After lifting our jaws from the floor, we quizzed Eidos on what is destined to be one of this-gen’s most impressive looking games.
Straight off the bat, the next Tomb Raider is comfortably one of the top five most impressive games coming soon we’ve seen to date. Lara’s animation easily rivals that of Niko’s in Grand Theft Auto IV, the atmospheric visuals are up there with the stunning Killzone 2, and the richness and scale of the game world looks like it might nestle closely with the beautiful Fallout 3. No messing about: Tomb Raider Underworld is going to impress in a big way.
We were recently shown “very early” pre-alpha code of Tomb Raider Underworld, showing a level about half way into the game set in Mexico – a stormy region home to many dangerous black panthers. The awesome-sounding thunder underlines a superb atmosphere (remember that storm in Jurassic Park?), and Lara reacts with the world in a far more realistic way with contextual animation and an intuitive addition that Eidos is calling ‘free climbing’. She can dual target, melee, dive and shoot, and pick up objects in the world and then use them in combat.
Crystal Dynamics has come up with a realistic graphics engine, vastly impressive right down to the way Lara subtly takes on the colours of the environments’ surfaces around her. A wonderfully refined Lara is presented; her skin texture is much more realistic and she has convincing facial expressions that see her eyes, eyebrows and lips move independently. An evolution of the wet and muddy Lara seen in Tomb Raider Legend, she gets muddy on different parts of her body and to different degrees, depending on what she’s doing, and as she stands in the rain, it gradually washes off.
After showing us the stunning demonstration, full of enemies to gun down, precise manoeuvring around slippery ledges, dynamic character movement around the environment and some nicely thought out puzzle sections, Eidos took time out for a chat with us about the game. We spoke with Publishing Designer Bill Beacham, Senior Producer Sarah Van Rompaey, and Brand Manager Kathryn Clements. This trio know everything that’s coming in the first truly next-gen Lara Croft game, and while they’re keeping a few cards close to the chest, they still have some very interesting stuff to discuss about Underworld. Let’s hear it…
Kikizo: This game looks stunning. The frame rate looks suspiciously high for something so early in development on Xbox 360. Is this really the 360 version?
SVR: Yes, it’s the 360 version. But it’s very representative of all next-gen versions of the game.
Kikizo: That’s impressive. I just had to make sure!
[Editor's note: Seriously - this looked startlingly good. The graphics are proper, and it all runs at frame rates of up to nearly 60fps, never dropping much below around 30. This is technically a visually striking production, no doubt about it].
TRU Publishing Designer Bill Beacham, Senior Producer Sarah Van Rompaey, and Brand Manager Kathryn ClementsKikizo: From the top, what is the brief for this sequel?
KC: It’s building on what makes Tomb Raider good, and special and unique. The way we’ve approached it is by thinking: how can we build on this for the new consoles – how can we take the gameplay to a new level in terms exploration and the environments we’re creating? We can do it on a scale now that was never possible before. Even with the character movement, Lara can just do so much more now that we can push so many more of those movements into the game. And that allows for a lot more gameplay opportunities.
SVR: Crystal has definitely taken a new direction, whilst trying to retain some of the things that were good about Legend.
Kikizo: Since it’s called Underworld, are we going to venture away from the type of setting we’ve seen so far and see all kinds of crazy fiery underground caves?
KC: We’re not giving too much away about the story just yet, but it’s safe to say that Lara will be going to multiple underworlds throughout the game.
Kikizo: So it’s not just real-world settings?
KC: No. On that side of things, the guys at Crystal have let their imagination go; they’ve thought in terms of locations and where they can take Lara, they’re taking her to different places she’s never been before, places that people will find surprising.
SVR: They’ve been very inspired by mythology from ancient civilisations, and they’ve done a lot of research into it.
Kikizo: So you could say it’s more mythology than archaeology based, perhaps?
BB: Yes and no. I mean that main environment you saw in the demo – the court, the pyramids, they are all based on real world environments, I think it’s important to have that grounded in reality; that’s one of the things that makes Tomb Raider what it is. But, as with previous episodes, you have to go beyond that. There are other elements that make up a successful Tomb Raider game. And in this one, it’s very heavily on the underworlds, and obviously tying that into real-world mythology about what that actually means. It’s taking it further as you would expect, but hopefully with things you haven’t seen before.
Kikizo: What about the balance between action and puzzle solving?
