Eurogamer Expo – Tomb Raider

As a large portion of the gaming world know the 2012 Eurogamer Expo has been and gone, leaving us with only awesome cosplay photos and graspable swag to remember it by. Luckily for me I was allowed the privilege of sitting down with Meagan Marie, Community Manager for Crystal Dynamics, for a quick exchange of words after having played an extended Eurogamer demo of the game.

To quickly summarise my experience with the demo I will say this: Awesome. Press got to play around 15 minutes more gameplay than the rest of the Eurogamer attendees but I have to say that it was one hell of a 15 minute extra. Without wanting to spoil anything, as it impacted me quite heavily and I don’t wish to take that away from anybody, this was without a doubt the grittiest Lara Croft experience I’ve ever had. She is attacked up, captured, and you are forced to make your escape with both hands tied behind your back and no room for error as you attempt to stealth your way out of a very tricky situation. It was brutal, it was real, and it was probably the most engaging moment I’ve ever had with Lara as a character. Utterly superb, but let’s see what Meagan Marie had to say about the game.

She has a bow. Bows are cool.

Duncan: To start off, could you give us a little back story on the game and its plot? As in the gameplay on show we were somewhat dropped right into the fray without a lot of context.

Meagan: Absolutely, so you know this game is a full reboot? [I nodded] So Lara is not going to go on to have the same mentors or know the same people; we are definitively starting over fresh. She’s 21 years old, she’s fresh out of university, and she’s hoping to go on the expedition off the coast of Japan in an area called “Dragon’s Triangle.” Instead her expedition ship called “The Endurance” is capsized and shipwrecks on the island following a storm off the coast.

She wakes up suspended upside-down by hostile natives. It’s a very horrific and disorienting situation, and essentially her motivation right off the bat is survival and to keep breathing. That’s the right motivation! [Laughs] From there she begins to learn more about the island and how it can help her to survive and get off the island.

Duncan: What was the inspiration behind going for the reboot, rather than just making a new Tomb Raider game to the existing series?

Meagan: It was time to re-evaluate the franchise. Crystal had just finished work on the ‘Tomb Raider Trilogy’ release, so after a trilogy it’s time to stop and take a look at the franchise. The team back then did tons of research; sentiment tracking, affinity and awareness tracking, all worldwide. Finding out what do people know about the game, how do they feel about the game, what do they know about the character, and what they felt about Lara. The general consensus was that it was time to make Lara more relatable as a character. She can still be an exceptional person but on a human level we want people to identify with her – male or female. Being the underdog in those types of circumstances, and the easiest way to tell that story was through an origin story. A re-imagining so you can be there for the moments that redefine Lara later on.

All my deer hunting prepared me for this moment.

Duncan: Sounds terrific. I’ve got one more question, right? [Event organiser nods in my direction] In which I want to say that I loved the new Survival Skills. What can you tell me about them and how they’re implemented into the game?

Meagan: We’re not going too deep into it just yet, but what I can tell you is that we didn’t want Lara’s story and her growth to be purely narrative driven. We want her skill sets to actually evolve as she does. We do that through the Survival and Salvage Skills, one which is focused more around survival such as hunting, combat, and sneaking whereas the other is based on upgrading your current weapons and equipment. So, when you explore new areas where you hunt, you do different activities you gain XP. Then at base camps, which are essentially fires she can go to upgrade and to rest, there you can access the Skill sets and allocate points towards certain skills that make the most sense to you.

They really allow you to prioritise what you think is important. I’ve seen this at community events where classic Tomb Raider fans are not always necessarily into games that use the ‘free aim’, because the classic Tomb Raider games have a ‘lock-on aim’, so putting your Survival Points towards Arrow Retrieval is likely to be more important to those players who aren’t used to the shooting elements in games. Others prefer to be able to scavenge items off dead corpses because that happens to fit their play style better. It’s all based around helping each player get what they want out of the game.

Fire good. Bow better.

Duncan: There is still a third Skill Set that hasn’t been revealed yet, isn’t there? [I got that question in super quickly!]

Meagan: Yeah, we haven’t revealed what the third one is yet, but there is a lot still to come across all three Skill Trees. Not so much that you will have to grind the whole way, but enough to really experience the game the way each player wants to.

At which point I was whisked away as Meagan got to have a well deserved break and, what I imagine, was her fifth cup of coffee of the day.

Thank you very much to both Crystal Dynamics and Meagan Marie for their time, and I highly recommend that everybody starts to get excited about the up-and-coming Tomb Raider game because it looks to be phenomenal. A real shame we must all bear the wait until March 5th, 2013 to get our hands on it.


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