原文：
Croft manner: Tomb Raider art director Brian Horton discusses Lara’s latest rebirth
Edge Staff at 02:42pm October 4 2012
An origin story which adopts many of the textures you’d expect of a survival horror, Tomb Raider has faced stiff questions over both its depiction of Lara Croft and its cinematic gameplay. Provocative footage and some poor choices of words have inspired some rather psychic predictions of a torture porn version of Uncharted, the gloss and eyeliner of earlier games swapped for QTE-inflicted cuts and bruises. Assuming the full game won’t be quite so monotonous, what can its island – a series first in being the game’s one location – bring to the format? Art director Brian Horton explains.
Neil Marshall movie The Descent seems to have had a major influence on Lara’s appearance and ordeal. Has it?
Absolutely. Descent was one of those movies I saw at the theatre that absolutely blew me away. Not so much that it was a horror movie but it was the characters, they went through an amazing arc from the very beginning to the end. There was a lot of growth. We had very similar aspirations for Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. A lot of that was trying to imagine what it would be like for someone who was on her first adventure, and how to really tell a survival story. When we were thinking about how to do that, references like The Descent or 127 Hours – all these survival stories came up, with these believable characters facing incredible fears, finding the will to push on, and that was really our foundation for Lara Croft. For those that have seen The Descent there’s a relevance, even though I wouldn’t call what we’re doing anything like a horror, there’s a fear component to survival. You as a player have to fight to survive, and that’s where the action component comes into the game.
Expectations for action games are often based on the last successful action game that came out. How do you stop Tomb Raider losing its identity?
What we decided early on, when we’d finished up Underworld, was that it felt like we’d taken Lara to the end of that particular incarnation. For this, we knew we needed to innovate but retain the essence of why you love a Tomb Raider game. We’re just trying to make the best Tomb Raider game we can regardless of other games in the marketplace. The goal, though, obviously, is to be as relevant as we possibly can. And if we’re compared favourably to some of the best games in the industry then that’s only a good thing. We look at it like this: there’s a number of summer blockbusters every year in movies, and they all sit right beside one another. We believe we’re similar, but we have something special to offer with a unique focus on exploration. And I think people are ready to just fall in love with Tomb Raider again.
Will the exploration aspect be sufficient for series fans?
We’re not an open-world game but we definitely have freedom of movement. There are these hub locations you can revisit as the character gets more developed; you can explore them. We’re really trying to make sure there’s a mix of scripted moments and moments where you need to explore and really discover this island. The island is the second most important character in the game, and in a way it sort of moulds Lara. And the way we bring character to that island is that we don’t throw you down this linear pipe the entire journey. For the gamer out there that really wants a very action-packed experience, there is a way you can play this game that will satisfy you. If you’re really into exploration and being lost in a place, though, there’s a game there for that kind of player. There’s a lot for you to find. I’m not saying we’re a jack of all trades, but we have to satisfy a lot of different playstyles within the thirdperson genre.
Most triple-A games aspire to an eclectic range of colours, moods and locations, but the early Tomb Raiders ventured deep into their locations. What’s the right balance?
We put a lot of time and attention into the island itself, how we rendered it. It’s one location, whereas a lot of the earlier Tomb Raiders were globe-trotters. So this is a shift for the franchise in a way. Within this island there are different ecosystems and different elements, whether that be for interiors or exteriors. It really gives the player a feeling that they’re progressing through the game and that it evolves. The other thing we’ve invested a lot of time in is our weather system and our lighting engine. Our lighting is full realtime and very powerful in terms of being able to light and relight a space. So you’re going to see these locations in different contexts. You might see a hub space in one type of weather condition at one time of day, and come back to it and it’ll look different. We’re very emotion-driven, even though I feel the game is very realistic in its art direction. There’s a lot of emphasis on trying to parallel Lara’s emotional state with the island, so the island plays a role in how the player’s feeling at any one time.
Most island locations in games go for the picture postcard look. Not this one, presumably.
We look at the style as decidedly darker in tone. There is going to be vibrancy and there will be stronger colour palettes… I would think our island is more akin to how people would view a King Kong island – an island that’s hostile, right? It’s not an idyllic location, though it’s beautiful in a lot of ways. It has what we call ‘layers of history’. It’s a fictitious Japanese island that’s been built on, and people have crashed there over the years, so there’s all these different layers to explore. And I think it brings an ominous kind of quality to it. It might be beautiful one moment but you’ll see something that’s truly dark in there, and you’ll realise as Lara that it’s not going to be easy getting off this island. That’s what makes it a little different.
Islands like those of King Kong and Jurassic Park succumb heavily to elements like rain. That kind of technology was never really available to earlier Tomb Raiders, but are you pursuing it now?
Yeah, I think the weather is something we put a lot of time and attention into from an aesthetic perspective. In a way, we wanted the dynamics of the space to affect how Lara makes her way through the world. So we often talk about our approach to puzzles: she has to look at the world and say, ‘How can I use this world to my advantage?’ What she lacks in resources she makes up for in her ability to assess the environment. You’ll see throughout, and as we reveal more of the game, how that plays a large role in affecting your gameplay experience. This is a space that has movement to it, and you can affect it and control it in some ways.
