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Lara Croft Returns Without Tomb Raider Name
by Eric Caoili [PC, Console/PC]
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March 4, 2010
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Crystal Dynamics announced Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, a new downloadable game from the Tomb Raider series that cuts out the Tomb Raider name from its title for the first time in the franchise's 13-year history.
This is also the series' first digital-download release and the first Tomb Raider game from Crystal Dynamics since Square Enix acquired the developer's parent company Eidos Interactive last year and transformed the London-based publisher into Square Enix Europe.
Crystal Dynamics' last Tomb Raider game, Tomb Raider: Underworld, released in late 2008 for multiple platforms and received lower-than-expected sales, which Eidos blamed on the slumping economy and a Christmas schedule packed with high-profile releases. The publisher then laid off some 30 Crystal Dynamics workers and tasked the studio with concentrating its focus on the Lara Croft franchise.
Tomb Raider co-creator Toby Gard also left Crystal Dynamics in September 2009 for unspecified reasons to work as an independent consultant. He was already nine months into an unannounced project at the developer when he parted ways with the company.
Neither Crystal Dynamics or Square Enix Europe offered further details on Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light other than their announcement that it will release as a downloadable title in 2010. The companies plan to show off the game "behind closed doors" at next week's Game Developers Conference.
"This is a really exciting project for Crystal Dynamics, we have created something completely new and very different to what people might be expecting," says Crystal Dynamics's general manager Darrell Gallagher. "Lara Croft is such an iconic character in videogames, with Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light we have created what we believe is a truly original digital experience."
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and what is wrong with episodic?
A character and setting like Lara Croft and Tomb Raider sets itself up nicely for an episodic game series. As long as the pricing is right, I see nothing wrong.
It would be impossible to make something like Babylon5 as a movie or a movie series, it would be impossible to have the long character developement and the surprising twists of Six feet Under in 2 or 3 hours. TV series learned, what it means to tell a story in episodes and chapters over a long time.
Games on the other side only divide a whole game into smaller portions and sell these portions one after another. In the end, you play a game, from which you don't see, why it was necessary, that it is episodic.
I really would love to see a Lara Croft game, that is episodic and does it in a new way, but I think, if the game is indeed episodic, we will see something, that isn't much different from Tomb Raider - Chronicles.
I see what you are saying and agree with you to an extent.
The problem I see with your comparison to Babylon5 is that Babylon5 is a tv Drama. If you jump into the middle of the series you risk being lost in the plot as you had not seen any of the previous episodes. A game that functions in the same way to build character arcs would suffer the same problem. You would make people feel forced to buy all the episodes in order to get the full experience.
On the other hand you have tv shows that are built with the idea that the show will go into syndication later and the episodes will not be aired in order. Such a show is written so that the episodes are stand alone so that anyone can just watch an episode without being confused.
A game IP like Lara Croft and Tomb Raider can do that. People are familiar enough with Lara Croft that they don't have to worry about much of a character arc and focus on the plot of the episode with Lara as the protagonist. Which is what I guess you didn't like about Chronicles.
If you are going to do a plot arc over the whole of the series it must be done in a way that I can pick up episode 4 of 6 on its own and have a full game experience while still being able to see that there is more to the story.
Interesting thought, never thought about an episodic game, that offers just small episodic portions, that aren't meant to build a full game.
I see two obstacles, that you have to overcome with such a concept and I don't know, how to do that.
First, a game without a story arc has to concentrate on gameplay, which is ok, not every game needs a strong story (even if I tend to prefer games with a good story and bad gameplay about games with a bad story and good gameplay, but that's just my personal taste). But I don't know how to build a game with good gameplay without a proper learning curve. If every episode of the game could be played in any given order, there would be no progress in difficulty. It's quite difficult to design such a game. Every episode has to offer something completely new, and has to try to establish an entire new difficulty learning curve, otherwise the people who played to last episodes would say, that's just the same as last month or the people that start with episode four could find it ridiculous hard to complete the episode, cause it was designed for people who already played the last chapter.
The second problem I see with such a concept, is, that I don't see a real pricing model for such a game. In TV, I can watch an episode of a series, like the ones you describe, and skip the next, cause they are free (or they come as Flatrate content via the cable fees), but as a game, I have to pay for every single episode, if I don't even get something, that ends in a greater picture in the end, I think, I wouldn't buy such a game.
But the really cool thing is that the developer doesn't have to make a 2.0 of the grahpics engine, which I think cost a lot of time/money. They can focus on new gameplay elements, stories, characters, styles while already having the base fully done. Should also be cheaper for the paying customer.
By the way, does this mean that the mystery title of Chrystal Dynamics isn't a new Legacy Of Kain game?
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!