This year marks a major milestone for the Tomb Raider series. Despite a few fallow years, Lara Croft’s adventures have endured and thrived for twenty years, and Crystal Dynamics are making a big deal about it with Rise of the Tomb Raider 20th Anniversary Edition.
Yes, it’s a game that came out last year, but this PlayStation 4 release adds a lot of new content alongside that. We went hands on with the Co-op Endurance mode and the Blood Ties DLC that lets you explore Croft Manor – in PSVR, as well! – and Lara’s nightmares, and then proceeded to speak with Meagan Marie, Senior Community Manager at Crystal Dynamics and author of the 20 Years of Tomb Raider book.
TSA: So it worked out quite nicely for this year to be the 20th anniversary. I mean, with the Xbox release of Rise of the Tomb Raider, I guess it’s not as catch to have “19th Anniversary” on the box…
Meagan Marie: [laughs] Yeah! You know, we really wanted to make the 20 year anniversary as special as possible, and with the PlayStation 4 version coming out, we really sat and thought what content we could create from the ground up that would resonate the most with fans.
Croft Manor was always that thing where we know it’s going to come back at some point, but we didn’t know how specifically. We decided that this was the time, and so it’s this very narrative driven piece of content that focuses on learning more about Lara and her story, which is pretty cool and I really think fans are going to enjoy that.
TSA: It’s still kind of strange to be coming and still talking so much about this game a year after it’s already released, isn’t it? I mean, we’re not really talking about Rise of the Tomb Raider itself, but all of the things you’ve been adding onto it.
Meagan: Well, we can talk about Rise of the Tomb Raider. Would you like me tell you about all of the cool stuff from the original release?
Well obviously it’s the same great game that was very well received from a critical standpoint, so what we wanted to do was to try and find ways to augment the main release with new stuff.
So really, the Endurance mode was something we were really proud of, with all the new procedural generation tech that we added after launch, and so we thought here’s a testbed to try that in co-op. It’s already technically very impressive, and now we allow you to raid tombs with friends, which is something that you don’t get to do in the main game. Exploring Croft Manor, as I said, is something of a no brainer for us, and then providing something for our action fans, the fans that really love the guerrilla combat style and the really scrappy fighting style.
We wanted to bring the experiences from the main game and give little playground for each of the sort of pillars of our game style outside of that.
TSA: So, I really quite enjoyed what I played of Co-op Endurance – there’s this bizarre glee of running around and killing everything that moves…
Meagan: [laughs] Like, “I’m not even hungry anymore, I just want to shoot it!”
TSA: [laughs] But then there is always the downside of having someone alongside you who doesn’t spot the trap right in front of them.
Meagan: Yeah, so we don’t have the slow down [when you trigger traps] now, which is so funny, because we get fan feedback saying, “Why do you slow down the traps?” Then we don’t slow down the traps and they’re like, “Oh…” because it’s instant death!
TSA: Have you thought of putting in that kind of difficulty mode for the main game?
Meagan: Not for the main game, the traps just don’t slow down in Endurance, but who knows? We’ll see how people react to it and maybe I’ll suggest to them that we’ll allow that to be turned on and off in future, so people will understand that it’s just in theory that they don’t want the traps to slow down… but in execution, when the physics work properly, it’s quite challenging!
But yes, keep your eyes out for traps. I think, once you’ve had a few deaths, people usually learn not to jump onto the crumbling floors, and so on.
TSA: Well, I did have it where my co-op buddy killed himself three times in the space of 30 seconds! [laughs]
Meagan: [laughs] And you’re like, “I need a new co-op partner!”
TSA: Well, I’d have liked the idea of just leaving them be dead and I can just carry on with my final life. But how does Endurance develop further? All that we got to really see was the first day and a bit of the first night.
Meagan: So, every day is something like six or seven minutes – we have had someone who’s survived 65 days in game, which is absolutely crazy. Essentially, the longer you survive, the harder the enemies get, the wildlife will come and attack you, and so on, but it’s really about risk and reward.
So if you go into a cave, you’re going to be warmer, because there’s no wind chill, but there’s no food in these caves, and some of these caves and tombs are really big and can go on for a long time. So is it worth risking trying to go and raid this tomb for the sarcophagus? If you get that, you get another revive back.
Maybe you make it to five days, you’ve got several relics, and you find a signal fire, which means you can call for extraction. Should you extract, meaning you get to keep your high score, or should you keep going with your run and risk dying and losing your high score?
The cool thing is that every time you play, it’s totally different; the Siberian wilderness changes every time.
