Lara arrived on the games scene in 1996, and lived a productive life as the cartoon action hero she was made to be. But she was reborn in 2013 as a much more serious person: an explorer, a survivor. Rise Of The Tomb Raider takes her back to those core ideals, but this time she’s chosen where to be. This time, the control is in her hands…
“We always begin with Lara and her journey,” says Rich Briggs, brand director at Crystal Dynamics. “It’s the central part of the experience and informs virtually every choice we make.” The same was true of the 2013 reboot: young Lara’s accidental descent into the Yamatai darkness penned a new chapter for the gutsy spelunker, and one that examined the human behind the idol, the woman behind those iconic guns and swinging ponytail.
“We outlined the adventure and the locations that would support [the experience],” continues Briggs, explaining how the studio wanted to evolve Lara and keep this fledgling trajectory of her character’s origin alive and moving. “We looked at the harshest environments on Earth, with the premise that history’s secrets are hidden in these remote and dangerous locations. That’s why they remain hidden, and that’s why it takes someone like Lara to find them.”
This isn’t the vague Lara of generations gone by, though; she isn’t just a face for the player to relate to on-screen. No, Square Enix has been taking cues from genre rivals when it comes to making the central character more relatable, more empathic (think Uncharted, The Last Of Us, think – even – Assassin’s Creed). Further than that, the studio has been looking to Hollywood survival films (The Grey, The Descent, Hanna, The Edge) and deconstructing their characters, assembling Lara’s growing confidence with all the most admirable traits of her peers. Writer Rhianna Pratchett has expressed that she doesn’t want Lara to just be a vessel for gameplay mechanics to live in – she wants Lara to be a human, a hero you care about.
“With Tomb Raider in 2013, we rebooted the franchise and took it in a new direction which was intentionally darker and grittier than before,” Briggs continues, when we ask him why the decision to take Lara in a more brutal – albeit realistic – direction was made. “The death scenes are not about gratuitous violence. We’ve created a world that is equally beautiful and hostile, one in which failure has real consequences. We want players to feel a degree of tension as they struggle to survive in these dangerous locations.”
We can’t help but disagree there – the violence and the deaths were gratuitous, but therein lay their individuality: the Uncharted games punished failure with making you retry an area, that didn’t exactly push into new grounds. The Assassin’s games were forgivingly easy – death would only rear its inconsequential head if you missed a bale of hay or seriously misjudged your combat prowess. Tomb Raider had a weight to it – a crunchy finality to failure that made you actively avoid dying. There was more than one occasion where we frantically pawed at our pads trying to prevent prowling wolves from tearing our face off.
That violence – gratuitous or not – returns in Rise Of The Tomb Raider, reinforcing that beautiful/hostile relationship, as Briggs points out. Thing is, rather than just a savage collection of fauna to fight off, Lara is now tested by something else: the very world she’s set out to explore. One of Rise Of The Tomb Raider’s biggest upgrades since the prequel is a dynamic weather system that ties in with an in-game day/night cycle: you thought seeking out camp fires when you had the threat of an enemy on your tail was bad enough? Well, now try doing the same thing as a blizzard closes in and night draws nearer. It doubles down on that promise of survival action that was only ever touched upon in the 2013 game, and owes more to the likes of The Long Dark or even DayZ than it does to any previous Tomb Raider.
We certainly consider Rise of the Tomb Raider to be the evolution of survival action,” explains Briggs. “‘Woman versus wild’ is our vision for delivering this. It speaks to the fact that Lara must survive in some of the harshest places on Earth in order to unlock the secrets hidden within. We also looked to some of history’s greatest explorers for inspiration to help capture the spirit of pushing the boundaries of human achievement.”
