Play Mag September Issue Tomb Raider Underworld Article
If Thailand is not one of the most beautiful places on earth, there is little arguing that it is the most exotic. And there is no arguing at all that it is the most exotic, most beautiful place you’ve been to in a Tomb Raider adventure.
This is the Thailand of Lara Croft’s eternal fantasies-undiscovered, deadly, ancient. The indomitable tomb raider will explore the unbounded waters of the Mediterranean, climb the Mayan ruins on Mexico, and on this particular stretch of her journey around the world, she is somewhere off the coast of Thailand, about to face off with Shiva, the god of destruction. Shiva’s consort, Kali, is here, too, guarding the entrance to something…big. These massive statues, carved with exquisite detail and looming elegance, are, of course, linked to a long series of mechanisms that must be manipulated from strategic spots throughout the richly organic maze of stone and water and growth. Who knows when the last human touched this area; it genuinely feels mysterious and unsettling, and the invitation to walk its path is genuinely stirring.
Tomb Raider: Underworld is not an overhaul of Lara’s mechanics as much as it is an extension of those mechanics into a higher level of world sophistication and authenticity. Crystal Dynamics introduced a new control scheme in Tomb Raider: Legend, refined it in Anniversary, and now are focusing on making Lara and her situations ring as true as possible, coining the philosophy, “What could Lara Do?” The idea is to frame Lara in a certain amount of believability, whether interacting with items, exploring the land, or dealing with the emotional weight of the narrative. This translates in more subtle ways than you might first think; for example, cast your grappling line and leave it attached as move around a corner, and the line will flex to follow your path; capable gymnast such as Lara should be able to fire off rounds if she’s secure on a rope or ledge, and so she can. Sounds simple, but these little details add up–little details that often break down and reveal the typically rigid nature of our game worlds.
This is the first from-the-ground-up, next-gen Tomb Raider, and while the bump up in level detail in dramatic, it’s the motion capture on Lara that is equally impactful on selling the fantasy of the character. Underworld is still being consistently tweaked, but even now my run through Thailand demonstrates a fuller connection to Lara than you’re used to in a series. Sure, she can shoot two targets at once now, and she has more flexibility of movement, but it’s the broader components in Tomb Raider: Underworld that seem to matter the most.
The overwhelming sense of wonder is immediate and that’s what Tomb Raider is ultimately about. As creative director Eric Lindstrom points out, it’s not their goal to reinvent the wheel, but more to make sure that wheel hums with a spirit and mystery that move the player. “We’re talking about making people believe that if you went deep enough into the Thailand coast where no one’s been before, you might find something extraordinary.”
Tomb Raider: Underworld
Toby Gard Cinematics Director
Eric Lindstrom Creative Director
Play: When it came time to officially go forward with making Tomb Raider: Underworld, what was the first thing that absolutely had to be addressed?
Eric Lindstrom: Well, there’s kind of two questions there, one of them has to do with what exactly we were going to do with the game. The other was what we were going to do with the adventure. We had a lot of thoughts in terms of enhancing the game play But Toby and I started a set of conversations in cafes in San Francisco and whatnot, talking about what her next adventure would be. The mythology was big to us.
Toby Gard: Yeah, just a lot of brain-storming sessions, trying to work out how to take things further and what we’re going to do…There really are two parts here: wherever the emotional journey is and then there’s what the artifacts, what the mythology was going to be, right? That had pretty much been decided by Eric, where around the world the game was going to go based on the mythology being created. Our job was to take what story was already there and make it as brief but interesting as possible. And that’s really hard because of so many restraints around trying to stay true to the mythology that already exists and the actual needs of the actual game adventure. That’s why it took us absolutely ages[laughs].
Play: Tomb Raider really does have quite the opportunity to take the idea of “world-based” gaming into compelling territory. Do you have some foundational component to ground the adventure?
EL: I don’t think we really had a single starting point, other than the philosophical goals.
Play: When you talk about the philosophical goals….
TG: We could make a Tomb Raider game where Lara doesn’t go to these seven different places around the world, maybe she really dives deep inside the ruins of Egypt and finds all kinds of interesting things down there. But for us, one of the stakes was that we wanted a world-spanning, mulit-ruin, multi-underworld adventure, and that informed all the other discussions after that.
Play: When you look at the first Tomb Raider you created at Crystal, Tomb Raider Legend, and then the follow-up with Anniversary, those games took a few fairly different approaches to the design. Anniversary was obviously a remake of the original, more exploration-heavy. Where does that leave Underworld in the balance of action and adventure?
EL: We’re really building on both. We didn’t need to compromise between the two, because we really felt there was no need to compromise. Legend was very much action-adventure forward, and the player-driven aspects of Tomb Raider 1 aren’t in conflict with that. If you accept that there are many things you can do to pace an adventure, there are combat moments, puzzle reveals, discoveries, Thor’s peril. All those can affect the pace, make it feel very dynamic and forward-moving, even while people are exploring those spaces on their own. We felt by having a strong narrative backbone that logically pulled the player and Lara from the beginning through the middle to the end, the player could have all of these exploration areas where they drove what the action was, according to what they wanted to explore first, what they were interested in.
Play: How much does the environment-Tomb Raider is much about environmental expression-how much does the space you’re in tell that story?
EL: Yeah, story can mean a lot of things. when you’re in Thailand, you’re experiencing the story of Thailand, even when you aren’t in a cut-scene. That was really important to us. The backbone is the logic. Your world isn’t fully open because you have a door that is locked and you need to figure out how to unlock it. As soon as you do, you go through it and now you are on the other side and hove more to explore. There is a chain of logic that isn’t restrictive to the player; it’s the way you would expect the world to work. And that’s really what we’re talking about when it comes to driving the player forward to the end of the experience.
Play: You guys have motion-captured Lara for the first time, dramatically overhauling her animation routines. Does this choice alter the control scheme or game play ideas in any way?
TG: The biggest win has been the motion capturing in the cut-scenes. We’ve been able to make Lara so much more real than she’s ever been before. That has definitely increased the impact of the story and the believability of the character.
Play: Yeah, I will say, seeing Lara moving like this does have a greater impact than I thought it would.
EL: There is a realism to it, but…This kind of detail, it’s an order of magnitude more than fidelity, whether it’s realistic or not. She does things that are more than realistic.
(about what part of Tomb Raider is invaluable to the experience. Did you guys remove anything from the formula you decided simply needed to be tossed?
[Long pause.]
Play: So there wasn’t anything? this is the perfect game?
EL: [Laughs] I’m sending out psychic waves of, “Toby, please answer this question…” since you are old-school Tomb Raider, brought forth into the future, what do you think is time to go?
TG: There wasn’t anything…Well, i suppose what I called out earlier as being something that got fixed, which is just how vulnerable to death she is. The amount of death in Tomb Raider 1 was obscene, to the point that we had to make it as funny as possible for people to at least somewhat enjoy the constant frustration. That frustration is a big one that pretty much had to be cut. [Laughs.]
EL: Yeah, the biggest thing we changed in Legend was that notion that…it was getting off the grid, but it was also making jumping and grabbing and pulling up on ledges a means to an end more, less of a test of your ability with the controller. Make it more about “How am I gonna go forward?” Not “Am I gonna execute each of these jumps perfectly?” I think that the fan community took that pretty well. There were some people who didn’t like how that represented a simplification of the game, it made it easier. But for the most part, people agreed it was time to go to the next step, which is: I can execute these things relatively easily, what do I do with it, where do I go with it now? We wanted to take that even further with Underworld.
Play: You’ve said you don’t want to get caught up in complex control schemes.
EL: The concept of what could Lara do, the concept of consistency throughout the entire game without special case exceptions. Those two things in themselves gave us the steering committee to be able to make a lot of decisions. We have a big team, a lot of ideas come up, when somebody would come up and say, “Hey, let’s have this wacky thing happen” or “Let’s have this combo set appear here.” Often it just wouldn’t get through the filter of “What could she do?” Is this consistent with what she should be able to do everywhere else? And by really sticking to those philosophies, that really kept us from getting a lot of crazy, special-case complexities in the control schemes. It really was just sticking to our guns about not being seduced by something that might feel locally cool but [would] really just add to the chaos of what players are trying to deal with.
Play: I wanted to talk a bit about what interactivity means in Tomb Raider. You’re climbing the environment, jumping over it, through it, around it. It’s architecture you’re playing on. How do you respond to the idea of connecting to the environment?
EL: I’d like to hear Toby’s answer after mine, because we’ve never really talked about this directly. I’ve said this before in conversations: Tomb Raider games are [some] of the hardest games to make. Because of the fidelity requirements, because she does so many different things, and needs to do them well, and she climbs on everything. And as soon as you climb, there are all sorts of rules communicating what you can and can’t climb on, how you can do it. It has to look really good because you get a lot closer to than when you’re in one of these corridor shooters; there’s all this stuff that looks really great because you never get close. There’s all kinds of challenges on how we spend our focus and our resources, and it’s really hard. One of the reasons I’m really so excited about Underworld is that I think we did a really good job of delivering all those things.
