Lara Croft: Tomb Raider reboot

CREATIVE DIRECTOR REVEALS THE THINKING BEHIND TOMB RAIDER REBOOT – AND FRUSTRATIONS OVER CONTENT CONTROVERSY

Lara Croft became an instant icon when she ripped across our consoles and PCs nearly 20 years ago. With her pistols, skimpy shorts and shades, she leapt and bounded her way through puzzles, mazes, tombs and lost worlds onto the covers of gaming magazines, onto the silver screen and, most importantly, into the hearts and minds of gamers.

Since then, her star has faded. Developers Crystal Dynamics, who took over the

Tomb Raider franchise from Core Design, who created the original trilogy, have updated her appearance, but the games have remained essentially unchanged. Until now.

“You can have a continually reducing relevance, right?” Noah Hughes, the Crystal Dynamics creative director behind the new reboot told me in an interview in Dubai last week. “We were almost losing fans more than we were gaining fans. I don’t know if that’s true, that’s not a statistical thing, it’s just a sense that you didn’t have even mind- share, without unit sales, just this idea that you had a reduced mind- share of Lara being part of the collective consciousness.

“I want to see Lara being a top- tier creative brand, so I think we did need that, we needed a breath of life, so for me this game was about taking that opportunity with everything. It wasn’t a continuation of one or the other, we didn’t work back to 1, 2, 3 and try and carry on there, we didn’t carry on from the Crystal ones, we didn’t reference the movie most heavily. We took all of that, that creative soup that was the Tomb

Raider franchise and tried to re- envision it in a modern and more tight expression of everything it once was.”

The UAE’s gaming media had a chance to try out an extended preview of the game, and what we experienced is extremely impressive. Hughes and his team have walked a tightrope to freshen up not only Lara herself, but the whole

Tomb Raider experience — and they’ve done it without losing the little touches that make the franchise special.

Exposing humanity

But they have sacrificed the all- age appeal of the older games to do it. The new Tomb

Raider is gritty, stark and dark, a mature game with mature content. Lara is no longer the rich, jet- setting adventurer who somersaults her way through cartoon- like ruins, tackling tigers and T. Rexes with a barrage of bullets from her twin magnums. She’s a lost, lonely young woman shipwrecked on an island full of fearsome mystery.

“We didn’t say, ‘ Survival’s hot, so let’s make a Lara survival story,’ we said, ‘ If we want to expose the humanity of Lara, we need to take her away from everything that she can depend on,’” said Hughes.

“In the past she had all the money she needed, she could win any fight she started, pretty much, and we wanted to take her away from that comfort zone, isolate her, put her in a situation where if she didn’t grow as a character she was going to die, and that became the impetus for her to grow as a character.

“And then, you know, we looked more directly at realworld survival stories, like Aron Ralston’s story [ Ralston amputated his own arm to free himself from a dislodged boulder], this idea that a human capacity to overcome adversity is an uplifting tale, but it is also something that changes you.

“Our goal was to tell an original story and for me that is about an arc, and it’s a great opportunity in a game, because a lot of times you have a consistent portrayal of a character through the course of the game, and for me it was very exciting to say the character you end this game as will be absolutely different from the character you started as. That idea of tak- ing you on that journey was the most important thing for us.

“If Lara couldn’t be afraid before, never got hurt before, then to show that contrast, that’s an important part of being human, and an important part of a survival story is feeling mortal, feeling close to death, and clinging to life by your fingernails.

Of all the challenges and character growth Lara goes through in the new game, none has been more controversial that what has been widely reported — and misconstrued, Hughes said — variously as a sexual assault, attempted rape or a rape.

Hughes let his frustration show as I pressed him on it. “It’s important to me that people play it and experience it for what it is in context. I do believe that it is hard to take out of context and understand its role in the story, and my hope is that when people experience this story it doesn’t feel out of place, it doesn’t feel out of context.

“Lara’s dealing with a life or death situation there. It’s clear if you fail in that situation you’re killed, and Lara must kill or be killed, and that that’s the conflict that we present in that scene.

“We really tried to portray all of the scenes with some amount of sensitivity. Lara’s put in life and death situations which, I assume, other people have been in also and we do it anyways.

Adversity encountered

“This is a mature title, and our intent is to tell a story that’s true to itself and feels honest in its expression of an adversity that a human might encounter in these situations, and any number of these situations could be close to home for some people, but we try to deal with all of them with honesty and sensitivity.

“So for me, yes, I wish the debate… I think it’s a healthy debate. I’m not… for me, I don’t wish this didn’t happen, I wish it could happen with everyone being aware of the content and the context, and I think it is important to talk about things like triggers and responsible storytelling in games, but that wasn’t the conversation we had, we had a conversation about a scene that never took place in our game and having implications about it that really weren’t real, and that is frustrating.

“And that’s on us… because we controlled what we put out there, and I do regret that. I wish we could have had the conversation in a more informed context is all.”

Controversy aside – and as Hughes correctly points out, none of us have played that scene, so can make no informed judgement on its rights or wrongs — the game ( at least the scenes I’ve played) feels both entirely fresh and delightfully familiar.

Hughes said, “In the same way that Lara is both the same and different — at the core she’s still the same character, but she’s looked at through a different lens — gameplay went through a similar evolution, which is to say, at its core it still is about puzzle- solving, platforming and exploration, combat, these are all the pillars the franchise was built upon, but that we needed to deliver the most modern, relevant, competitive version of each of those.

“On the platforming side we went to a full air- steer – you have continuous character control. Previous Tomb Raid

ers, once you started the jump it knew if you were going to make it or not, and that lack of control throughout the process was detaching for the player. So in each of these cases, whether it’s puzzles or the combat or the traversal, we really tried to look at what’s the best version of these pillars that we could deliver.”

Tomb Raider will be released in the UAE on March 5. From my perspective, having played the limited demo at Games12 and an extended demo last week, I am looking forward to it with great excitement. Great games go beyond gameplay and story; they have a certain magic about them, a spark of genius. Everything I have seen so far indicates Creative Dynamics have caught that spark and bound it into this game.

Lara Croft is back.