注：文中“GC”为Metro网站的GameCentral的缩写，“KS”为古墓丽影全球品牌经理卡尔·斯图尔特(Karl Stewart)的缩写。
原文：
Tomb Raider interview - remaking Lara
GameCentral talks to the makers of the new Tomb Raider reboot, about redefining both Lara Croft and the franchise that made her famous.
If you've already read our preview of the new Tomb Raider demo you'll know we were extremely impressed by what we saw. It was being played by Crystal Dynamics' own Karl Stewart, who afterwards spoke to us at length about the challenges of reworking such a famous series and giving its character a proper back story.
For a game about which both Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix have, up until now, been very secretive about he was remarkably candid concerning both the challenges of working on the new game and ensuring the franchise can remain relevant in a post-Uncharted world.
GC:The first Tomb Raider reboot in 2006 was very successful, both critically and commercially, so at what point did you realise you'd have to reboot the franchise for a second time? Why did the success of Legend not sustain the series for longer?
KS:One of the things we've been very clear in communicating is we inherited Tomb Raider from [original series creators] Core Design and we continued the canon. We didn't change anything about it. She had her same parents, she had same mansion, basically we just put the new engine on board, right? So the story continued. So to us it wasn't effectively a reboot, it was a refresh continuing what had begun with Core. And when we inherited it we made the decision to do a trilogy.
You're right Legend was critically acclaimed, a success financially. But what we realised very quickly was that, apart from the bar being raised by many new games coming out, it wasn't as accessible a game as it should be. And what we mean by that is that we felt that by the time you got to Underworld people were like, 'I kind of don't know the story of Lara Croft, and how she became Lara Croft and who she is. And her parents, do I need to know that story in order to play the game?'
So when we kind of started beginning Underworld, which we committed to doing, we were all caught up in the fact that we had the opportunity to put our stamp on the Tomb Raider franchise. Put a sort of a new vision and a new direction on Tomb Raider. And this was at a time when Batman Begins was coming out, which was very successful, and Casino Royale, with Daniel Craig picking up the mantle.
And the opportunity was for us to look at the franchise and think, 'Do we continue what we've got?' And ultimately you start to dwindle with your audience, because they feel like they have to be hooked in. Or do we take this opportunity to re-imagine it and go back to the beginnings and tell a story about Lara Croft that we feel has never really been told?
In the first ever Tomb Raider she had her twin pistols, she had her outfit when she started. Whereas Batman Begins is a great example of… the first third of that movie you wouldn’t think he's ever going to turn out to be Batman because he's not the guy you think he is. So for us it was to be able to re-imagine it and bring it to the audience - a very fresh approach that will make them feel like, 'Now I understand who she is'.
GC:But Batman, despite all the many different ways he's interpreted, has a character. People know what he's like and how he thinks. But Lara Croft, like almost all other video game characters, doesn't really have a distinct personality.
KS:I agree.
GC:She's defined purely by what she looks like and her skills within the game. So what do you actually work with there, since you're essentially building on sand…?
KS:We went through a phase of analysing all the games that were out there and sort of looking at it and saying, 'Okay we want our traversal to be better. We want our combat to be better. Puzzle-solving, what does that mean to us anymore?' And we started to take all these different influences and soon you have this melting pot of a game that you feel like, 'I'm just mimicking four or five other games.' And we started looking at Tomb Raider with a very different set of glasses.
We went, 'There's a formula, there's something that made it very unique and very iconic.' But it wasn't the smashable brand. You couldn't, as you said, break it apart and put it back together. It hadn't got that thing where people were like, 'Oh, I remember, I know why she had twin pistols, she had a blue top and short shorts'. But there wasn't anything really iconic. And I think that was because there's never a story told about who her parents were, where the mansion came from, where she got her money. She just came to be.
And for us we kind of looked at it and thought, 'Right, well we need to set the tone. We need to re-imagine it and turn her into an icon which people will look at and go, 'Now I know how she became the person that she is''. Therefore setting the foundation for the franchise, hopefully.
GC:What was interesting to me was that when she killed that guy at the end of the demo she was really upset about it. You don't normally see that sort of emotional response in a video game character.