TG: I have an obsession of wanting to climb to the top of things, like a little monkey, I guess. And particularly I have fond memories of England, of the times when I was younger, before all the cultural heritage people essentially put ropes around all the ruins in England. Kids were freely climbing all over these castle ruins, you could get up the third floor, there were fragments of crazy stuff, everybody’s “weee,” having a good time and not caring about any of that. But that type of feeling, and the sense of place you get when you do go to ruins, the real impact of a sense of past that you feel when you’re in a ruin, an abandoned space. That really excites me a lot. That’s what Tomb Raider is trying to achieve. There’s a reason why things like climbing over the giant sphinx were meaningful to me…It’s really a fantasy fulfillment. And then the way the game was put together. As you say, it’s not so much playing in the space, it’s kind of finding a way to open up this complex box that takes you down to the core of the game world.
Play: And that’s what I love about the ideas behind Tomb Raider.
TG: Yeah, and it was such a big shift, the Castle Wolfensteins and the Dooms were, “Wow, there’s this BAD space,” but it was just a floor plan. And going into Tomb Raider, it was this order-of-magnitude leap of, “Wow, I really am in a space, I feel very immersed in exploration going through this space.” In Wolfenstein, it was all about managing your cover and your firing lines, that was it. when you walked Lost Valley in Tomb Raider 1, you really looked at it the way you did as a kid up on the hillside, always wondering how to get up on that ridge. What am I going to see when I get up there? That kind of thinking really hadn’t been tapped.
Play: And when it comes to making your way up through those spaces, one thing that really stands out is the way you guys sell Lara clasping a ledge and working her way up. the smack, the movement-is that minor detail I’m latching onto, or did you really sweat over this to get it the way it is?
EL: Toby, you were deep into that.
TG: Yeah, I was very deep into that, I was actually in that particular squad of people working on it. It was a very scary thing there, I was introduced to that later on in the production. There were concerns about how it was going, and I worked with the other guys to create the system that would deal with the jumps and the landings and the attachment. I was very eager to include the inertia that you talk about. It all came really late [laughs]. In Legend, there was a lot of fear, we were right at the last minute. It was just broken. She was attaching really poorly, so people could still test the levels, the game play was correct, but it looked terrible until our new system finally slotted in the last minute. I’m glad you thought it was successful[laughs].
EL: One of the things that makes Crystal such a strong studio, across the team, we all do believe the details really do matter. That’s one of my big points of how we push forward the whole game development-people notice stuff, and when they don’t, it matters anyway. If you take that away, they may not say anything about it, but they’ll like your game less. If you hold up tow games that are the same, except this game has the details taken care of, this one doesn’t, you know which one will be successful.
Play: The tone of the game, where does this Underworld allusion take us? and don’t just tell me you’re “going darker!”
TG: Yeah, there’s a reason it says “Underworld.” It is definitely darker though, that’s a necessary result of…I don’t really know how to describe it, really. It’s not because we sat down and decided it had to be darker, that there was this one path we were heading down. I feel like there are a lot of games that do it in a gimmicky way. “Oh look, we have Jack and Daxter, it’s really good, but what if he was [in ominous tone] darker?” Same thing with Prince of Persia, it’s a bit rubbishy because it clearly doesn’t to appeal to the teen ager, angst-ridden guy, that’s really not in any way the direction we came at. This tale just ended up being…I guess more believable and contextualized.
EL: Yeah, I’ve been struggling to find a word from the beginning instead of the word “dark”, because when people hear the world “dark” in marketing, they bring a lot of different associations and baggage. It feels more real, it feels weightier, higher stakes. And this word that I can’t find [laughs], it’s not “dark.”
Play: It would be satisfying to see you start exploring her human nature and bringing her out of the cartoon realm for that weight.
EL: Humanity in the sense of credibility, believability. The more that a character triumphs without effort, never sweats, never bleeds, never loses, you don’t sympathize with that character. You don’t get involved emotionally with that situation as something that engages you; you are afraid of what the outcome might be.
Play: You’ve talked about making the environments expand beyond what we’re used to in a game, too.
EL: Yeah, the idea of puzzle is becoming much broader. Half of Thailand, you’re in a puzzle, the whole thing is a puzzle. And there are enemies, there are objects to manipulate and understand in that puzzle.
Play: Tomb Raider as a concept could go on for a long time, when you think about the continual expansion of the world.
EL: Nobody talks about, “I loved that part in Tomb Raider 1 where I put the gears in the wall.” They talk about their impact on the space and what they discovered, what they did. It wasn’t about the specifics. It was about the experience, and that experience is as exciting as it ever was today.
Pat Sirk Environment Art Director
Play: What feeds your art in Underworld?
