The original Tomb Raider is often obtuse and obscure, challenging you to climb your way through intricate levels inch by inch. Later games in the series would gradually become more friendly, offering clearly marked pathways and handholds to prevent players from ever getting lost. For Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, the developers want to make sure those stretches of isolation and exploration are front and center once again.
"We celebrate those moments to say, 'Hey, let's not hold your hand. Let's let you go out there and hunt around, maybe find some stuff that you weren't expecting to find,'" Jeff Adams, experience director at Crystal Dynamics, says in Edge Magazine issue #429. "That's the idea, to have that sense of 'be adventurous, go out, explore, get on your own, get lost, then find your way back.' And that gives a lot of reward just by traversing the world."
The puzzle-driven spirit of the original game was certainly there in my Summer Game Fest demo of Legacy of Atlantis, and subsequent showings have demonstrated how the devs are walking a tightrope by modernizing the original spirit without getting trapped in the hand holding that dominates so many modern games.
But how do you decide what parts of the original game to keep for a new remake? "Imagine you just finished the first Tomb Raider, then you close your eyes and you imagine a playthrough in your head, and your brain remembers the things that generated the most emotions for you," Michael Kuk, creative director at Flying Wild Hog, explains. "These moments, locations, vistas, objects that stick in your memory, these are the things that have to be in the game almost untouched."
That idea of keeping the spirit of the original game without necessarily being beholden to it is part of why the devs decided to implement a crafting system – something that's already proven controversial to fans.
"As we bring the level of realism up, there are some things from the original we struggle to justify," Adams explains. "One of those things is finding a med pack in a tomb that's been concealed for 10,000 years." Thus we get a system to craft healing items and other boosts mostly from materials you might actually find in or around these tombs.
Exploration and the ability to get lost were defining elements of OG Tomb Raider, so I'm happy the devs are putting so much emphasis on bringing that element of the game back. I love an Uncharted-style romp across exploding mountainsides with clearly marked handholds as much as the next gamer, but sometimes I need my action-adventure games to be just a little bit meaner to me.
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