TSA: You said that the animals get more aggressive, but do you get to the point where the squirrels start attacking you?
Meagan: They do not! The squirrels are just very peaceful, but they don’t provide you very much food either, so I always feel bad killing them. They don’t even sustain me for more than five minutes, so I focus on the boar and the deer and so on…
One of the funniest things I’ve seen is someone was being attacked by two bears, and then they used a fire arrow to set the bears on fire… and then they didn’t die right away, because it takes a bit for them to burn, and so they set her on fire, and it was just… [laughs]
The Siberian wilderness is a brutal place.
TSA: [laughs] Blood Ties can be pretty brutal as well with the Lara’s Nightmare mode, but is that Lara’s worst nightmare, with the undead roaming around Croft Manor?
Meagan: I think it’s just a nightmare. I feel like, based of Lara’s character arc, one of her worst nightmares would involve losing her friends. She’s so loyal to her friends and putting her friends in danger, you can see it in the main story with Jonah, we she’s like, “I have to do this alone.”
Lara’s Nightmare is like a twisted version of what’s going on in her life – you know how your mind twists things? So in the Blood Ties DLC, her uncle is trying to legally take the manor from her, but when you start Lara’s Nightmare, you hear him reading that same letter, but his voice slowly distorts and slowly becomes demonic sounding. It’s in her dreams that she’s personifying that struggle as monsters.
The monsters are pulled from Darkness Awakens and past adventures, but it was just the idea of her physically trying to take the manor from her and her trying to defend her home. It’s zombies instead of a legal court order.
TSA: I like the idea of having lawyers turn up later on, trying to serve her with papers. It’s a bit different from the typical horde mode, though, because it’s not really waves but more objective based.
Meagan: Yeah. If you get on a really good run and you find all of the skulls right away, you could finish it really quite quickly, but everything spawns in different places each time. The skulls are in different places, the ammo’s in different places, and the monsters won’t stop coming. You have to keep on fighting them off and it’s really intense.
I usually panic and die when I see the dynamite guy. Every time, I get trapped in the corner. […] And some spaces are a lot more claustrophobic, so when you get down into the cellar, you’re stuck in these tiny little corridors, and you just have to get the skull and run!
TSA: Did you ever think that, when you die or when you succeed, you should have Lara just waking up in a cold sweat in bed?
Meagan: [laughs] What’s the TV series that they did that with?
TSA: That was Dallas, where the guy woke up in the shower.
Meagan: I don’t know if they thought of doing that, because Croft Manor isn’t really that inhabitable right now…
TSA: Yeah, she hasn’t really kept it in good repair. Maybe her uncle’s got a point?
Meagan: Well at one point in Blood Ties, she says that maybe she should just let him have the place, because it’s just so run down. […] But she starts to realise that she has a destiny that’s bigger than what she expected and that Croft Manor is a part of that, and that it has some secrets that will help her on her journey.
TSA: It’s nice to have Blood Ties in VR, but why did you think to do it in VR as well?
Meagan: It was a great opportunity to explore the technology for the first time. We felt that, because it’s adventure focussed, it’s about the character, some exploration and puzzles, it was a good fit for VR and the studio.
It’s really a kind of magical experience for hardcore Tomb Raider fans, because Croft Manor has such sentimental value. We have so many people who grew up and were very young when Tomb Raider came out, and Croft Manor’s kind of a safe place. There’s no enemies there, there’s no tigers, but they can run around and swim and jump and shoot. So it was a huge part of the franchise for them.
Being able to see Croft Manor and to walk around, when we give it to fans, they have a huge grin on the whole time. It’s so fantastic to see and, you know, Blood Ties takes around an hour to finish, but when you play in VR, people take two to three hours, because they’re looking at everything. The environment artists put so much effort into it.
TSA: You weren’t tempted to do Lara’s Nightmare in VR though, were you?
Meagan: Nope… no!
I mean, maybe they considered it at one point, but we were pretty well established that we wanted to start people in VR with an adventure. People still think that something’s going to jump out at them in Blood Ties, but there’s not.
TSA: You just need one little jump scare.
Meagan: I think there’s like a rat that’s a little scary at one point? But there’s no zombies!
Thanks to Meagan for chatting to us about Rise of the Tomb Raider 20th Anniversary Edition. You can read our hands on impressions here and watch us playing some of the Co-op Endurance and Lara’s Nightmare modes here. Lara Croft’s latest adventure arrives on PlayStation 4 on October 11th.