KS:That was a very important factor to us, in that we don't want to create a cold-blooded killer. The idea is that we want a personal connection. We want you to kind of feel for Lara…
GC:It is hard to feel sympathy for someone that goes around killing dozens of people every few minutes and doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the fact.
KS:Exactly, and that's why for Lara… the first time we gave you a bow we don't want to go, 'Okay, there's a bow go kill somebody'. We wanted to say that there's a stepping process where she gets the bow, she learns how to fire it, and then she's attacked by wolves - she protecting herself. And then when you forward to this situation where she has to kill this guy, she's killing him because he'll kill her. It's a very intimate situation and that kind of sets the tone for the entire game, in that we want the player to think consciously about what they're doing and their consequences.
Even down to the next phase where she ultimately has to go on to save her friend Sam, you start to think about it in different ways and it's not just her as cold-blood killer. And that's one of the big takes with this, in that we want to bring something new and fresh to video games. And that is more than just a story, it's more than an attachment.
GC:I don't want to seem patronising or sexist, but is that also a purposefully feminine quality? Because she even felt bad about the deer. I mean, I'm sure I would in that situation as well but the Gears Of War guys, or just about any other video game character, they wouldn't…
KS:Yeah, and that's why because it's a day one story… it's rebooting a franchise for a 21 year old girl who's straight out of college. She's never done of this, so you go through these experiences where you're like, 'God, I don't know if I could do that…'
GC: I noticed a lot of use of close ups in the game and a sort of quasi-shaky cam effect. What are your main cinematic influences? I imagine The Hunger Games must have come in there at some point?
KS:We started development of this in early 2008, which was well before The Hunger Games, and certainly before the cinematic Hunger Game ever came out. The key thing that we wanted to try and bring is personality. We wanted you to feel the situation and we wanted you to feel with Lara Croft, the situation she's going through. And in order to do that we brought in a whole new camera system, which is the dynamic camera. And you'll see how it goes in and out. When it's intimate, the last scene there where she's kind of hiding away it's all in her eyes. You don't even have to look at what's happening around her, you can read the situation from her eyes.
And we showed the piece last year where she's in the tunnel with the torch, and the camera gets up really close. Or when she's coming across the cliff it breaks off. The goal is that the camera helps tell a story. The shaky cam effect is just to help the reality filter, that you're there in the situation - you're jumping from person to person just like a movie. And we do everything through the performance capture obviously, but the camera allows us to say something and do something that is generally very hard when you have a very scripted scene.
GC:The segue between gameplay and cut scene was handled particularly well, to the point where I'm not even sure from just watching it exactly which was which.
KS:I was playing about 80 per cent of what you saw. So basically there was the natural cut scenes that you could see, but obviously the way I demo it I add atmosphere by her waking in slowly to certain situations but pretty much 80 per cent of what you saw the player will be in full control of.
So the camera is dynamic in the sense that when I'm playing it'll come in close or pull back, to kind of help explain the situation or bring home the severity of what you're doing.
GC:The only major criticism of what you showed at E3 was the large number of quick time event sequences, but I only saw one in this demo - right at the end. Was that a conscious reaction to that feedback?
KS:For the first introduction of the story and the narrative you have to involve the player in a situation, and yes there were several quick time events. Nothing's changed from our original plans but I think when you show a 30 minute piece of code certain people go, 'Oh there was three! Is that going to be the same every 30 minutes throughout?' Of course not, it's much like you don't see 10 scripted sequences every single hour of gameplay.
You see them because you need to set a foundation of the story, but as soon as you reach a point where she's a badass action adventure hero they drop off and they only happen when they really need to happen. So I think there's always the fear that when you show code early, and showing it in segments, people are like 'Oh okay, so that's what it's going to be like throughout the entire game'. And it's the same last year; we had the criticism of, 'She sounds weak, she sounds vulnerable'.
GC:Those were criticisms…?!
KS:Yeah, a lot of people were like, 'She whinges a lot'.
GC:By people you mean goatee-sporting Americans?
KS:[laughs] Exactly, that's what they said.
GC:Okay, well. Moving swiftly on, and I'll use Uncharted as a comparison here, which I'm sure you won't be offended at.
KS:Not at all, we love Uncharted.