Lara is adaptive, resilient, intelligent (she’s an Oxford grad, remember? That doesn’t count for nothing). She can use the shifting terrain to her advantage; a blizzard might slow you down on your way to that next promise of shelter, but it can also cover your footsteps and throw any pursuers off your back. There’s a whole heap of processing power devoted to snow deformation; when applied to the action it’s a game-changer. All enemies and animals leave tracks as well as Lara, so hunting and tracking can be made far easier or much harder, depending on what the weather’s deciding to do. It stands to reason that you could lead enemies down a path, hop into a tree and lead them into an ambush, too, if you were canny enough. Lara’s most offensive tool here is brains, rather than brawn.
You can use tactics like these to confound your pursuers – particularly, the Trinity organization from the first game, who are back, and desperately trying to stop you raiding tombs. They want whatever Kitezh is hiding for themselves, and they’re pushing Lara deeper and deeper into the wilderness to find it – hence this renewed survival focus. Any feral animals you find can not only be cooked for meat, but also harvested for their fur – Lara’s expensive red parka will only get her so far; the skins of a pack of Siberian Wolves will go even further.
“The crafting system is a great way to offer players more choice, and it also adds more weight to hunting and gathering resources in the environment,” Briggs expounds. “Each element that you can collect in the world can be used in the crafting system, and there are 16 in all, including rare resources. You can craft upgrades for your weapons and equipment and even choose which bow to upgrade and use to best suit your play style. There are also custom ammo types such as poison arrows and explosive arrows, both of which require certain resources and can be crafted during combat or while on the move.” Considering we mostly played Far Cry 4 decked out with a bow and a crossbow at our sides, this not only excites us greatly, but it reveals Crystal Dynamics’ intent for the world.
If you come across a lot of enemies armed exclusively with guns, with only a bow and some melee weapons at your side, the uber-traditional videogame power fantasy is replaced with something much more intimate and humbling… something much more about survival. With Lara’s new-found adaptability comes a whole new moveset – her experience deep in the wilds of the Pacific islands trained her for bigger, better things and now she’s more predator than prey. As a player, this gives us more mobility – we can nimbly climb trees, hop from branch to branch under cover of darkness, use the towering mountain pines as another route through (and above) enemy installations.
Lara’s upgraded her ice pick(s), too – she wields two of them now, allowing for more verticality when it comes to sheer cliff-faces and previously unscalable impasses. Her time back in England has been productive, it seems: Lara can now swim, so expect some of everybody’s favourite gaming sections to make a return: the underwater levels (you may scoff at that, but you can’t deny water levels are and always have been a core part of Tomb Raider’s DNA).
Lara’s refreshed moveset is mimicked in the way she actually moves, too – Crystal Dynamics’ own ‘Foundation’ engine is being put through its paces in Rise Of The Tomb Raider: it’s seen some new improvements, like the TressFX hair system that’s not only being used on Lara’s hair (a highlight of the 2013 game), but also on animal furs and Jonah’s luxuriant beard.
“We’ve spent a great deal of time and effort on Lara’s performance,” explains Briggs. “We always strive to make her feel as human and relatable as possible, and part of this is her animations and how she behaves in the world. Subtle actions like warming her hands by a fire or wringing out her hair when it’s wet lend an extra level of authenticity. The other component is in our tech, which delivers extremely high fidelity in her skin, muscles, clothing, hair and eyes.”
Mo-cap techniques have been refined, too, making Lara’s movements far more realistic and interactive, responsive to her environment. It’s all very Uncharted, but that’s certainly not a bad thing. In fact, Tomb Raider looks like it’ll supersede Uncharted’s tight animations thanks to new motion-capture tech in use over at Crystal Dynamics. MOVA – a fluorescent paint that’s applied to the actor’s skin – replaces the old white-ball system, and can give animators over 7000 different points to work from, versus the traditional tech that lets you key in roughly a couple of hundred.
This improved facial animation tech has previously been used in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and the final pair of Harry Potter films… simply put, Rise Of The Tomb Raider is sharing graphical tech with blockbuster Hollywood movies. In terms of the final product, it means the animation team at Crystal Dynamics can capture even more of the intricacies and nuances of the human face, making Lara more emphatic to us as players, making her more realistically emotional… we just hope the script lives up to the tech.
