Games seem to be thinking a bit more about killing lately, or at least they’re trying to make us think about it a bit more. Spec Ops: The Line earlier this year used the conventions of the first-person shooter to question how the genre encourages us to think. Far Cry 3’s traumatic first-kill moment kicks off a narrative that muses on what kind of person you become if you’re willing to murder for the sake of your friends. Tomb Raider, too, has shown us a character driven to kill by necessity, in self-defence, almost retching over the corpse of her assailant after she fights him off.
These moments puncture the feeling of power and cool that games usually associate with killing. But what happens after that pivotal moment? How can you possibly have a transition from that first kill to games’ usual shooting-gallery approach that feels at all believable?
The last time I saw Tomb Raider, the demo cut off as Lara, with a mixture of fear and steely survivalist resolve in her eyes, picked up the gun she’d just used to take her first human life from the jungle floor. The island is burning around her, and she’s still in extreme danger. Empowered by the weapon, the first thing she does is fight her way out.
The central answer is that we try to make all of Lara’s actions feel motivated. We don’t want every kill to be the first kill.
Many more island-dwelling militiamen fall in the next ten or fifteen minutes before she makes it to safety, sneaking through the ruins and old wooden shacks up the mountainside. As she’s climbing to safety, she gets ahold of her mentor Roth on her radio and tells him she had to kill some of them to get away. “That can’t have been easy,” he says. Her reply: “it’s scary how easy it was.”
It’s not exactly a gradual transition, then, but it’s not a ridiculous one either. Creative director Noah Hughes is as aware of the potential contradictions here as anyone, but he feels that Lara’s quick adaptation makes sense. She’s never been a victim. “The central answer is that we try to make all of Lara’s actions feel motivated. We don’t want every kill to be the first kill,” he says.
“Lara does need to cross a line, but you see her struggle several times with staying across it. She even tries to talk down the enemy combatants, but they’re not having any of that. They make it very clear that it is a kill or be killed situation. Our hope is that we get to the pace of gameplay that feels appropriate, but it should feel like a motivated transition – if a bit accelerated.”
Lara does indeed try to talk the militiamen down. “We don’t have to do this!”, she shouts ineffectually, hiding behind cover. It’s not overdone, though – nor is the vulnerability that Lara shows in the game’s opening few hours. After the hardcore trials of her day on the island, where she sees a friend killed, fights off wolves and learns to kill herself, a lot of that melts away, and she starts to emerge as the Lara we know.
She doesn’t enjoy killing people. She doesn’t quickly go from not wanting to kill to wanting to kill; she goes from not wanting to kill to forced to kill. And she always struggles with that.
“It continues but takes a back seat to other transitions that Lara has to make,” says Noah. “We try to challenge Lara emotionally in other ways, and as we get into later aspects of the game we challenge Lara’s core belief system. The challenges make her become who she will become one step at a time, and that’s not all about killing people. She doesn’t enjoy killing people. She doesn’t quickly go from not wanting to kill to wanting to kill; she goes from not wanting to kill to forced to kill. And she always struggles with that.”
After being reunited with an injured Roth, Lara gets an important piece of adventuring kit: a climbing pick-axe that lets her scale textured rock. These bits of equipment gate Tomb Raider’s island paradise, letting you return to places you’ve seen before and discover new parts of them. Lara’s path isn’t entirely linear, though the story is strictly directed – she criss-crosses around the island, letting you get to know it as if you were treading it yourself. You encounter the first hub – a night village of tall, ramshackle, abandoned wooden buildings leading up a mountain trail – in the dead of night during a rainstorm, but when you come back in the bright morning light later on it’s suddenly not so imposing.
“We always try to bring you back to a hub with a new piece of gear,” explains Hughes. “You’ll be able to access nooks and crannies that you couldn’t get to before, but it also opens up whole new sections of the hub. Part of what’s important there is to feel that growth of character… the growth within the hub is a reflection of the power dynamic changing between Lara and the island.”
Pick-axe in hand, Lara sets off in the midst of a raging storm towards a radio tower barely visible at the top of the mountain, hoping to send out a distress signal. The journey leads into the game’s first big action sequence, as Lara makes her way into a kind of underground base at the foot of the tower. It’s full of militia, as aggressive as they are numerous – Lara has to shoot her way through. Tomb Raider’s action is impressively free-flowing; Lara’s movement feels unrestricted and natural, and she crouches naturally behind cover or presses herself against walls unobstructed by awkward button-based cover mechanics.
In order to create the character richness and hopefully emotional experience, we really did want a strong narrative, but we didn’t want that to be at the expense of player-driven exploration.
The exact nature of these mysterious adversaries still isn’t clear at this point, except that they’re well-equipped, extremely antagonistic and evidently deeply, religiously involved with some ancient, blood-sacrificial island beliefs. It’s almost like the island is causing some kind of madness in them; there are definitely flashes of Lost-style, mysterious danger about the place.
The island itself is emerging as a character in its own right as Tomb Raider nears release. Lara’s expedition was headed there in search of the truth behind a Japanese legend, the Sun Queen Himiko. Lara’s archaeological instincts and passion for discovery are drawn out by the island’s mysteries, its incongruous architecture, the artefacts and documents that she finds sequestered away in hidden tombs and chests. There are things about the island that don’t quite make sense – the weather, for one thing, which flits temperamentally from snow to rain to tropical sunshine. There’s an element of mythological intrigue here that you can really imagine Lara getting into.
“Early on we really are telling a fairly traditional survival story, but we’re hinting at the mysteries of the island and Lara’s passion for understanding it,” says Noah. “Ultimately over the course of the adventure that becomes less of a side-pursuit and more central to getting to the bottom of the island and escaping it.”
Although the game starts right there on the island as Lara quite literally washes up on the beach, there are found-footage flashes to what happened on the boat and the events leading up to the shipwreck. Lara, in times of loneliness, turns to her friend Sam’s camcorder to relive happier moments. The footage shows Lara and her friends at ease with each other, excited about a coming adventure, arguing over what course to take (and ganging up on the unpleasantly self-important archaeology professor who’s along for the ride). These moments, too, help Lara feel more like a person; someone with relationships, passions, education.
We wanted a strong narrative, but not at the expense of player-driven exploration.
I’m still not clear on how much there is to do outside of following the game’s plot, despite promises of secret tombs and relic-hunting and hubs that open out as the game goes on. Hunting is quickly sidelined into an optional exercise, undertaken for XP rather than survival, which is a little disappointing when you think about how effectively it could have been integrated into the island-survival scenario. Exploration has always been a part of Tomb Raider’s adventuring, and I can only hope that it isn’t hemmed in too aggressively by the plot here.
Noah is keen to reassure me, though. “In order to create the character richness and hopefully emotional experience, we really did want a strong narrative, but we didn’t want that to be at the expense of player-driven exploration,” he says. “Each of the things you can do is about rewarding exploration, but also selling the sense of place and sense of character that’s being established.”
In some origin stories, you know everything there's going to be to know about the character within the first hour, and actually they are sometimes less interesting for it. Tomb Raider is a longer-form establishment of a heroic figure. The early hours might be about the breaking of Lara Croft, but the overarching narrative of Tomb Raider is about her making: how she empowers herself to be the adventurer she knows she can be, drawing on inner reserves of strength and resolve. It's a story I'm still very excited about experiencing.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games team in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
Source : ign[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment