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We noticed a lot of places with rewards for people who explore. Is there greater emphasis on exploration now?
We definitely wanted to make exploration of the environments a main theme as part of getting out that winning or passing through environments, really rewarding the player for what the essence of Tomb Raider game we feel we should be, which is about exploration, about discovery and about finding new areas and new things that you may not have seen the first time you ran through it, so we really spent a good deal of time trying to make secret areas, different way to get through rooms, to find little secret notes, so there was definitely a lot of effort put into that. I think it really does make for a more rich and rewarding experience when you play - it really makes the areas feel more interesting when you're in them.
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Are there any puzzles that you could only do with PS2's hardware?
Absolutely - most of the puzzle interaction in TR1 was relegated to pulling switches and putting keys in locks ands that was just due to the technical limitations of what the engine was at the time. So most of it was room traversal to find keys and then bring them back - you know, an area to put them in and then open a door. We still have lots of exploration to collect items and bring them back and open doors because that was a key theme of the original and we wanted to keep that. But we obviously still had to add a lot more to that otherwise it would be really, really uninteresting by modern gameplay standards.
So we had the physics engine that we used in TR Legend, obviously, so a lot more of the puzzles involve manipulating physical environment pieces as well as doing some of the other, more traditional collection and what-not. I think there's a lot more thinking involved in a lot of the puzzles now. Using the environment and then also... everything's not so straightforward as collecting a key and putting it in a lock.