A lot of press has focused on the battering Lara endures from people and environment. How much of this is about vandalising the pristine aesthetic of the earlier games?
That’s definitely something we made a conscious decision about. We often refer to Lara as she had been seen as almost Teflon, either completely alive and looking amazing or dead – there was no in between. We really wanted to give her a lot more shades of grey. So you’re going to see her struggle and there will be moments where she’s hurt – that’s part of the survival context. We look at it like this: it’s justified by the story we’re trying to tell. This experience that she has to endure is shaping her, moulding her, changing her. These experiences are part of that tapestry we’re using to build this origin story. If there’s no adversity then it’s difficult for you to grow, so we think that’s a big part. When you experience the game in its full context, you’ll see how it all fits together.
Tomb Raider Legend brought Lara’s gymnastic abilities to the fore, and her avatar was defined by animation. Is it safe to assume you’ve had to play that down in this game?
The idea of her being an athletic, kinetic character is still a very big part of what our game is all about. When you control Lara, I think it’s the most fluid controls you’ll have ever seen in a Tomb Raider game. The fluidity of movement and analogue control when you’re jumping about truly is taking the character to another level. Is she as gymnastic as past Tomb Raider incarnations? No, I don’t think that’s the word I would use. But she is athletic. In order to make her grounded, when you think about making her climb up a mountain, the extra flourishes that were there were cool but they didn’t feel as real, so we chose to take her in a direction that still makes her very capable in a navigation sense – she does some amazing things – but ground her a bit more. She’s still very feminine, she still feels like Lara Croft, but in a context where you say, ‘Yeah, I can imagine this is how someone would move through this environment’.
Lara’s never been reliant on tools so much as gadgets. Is the equipment this time more tactile and realistic?
The toolset is limited. Lara is her best tool, her brains are her best tool. By extension the player gets to experience the game by exploiting those natural abilities. There are going to be tool-based obstacles in the game that the player will learn to overcome. I think the physics nature of the game is really going to shine through when using these tools. So things like wind will play an important role; controlling mass and the weight of something; the relationship between fire and water: these are things people are going to notice, systems that you don’t have to explain or tutorialise. There’s a naturalism to how the player gets through this game. That’s the hook we’re going for.
Rob Briscoe’s Dear Esther remake was exceptional for its sense of travel, only drawing areas you’d visited or would later reach. Can the same be said of this game?
Yeah, I think this Tomb Raider’s taking the most ambitious licence with scale we’ve ever done. Tomb Raider’s always suggested grandeur and we’ve always had amazing vistas, but now you look at a vista and you can traverse from here to there. That’s a new thing for us. Having an open world where you can just point over there and say right, I’m going over there, and you make your way organically over to that place way off in the background. There will be unreachable spaces that are just there as an amazing backdrop, but they might be places were you’ll see them way off and then, later on, you’ll arrive there and look miles back and see where you’ve been. That’s what’s amazing about having an island, it allows us to render a space with dramatic scale but which at the same time has intimacy. Another thing we’re doing is really pushing the scale from the super-claustrophobic to these big open expanses, so the feeling of grandeur’s even more prominent because of the contrasts.
As game worlds get richer and more visually complex, how do you meet expectations without overly camouflaging the player’s objectives?
We draw attention to what we call visual language: the patterns we can identify that repeat and give the player some hint as to what they can do with something. We try and make sure there’s some consistent things the player can see that get rendered in such a way that they still feel natural and organic in this space. We’re trying to make a work that feels completely real and contiguous, but at the same time you want the player to have a way to navigate. So for players that want an additional layer of hints, we also have the Survival Instinct mode which is Lara’s way of assessing space. So when she looks at the world, you hit this button and it highlights primary destinations, or makes certain things that are interactive glow. It’s those tools that we have to make the player feel totally immersed, but, at the same time, if they want to have a clear idea of where they need to go, there is a hint system.
How has the Tomb Raider camera evolved with this game? Is it more intimate, versatile?
We’ve put a lot of investment into camera. It’s one of the things we knew early on would get special care, to make sure we had interactive cinematography. One of our aspirations was to have the feeling of a virtual cameraman at times, even though there was no one there. We want you to feel empathy in a way. So, when she’s in a tight claustrophobic space, you’re close to her and she’s taking up a lot of screen real estate. It makes you nervous and you feel that claustrophobia. And when you’re on these large epic vistas we can pull the camera out and give you a feeling of freer movement, and it makes the world feel that much larger. We put a lot of attention into cameras, but also seamless blends from some of our more cinematic gameplay to some of our other gameplay so that you feel like it’s one fluid experience. We have an amazing camera artist in Remi Lacoste; he’s from Ubisoft and has done some amazing work for us, working with the programmers to develop a camera system that’s truly top notch as far as industry standards are concerned.
Square Enix has become something of a champion of PC with its deluxe treatments of Sleeping Dogs and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Will Tomb Raider follow suit?
We spent a lot of time making sure that the standard here is good enough for someone who’s only ever experienced Tomb Raider on PC. We have dedicated people making sure the PC game feels just like console ones, but at the same time takes the best advantage of the format. We’ll have things like being able to have higher-resolution textures— There’s a lot of details I can’t go into right now, but the PC version will definitely make those who have a powerful gaming PC very, very happy.
