to a later point in the game when Lara is more tooled-up. her torn climbing outfit has been swapped for a sturdier wolfcoloured number – you can fill in the gaps – and her improved arsenal has her ready to face her bear oppressor from the earlier escape. Trekking back to its cave reveals what a difference time of day and weather can make to your perception of the world; without Mother nature throwing a hissy fit you can better spot potential resources and paths that beg you to follow them. Not today, though, as we’re all going on a bear hunt. Fear level: marginally scared, and that’s with a gun.
The tunnel to its den is not a wise battleground, so Lara fires an arrow to tempt it out. Emerging in a flurry of claws, we see liberal use of Lara’s returning evasive lunge to duck under its swinging paws, blasts of slowmotion emphasising their ferocity. A strike to her back splatters the screen’s edges with blood, indicating a deeper wound that requires manual healing. This is no harder than tapping LB, but with no leaves to hand she’s forced to limp over to a life-saving shrub. Auto-ducking into nearby cover she replenishes her poison arrows, soon thudding into the bear with a puff of toxic green. Ten or so shots later and it falls with an almighty crunch.
Entering the lair of the slain beast Lara discovers evidence of a camp, apparently proving that the Mongol horde also pursued Kitezh. It’s here that we finally appreciate hughes’ vision: further into the cave we find an ancient greek ship stuck preserved in a frozen waterfall. A secret tomb, a reward for having the guts to leave the path and face your fears.
T o m b w i t h a V i ew
A world so bleeding-edge someone better fetch it a bandage
Upon watching the demo, the first thing that hits you – avalanche aside – is how crisp the icy wastelands look. Lara’s initial ice climb is tethered to a linear path, but it’s beautifully decorated: hunting gear freely jangles on her belt, flare light sinks into the cracks between icicles and wading through thick banks of powered snow sees it displaced into mucky trails. Croft herself is impressively reactive to changing conditions, be it pulling her feet from snow piles or hunkering down when walking into a brutal wind. And yes, those ludicrously wafty TressFX hair physics are back, though they take time to warm up, with Lara’s initial ‘do frozen into an icy wodge.
You can see the skeleton of the former game under the shiny details, a result of Crystal Dynamics’ new Foundation engine being built, aptly, on what came before. This isn’t meant as a slight. The reboot was gorgeous and still held its own in 2014’s Xbox One port. But the two share visual DNA, with intensely scripted linear corridors that throw blockbuster effects at the screen and more contemplative hub areas where Lara drinks in the details and goes about exploring. The difference this time? Those hubs are two to three times larger than Tomb Raider’s, which, let us remind you, already gave us entire mountains and sprawling mining outposts to conquer.
Our demo reveals one such hub – a disbanded Soviet facility that incorporates a factory, a small town’s worth of dilapidated buildings, a rail yard and valley-crossing bridge. Just in case any of this is read as unreachable background detail, one of Trinity’s invading goons fires a signal flare from the other side of the valley. Automatically you start planning your route over, eyeing the criss-crossing telegraph wires and the you-couldjust-about-make-it gaps between crumbling rooftops. It’s a shame that, for the sake of this presentation, Lara is left looking down from a distance.
Standing still does give the demonstrator a chance to rotate the camera and reveal the shiniest overhaul of them all: Lara herself. gallagher says character models were a big focus this time round, that “Lara is so prominent on screen, making her spectacular is the goal.” Where the first game strapped cameras to the actors for frame-by-frame reference, ROTTR uses motion capture to map the shifting musculature of the face and better translate actor Camilla Luddington’s emotional state. Even this technology takes a step forward thanks to the Foundation engine.
“The new motion-capture system is actually a spray that goes over the entire face, which gives you something like 7,000 reference points,” says hughes. “They still wear the dots, but the system scans Camilla’s face, and then maps that to these superhigh-resolution versions of her face.” The effort is harder to appreciate, as Lara doesn’t have Luddington’s face, but the actorly effort is there in every flinch, shriek and moment of wideeyed wonder. gallagher likens it to CG in real time, backed up with global illumination to simulate light bouncing around a room – essential when so much of the game revolves around bringing light to the darkest crannies.
Don’t forget that all this is also coming to Xbox 360. Gallagher explains that with the Xbox ecosystem and community spread across multiple platforms, and Tomb Raider achieving such impressive things towards the end of the console cycle, the studio felt it should at least try to share the vision. “We went through a process of saying ‘will it translate?’ and when we [saw] an early version up and running, we were amazed. [We] got a translation that we felt was a real technical marvel, so it was a great thing to support that.” The judicious use of ‘translation’ suggests this won’t be an exact match, something we can only speculate about.