To that end, we’ve got the same voice actress from the 2013 game reprising her role – bringing back the defiant English woman that found her voice in the latter half of the first game. “It’s been great working with Camilla Luddington on the performances; she brings such emotion and depth,” explains Briggs. “Our team is very experienced now, so we’ve been able to leverage our learnings from Tomb Raider, along with the advancements in our tech that I mentioned earlier to deliver these sequences.” From the gameplay we’ve seen so far, it’s clear that Luddington herself is a young actress that’s developing and growing alongside Lara – there’s a parity between actor and character that’s only ever going to lace the game with more legitimacy and authenticity.
A strong character like this needs a strong world to bounce off: each locale in-game has its mandatory band of armoured thugs who want to take whatever treasures litter the area to themselves, and to that end, Lara is going to have to go back to her trusty guns. And bows. And icepicks. And daggers. And so on. Quite an arsenal in other words.
There was a kind of mechanical/narrative breaker in the first game, a margin in which we could quite suspend our disbelief: Lara had never killed before, and yet, despite her horror and self-loathing upon first spilling blood, she’d then go on to do it (under your control, you monster) hundreds more times, in the name of survival. It’s different now, though: Lara isn’t trapped in the Siberian mountains against her will, oh no – she’s here on purpose, and she’s come prepared.
“We don’t consider Lara a victim,” says Briggs, bluntly. “She was trapped in a desperate situation on the [Yamatai] island against her will. She did what she needed to do in order to survive and to try to save her friends. The key difference in Rise Of The Tomb Raider is that Lara is now making a choice to place herself in danger for what she believes is right. […] This chapter is about Lara’s journey to accept her destiny as the Tomb Raider.”
What Briggs wants to make abundantly clear though is that this isn’t some long road to the Lara Croft of old – in other words, we definitely won’t eventually see her back in the mansion, locking butlers in the freezer. Crystal Dynamics views new and old Lara as distinct entities, existing in their own series.
“Rise Of The Tomb Raider tells the next chapter in Lara’s journey, and it continues with the mature and grounded tone that we established with the reboot. The Lara Croft brand is closer to the character from the classic games, and offers high-spirited nostalgic adventures.” So Lara Croft GO! and Temple Of Osiris is where you’ll find the popcorn-movie Lara of old; these new main games are much more concerned with the human behind the name.
So what she needs is a mission. A sense of purpose and perhaps a macguffin or two to chase after – something to compound who she is, something to test her. The Lost City of Kitezh – a rumour of a place nestled in the depths of the Siberian mountains – could be just that.
“We need to make sure the story works within our gameplay and narrative, but we always prefer to have our myths grounded in reality,” reveals Briggs. “The Lost City of Kitezh was an excellent foundation for the story because it is a real myth, but it’s not as well-known as some. We love to celebrate the fact that Lara is a brilliant archaeologist, she’s the one who links the myth of Kitezh to the Deathless Prophet and uses that as the basis for her expedition.”
That’s the key here, the reason Lara’s flung herself so wildly out of her comfort zone. But she isn’t going to find this Prophet (and his rumoured access to immortality) propped up on the top of a mountain. No; she’s going have to go and actually raid some tombs. This is something Crystal Dynamics has been explicitly working on since the 2013 reboot – a game deceptively scarce of them. The Siberian mountains are rich with legendary tombs and caverns, catacombs and cave networks – Rise Of The Tomb Raider is full of the eponymous sites.
“This chapter is about Lara’s journey to accept her destiny as the Tomb Raider,” Briggs explains when we ask about the decision to include more places for Lara to raid. “Lara embodies that sense of discovery and of driving beyond your physical and mental limits.” He’s right, she does. In a roster of upcoming games that are rather short on female protagonists, Lara stands head and shoulders above her fellow characters, men and women alike. She embodies what it is to struggle, to persevere, to fall, to rise. She embodies survival, not just on remote islands or the sides of mountains, but through a 19-year series of games. It’s a lifetime in this business and she’s stronger than ever.
How did Lara change the world? Find out in our digital special. Download it now!