GC:There are numerous obvious similarities between the two games on paper but what I saw today really didn't look or feel like it. Uncharted is in large part a third person shooter, but I didn't get the feeling there's much gunplay in Tomb Raider?
KS:No, you're not going to get as much. It's more about you having particular styles of combat that certainly you're not going to get in Uncharted. So we'll show a little bit about that later on. We're very excited about that, because that's what diversifies us.
GC:In your introduction you spoke about the main pillars of the previous games, so how do they translate to the new title? How would you break down the gameplay in terms of how much screen time each element has?
KS:That was kind of one of the problems that we had in past Tomb Raiders, in that we weighted it too much in one direction. And when we started to pull apart the pillars we realised that puzzle-solving, which is smart resourceful Lara, allows us to be able to look at the world with a very different set of glasses.
It made us think about the situation around us and we can actually have a very balanced game, an evenly balanced game throughout, it's just when you come to a certain level you may find that it's more combat with smart resourceful and no real exploration. Or it's exploration with a little bit of smart resourceful, so the goal is that when you finish the game you'll go, 'That was the right balance'.
It may not be 33, 33, 33. It may be that you go, 'If I was to analyse that it was maybe 30 per cent combat, it was 60 per cent and it was 10 per cent, and that was perfect.' We map minute by minute throughout the game to make sure that at certain points in time, through all of our focusing testing and research, you're getting what you feel you need to keep you engaged.
It doesn't mean that you have to finish the game and go, 'That was perfectly even'. There's got to be the right weight, because if you actually play three and a half hours of combat you'll be like, 'Phew, that's a lot of combat in a 10 hour experience'. So it's finding that right balance for us, and we believe we've got the balance down because we've really worked hard at mapping minute by minute throughout the entire game.
GC:I think this was more rumours before the game was officially announced, but there was a lot of talk in the early days of the game having survival horror elements.
KS:Yeah.
GC:And there were certainly elements there that reminded me of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and maybe The Descent as well. But were they actual conscious influences?
KS:There's a dark side to the game, definitely. Because the scavengers who've been on this island long before Lara's ever gotten there, they've created a social structure and it's not a nice social structure. And there's a mystery around the island that you have to uncover, and there's the harshness of what they've been up to. And you'll have to obviously… I don't want to spoil anything.
But there's a harshness to the island that you have to come across, and we've moved to an M [for Mature - the de facto highest age rating in America - GC] so you can't treat survival with kid gloves as a T [for Teen]. So it's not about dropping the f-bomb, it's about making you feel like that. That there's a severity to the situation and consequences.
GC:But is it survival horror in terms of gameplay?
KS:No, no, no. We completely ditched the whole survival horror concept. Our game is ultimately to get to the action adventure hero, where survival is just the tent pole that everything is wrapped around. But there's no horror or J-horror side to it. That's not somewhere where I wanted to go.
[At this point our time is officially up but we manage to throw in a few quick questions to end.]
GC:So are there any supernatural elements at all?
KS:No, we've tried to steer away from it and keep the reality. So it's more about the mystery of the island.
GC:So there's no walking statutes and that sort of thing?
KS:No, that's kind of been the problem in the past where it's got too supernatural and people have kind of gone, 'What's going on?!' straight away.
GC:In terms of wilderness survival how serious a part of the game is that? Can you die if you don't eat enough?
KS:Yeah, we try to stay away from the sim survival, it's more about survival as in she's got to fight to survive. She's got to find her friends. It's more about the physical…
GC:But does she have to catch meat to survive?
KS:No, that was just an example to get you to understand how to use the bow. So survival is more about your skills, about the evolution of the character. But it's not a sim, you're not picking berries and drinking your own pee.
GC: [laughs]And finally, who's the voice actress?
KS:We haven't announced it yet. We'll announce it… probably in about a month's time we'll be doing it.
GC:She was very good.
KS:Yeah, she's done a phenomenal job. We're very, very happy. She's been a real star. She's gone above and beyond, so I'm looking forward to announcing her. That'll be exciting.
GC:Will we recognise the name, do you think?
KS:Yeah, I think you probably will.
GC:Okay, that's great. Thank you.
KS:Thank you, good talking to you.