BB: I think the way that we see Tomb Raider is about meeting the challenge, and in this case the challenges are the size of a level – they really are on a scale that we haven’t seen before. And that challenge can be made up of a number of elements – the environment, the enemies that you meet, what Lara can do. So it’s a question of overcoming those challenges. So we don’t see it as “here’s a bit of puzzle solving, and here’s some combat”; that’s not how Tomb Raider works. It’s very much “here is a challenge, and it’s up to you how you want to approach it”; in other places the emphasis will shift, but we view both as integral parts of Tomb Raider, and we wouldn’t want to put an over-emphasis on either one of those.
KC: Crystal has innovated with their approach towards the puzzles now; they’re not in these isolated areas now…
BB: Yeah, it’s not like, here’s a room with a locked door; another room with a locked door, a corridor and another locked door. As you’ve seen, it’s like, here is a landscape – and the puzzles now really are on an unprecedented scale.
Kikizo: You mentioned that the weather effects are only fifty per cent done. Do you think that you maybe will be overdoing it if you add even more?
SCR: It doesn’t really mean that there are going to be different and more weather effects added in a scene, but there’s going to be more nuances in them, for instance the raindrops bouncing off Lara, trees blowing – small details like that that really add to the atmosphere – the things that come later in production.
Kikizo: Got it. How close were you before this recent announcement to a June launch? Was it already fairly far along in production?
SVR: Tomb Raider is really important to us, and we wanted to give Crystal the space and the correct development timeline in order for them to make the Tomb Raider that is going to be the best Tomb Raider so far.
Kikizo: But did it come as a surprise to Crystal when they realised they essentially had an extra half a year to finish it?
SVR: Well, I think we have very good communication with Crystal, so we’d like to say that there’s not really any surprises between us and Crystal…
KC: I mean they have been working on the game for a long time; they started working on the game while Tomb Raider Legend was still in production, but again it just needs to have that polish for it to be AAA. And that’s what we’re giving the guys time to do.
Kikizo: With these big locations and puzzles that scale environments does this mean the player may end up doing a fair bit of backtracking?
BB: It depends. I mean as with previous Tomb Raider games, and this type of game, you a make a progression through the level and unlock a shortcut back. Lara’s also got a much faster sprint move, and the bike is very much more integral to the levels, rather than having the standard “OK, here’s a bike level”, it’s one of the tools that Lara’s got in her ‘arsenal’ of gear. So if you want to get from A to B quickly, that’s what the bike’s for – it has other functionality, but we’ll be revealing that later.
KC: And sections of the puzzles can be solved in different orders as well, so I think that will help with the backtracking as well, because you’ll complete that part that’s closest to you, first.
Kikizo: In the demo, we saw a block fall down, and you said that it lands in a different place on each play through – does that lend itself to designing the game? If you can’t guarantee the position of an object like that, how does that affect the way the puzzle unfolds?
BB: The right answer is that you don’t design based on objects that you can’t rely on, in the same way that you wouldn’t want to accidentally block the players progress, you don’t want to rely on it to be in a specific place to be able to facilitate the player’s progress. So given that it’s a real physics system, we’ve got a lot of flexibility there, so the player can move objects as necessary. But yes it’s something that the level designers are aware of, and it is something that a lot of next-gen games which have that functionality… some of them are less successful at dealing with it. But we’re confident that it’s not going to be a problem.
Kikizo: Are there going to be any Quick Time Events this time?
BB: Not as we knew them. There’s going to be a new system that’s more flexible and with a bit more freedom. It’s going to be more natural and more rewarding to the player.
Kikizo: Is Underworld going to cover more of Lara’s back story?
KC: We can’t discuss the story at this stage – our lips are sealed at this point in time! It’s safe to say though that the guys have written a story that is a new adventure, and the way that they have designed it is so that fans will be very happy, but likewise people who have never played it will also love it.
PLUNDERING the rich world of Greek mythology should be a gift for games developers – an epic story, heroes doing great deeds, mighty gods and mythical beasts are, after all, perfect material for a videogame.
Being a games reviewer, you occasionally have to take a look at games you would never normally pick up. This is the case with WWE SmackDown vs Raw 2009, the latest wrestling game from THQ. My wrestling knowledge is limited to say the least, and the last game I remember playing was WCW vs NWO World Tour on the Nintendo 64 roughly 11 years ago with a bunch of friends.