Even if it’s a shorthand version of what’s achieved on Xbox One, that’s still quite a demand on the wheezing tech. In order for Crystal Dynamics to focus entirely on “pushing to the bleeding edge of Xbox One technology”, hughes says his team is working with nixxes, who handled Tomb Raider’s PC and PS4 ports, on the last-gen version. He admits the team thought it had hit Xbox 360’s ceiling with Tomb Raider, but is happy to report “We’ve gotten some sneak peeks at what nixxes is doing and it really is working magic – it’s taken the bar that we’ve set on Xbox One and trying to realise that as faithfully as it can.” Hang onto your faithful Xbox 360 then, just don’t expect those meticulously wafty hair physics, okay?
T o m b i t M a y C o n c e r n
Lara’s back where she belongs - getting crushed and confused
For a game called Tomb Raider, tombs were conspicuously absent. Instead of the ancient machinery of old, we found self-contained puzzle chambers filled with modern-day contraptions. Tombs are largely absent from our Rise of the Tomb Raider presentation, too – “they are too big to dip a toe into”, we’re told – though they aren’t far from hughes’ mind. Although enthusiastic about all his new ideas, it’s the promised return of true raiding that lights the fire in his eyes; an excitement backed up by a showreel of deathtraps to come.
We catch glimpses of catacombs sprawling over multiple floors. A waterlogged shrine with lakes of shimmering green murk that will no doubt test Lara’s diving ability. There’s an intriguing hellenic-looking number, with verdant greenery hanging from majestic pillars. None of this, it should be noted, looks native to Siberia. Although this has been announced as a globetrotting adventure, hughes is keen to “eke out the variety from any given space”, even if there’s “a little bit of creative liberty.” A shot of grand doors carved into Petra-esque rock suggests Lara better pack sun lotion.
Crystal Dynamics has a proven eye for tomb architecture, having given us the excellent Legend, Anniversary and Underworld before rebooting the series. Underworld, in particular, gave us a huge leap in sophistication fuelled by a new console generation. Think of a ziggurat jutting from the vast seabed or a shrine so large it had to be tackled on motorbike, and Tomb Raider’s modest crate-pushing cubbyholes look no more epic than a trip to your garage. ROTTR arrives after a second technical leap, so surely we should be expecting some pretty spectacular evolution?
“I think one [development] is scale, and pushing scale in general. There is a sense that my most memorable tomb experiences are these giant places that feel almost unsolvable from a gamer’s perspective. And I think that’s something we’re able to push from a technology perspective,” says hughes. But don’t assume the line is drawn at ‘bigger is better’. “Often it’s the immersion and storytelling that really add that other important layer. You got a glimpse of it in the teaser, but the idea is that through lighting and a more dynamic effects system, there’s a lot more personality in every space.”
And it’s not as if Lara’s world is neatly split into tombs and survivalfocused wilderness. Threats from one can bleed into the other. “There are animal guardians that are just guarding their territory but are ultimately barriers to discovering these ancient spaces,” explains hughes. Factor in that aforementioned desire to see Lara die as much from challenging traversal as lead-absorption and you get an exciting sense that tombs are back with a vengeance. Careful as he is not to spill any exact details, hughes is willing to be drawn on his more general tomb-building philosophy.
The first key ingredient? “I think it starts with the awe-inspiring ancient spaces and that sense of discovery when you walk into them. For me, coming into them – we talk about the giant door or something that basically presents you with a problem to solve – needs a balance between enough grounding and believability that it feels real, but a degree of grandeur and almost improbable scale and ambition that for a moment you really are in awe of what people built once upon a time.” So: enter and drool. What next?
“Going to the next level, it really is about solving puzzles and getting a degree of scale. We use the term ‘nested puzzles’, and part of that means having more than a single thing in a room, so as we make these rooms bigger you create this situation of, ‘Oh, I need to get up there to do that thing and then I need to get over here’.” That it’s tricky to pick exact details from the showreel is due to many points of interest battling for attention amid the renewed scale and verticality. The final step is taking such a promising space and lacing it with your deadliest ideas.
“The tomb weaves together all of the game’s pillars. As much as they’re an almost set-piece moment for our puzzle designers, you’re also having to do some of your craziest traversal to navigate these tombs. And you’re avoiding traps and, in some cases, fighting animals,” says hughes.
It makes perfect sense that a game called Rise of the Tomb Raider would see its ideas converge and amplify in those titular constructs. It’s a pretty ambitious promise, sure, but as Amelia earhart said, “never do things others can or will do if there are things that others cannot do or will not do”. Words for adventurers, and studios, to live by.