PS: Mystery, I guess. Tomb Raider has everything that I really like in environments: Ancient archeology, ancient ruins, exotic locations. Just visually it’s so strong, the Mayan architecture is so decorative. And with the backdrop of thick jungle, it just asks to be explored. It’s a perfect medium for a game.
Play: That sense of mystery comes up a lot in these conversations. What are you looking to instill in your art that creates that mood for Underworld?
PS: One of the biggest aspects is the sense of discovering a location. By traveling through an area heavily overgrown, where nothing is immediately visible to you, and then navigating through a maze and then suddenly coming upon a great ruin that looms up above the jungle, with shafts of light streaming through, and having that reveal. It’s a moment of discovery that I think will immediately beckon the exploration. To give the player chunks at a time and then pay off with a grand moment helps reinforce that sense of mystery. You know you are traveling through the jungle for a reason, and we want to give you a big moment of, “Wow, I’ve found this, now I want to explore it.”
Play: The game goes through Thailand, the Mediterranean, Mexico I believe is one location. Of all the areas in the game, is there one you are most satisfied with, something that you felt appeased your sensibilities most?
PS: It has to be the Mexico level, the Mayan stuff, because I’ve been interested in the Mayan culture since I’ve been about 15. And having gone down to the Yucatan: We shot 10,000 images there to be used as game assets. To see that realized on screen real-time, very satisfying. Because the architecture is accurate, I really wanted my artists to obey the Mayan architectural rules. Thailand was also very satisfying. We went Cambodia to shoot another 5,000 images in and around Angkor Wat, and again the artists really paid attention to the architectural style. Those areas where we could get really solid photographic reference; those really sing, in my opinion.
Play: Just why is that accuracy so important? I can imagine you could fool the player with plenty of cut corners.
PS: Well, my whole philosophy for the environment art in Tomb Raider was to make sure we had a foundation of believability in our architecture, in our lighting, in the plants we use. If the player can identify with the realistic things they see in our game, when we press them with the fantastic, it seems more believable. They can accept it, they’re more engaged. Steven Spielberg did this a lot, at least he did in the ’80s. E.T. is a good example. You have this fantastic story crazy, but it takes place in suburbia, with characters we can all identify with. It lets you buy into the fantasy of it, so that’s why the reality is very important to me. And I’m a realist, I enjoy trying to make things look real. Once we have the foundation in, then we can layer in some style on top of that. But if the foundation of realism is there, it gives you all the room to wiggle.
Play: You are in a interesting place, informing a game with artistic sensibilities that you seem to really believe in.
PS: I’ve been thinking about that a great deal, and i just feel like this is the project that I’ve always dreamed of doing. For some reason, all these things that I love-archeology, computer graphics, ancient history-it’s all come together for me on this particular project. might be once in a lifetime. I’m pushing as hard as I can to deliver this look.
Play: What is the essence of that look, beyond the mystery/believability thing?
PS: That’s a good question. We would like National Geographic-style moments of beauty, but as you descend into the more fantastic, then the stylization becomes stronger and stronger. The outer layer of the onion, so to speak, would be grounded in beautiful compositions, beautiful color arrangement, and as you proceed into the underworld, the are becomes more and more colorful, fanciful, vibrant, even more mysterious. It’s difficult to summarize the global look of the game because it does change so much. The Yucatan was definitely a prime area, because so many of the ruins there are in such excellent shape. Much of our photography done there was not just nicely composed photographs, we would shoot details of stone, entire facades of Mayan buildings, literally, to be used as assets to be put on geometry in the game.
Play: You traveled to Thailand, too, right?
PS: Frankly, it was brutal. After the flight, 12-hour flight, I think i had maybe four hours of sleep and hit the field immediately. I didn’t stop for six days. I was exhausted, the heat, I couldn’t drink enough water. It was grueling; just as i left the country about six days later did I adjust to the time, it was a nightmare. However, the beauty of the architecture was just extraordinary. The detail and carving they do is phenomenal, the precision of craftsmanship is mind-blowing, truly. And we’ve really incorporated much of that artistry into our game. Next-gen really lets us sell the intricacy.
Play: What marks the most beautiful game spaces to you?
PS: What strikes me are very beautiful photographs. Again I bring up National Geographic, so much of that richness and color I see in much of that imagery is what I try to bring to this game. Especially that organic nature of light, which we miss so often in games. The combination of light and color and photo-realism. If i can get all that to work in harmony, I really believe we’ve created something beautiful. In short, I’m a landscape photographer. If I can convey that to the imagery you see in Tomb Raider: Underworld, I feel like I’ve succeeded.
Thanks to (Gia) Assistant Editor for the article text