14 DAY TRIAL // Tomb Raider: Underworld will most likely manage to create another Lara Croft starring game that captures the player’s mind just as the original release.
One of the most interesting features of the game will be the fact that it will have “Player Tailoring”, which basically means that the gamer will have the ability to choose which features of the game he wants to emphasize.
Eric Lindstrom, who is a creative director at Crystal Dynamics, the developer of the game, says that the new feature is “not about difficulty. It's about people having different ideas about what they want exploration and discovery to be”. In an interview with Gamasutra, he also points out how the new system will work in the game.
If you like the action and platforming part of Tomb Raider, then you can tell the game to make Lara auto solve some of the in-game puzzles, those that seem to be too hard. If you love the puzzles, you can instruct the game to offer less powerful enemies so that you can focus on the part of the game that you enjoy most.
You can't turn off combat completely because, as Lindstrom says, “those punctuation points are important for the overall pacing”. The ability to customize your playing experience is pretty much a logical extension of the customization options that games have been offering for a long time now. After all, a game like Tomb Raider: Underworld, that is part platformer, part shooter and part puzzler, cannot completely satisfy all the fans out there; thus, the developers decided to make it so that the player can create the experience he wants. It could prove a huge selling point for the game if the system really works.
Underworld is currently in development and no clear release date is available. As more details surface, we'll bring them to you.