14 DAY TRIAL // The new Tomb Raider game is scheduled to arrive in 2012, but its developer, Crystal Dynamics, has shed some more light on why the old Lara Croft was replaced with a younger one, and how quicktime events are going to help the overall gameplay experience.
The long-running Tomb Raider series has delighted gamers for tens of years, but, with recent iterations, hasn't really managed to capture the same cult following like it did in the early years, which made the protagonist, Lara Croft, so popular all around the world.
The developer of the series, Crystal Dynamics, realized this and decided that a full pledged reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise was needed, in order to get players, both old and new, reacquainted with Lara Croft.
Talking about the change from the heroine we all knew to a younger, more inexperienced one, the studio's global brand manager, Karl Stewart, explained the situation in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
"I think Lara had done all the growing she could. We’d taken her to a great place, to somewhere she had some closure. There weren’t really many more stories we could have told. So we feel like with this new place we have fertile ground and there’s a lot of places we can go."
Stewart continued, saying that the setting of the new game, on a deserted island filled with dangers, is going to help people relate to Lara almost immediately.
"I think people when they see her in these situations they are immediately emotionally attached. They feel connected and want to help her survive. The survival theme we’ve been pushing really resonates with people."
Last but not least, as we've seen in the gameplay video from last month's E3 2011 conference, QuickTime events are going to be present in the game, so Stewart explained just why Crystal Dynamics has taken this decision.
"It’s all about pacing, right? A systemic mechanic takes a lot of time to craft. It’s also limited in some fashion. If we want to come up with a very customized experience, sometimes a quicktime event is a great way to do that.
"What we’re trying to do with quicktime events is make some parity between what you see, so we’re trying to use the analogue stick as much as possible. We try to keep it as analogue as possible. We’re in tutorial-heavy areas, so across the whole game it’ll feel a lot less."
The Tomb Raider reboot is currently scheduled to appear in 2012, from Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix.