Tomb Raider is a franchise with a frustrating identity crisis. The original games are credited as landmark titles of the 3-D action adventure genre and made Lara Croft a household name. So it’s sad to see that for its latest incarnation, developers couldn’t recapture what made the games famous in the first place. In an attempt to bring the series back to life they borrow bits and pieces from modern franchises with the hope that they would come together as a new and improved entity. Instead they created a monster, one Dr. Frankenstein might’ve commended, but that I can’t help but pity. Rather than acting as a single being, the disparate gameplay elements challenge each other for control. What results is an experience that lacks focus. The mechanics are disconnected and distracting. The pacing is wildly uneven, constantly dragging the player out of their flow. The story is filled with flat characters, thin motivations, and a weak premise. In isolation, and maybe compared to similarly flawed games, these problems don’t seem all too bad. But Tomb Raider originally defined this genre, so I’d like to hold it to the new standard defined by modern masterpieces like Uncharted, God of War, or Red Dead Redemption. If the franchise can’t live up to its peers, then maybe it’s better left in the grave.
Mediocrity Machine
While Tomb Raider is considered a gaming icon, the series has always had trouble living up to that mantle. The original game made a splash with a number of notable achievements with its use of 3D graphics, detailed environments, and a strong, adult female character. However, as Ryan MacDonald said in his review for Gamespot, “Make no mistake, gameplay is the bread and butter of Tomb Raider.” It was able to combine exploration and action in a 3D platforming world in a way no games had done before. As Ryan explains, “[you] take the puzzle solving of Resident Evil, the gory action of Loaded, and the 360-degree freedom most gamers only dream of, and you have Tomb Raider, the closest thing to a "Mario 64 killer" to date.” The next game in the franchise was able to solidify the game’s legacy. Tomb Raider II did so by improving the core elements of the game without jumping the shark. There were more ways to platform, more ways to fight, and more dynamic areas to explore. But by the third game the series had already begun to falter.
Trouble was brewing at Core Design, the studio behind the franchise. The company was built on the foundation of British bedroom coders and the culture started off relatively relaxed. Robert Cirillo, a former artist at the company, notes that “ it always really felt more like a place where talented people would come together to show off their ideas and skills in video-game development than an actual ‘work office.'” But this culture didn’t scale, and as demand for more games came in the team fell apart. Eidos, who had acquired the studio, was in desperate need of cash. In 1996 they had reported a $2.6 million loss and had to show their shareholders some money fast. When Tomb Raider became a massive hit, and the next year they had turned around a profit of $14.5 billion, they saw they had a cash cow, and wanted to milk it. At that point, Tomb Raider II was already in the works. Using the same engine and tech, they were able to deliver the game just a year after its predecessor. At that time Core Design felt they were done with the franchise and readied to move onto their next project. Gavin Rummery, a software engineer who went on to become studio manager, noted "by [the end of] Tomb Raider II we basically thought that's it. Finished. We were a bit burned out." But their bosses didn’t agree.
Eidos demanded that they continue with the franchise and forced the studio to continue their output of a Tomb Raider game per year. The team at Core Design was already fed up. During development of Tomb Raider II they had already lost several key personnel, including the creator of Lara, Toby Gard. He, as well as others, didn’t like how the marketing team focused on Lara’s sex appeal and the lack of freedom they were allowed in development. Gard stated as such in an interview with Gamasutra, saying, “[we] wished for more extensive control over marketing and PR decisions and partly it was because we felt that we were no longer being given the creative freedom at Core that we had enjoyed while making Tomb Raider.” The people that were left felt drained and tired and couldn’t continue with the franchise. So, a new team in the studio took on development of the franchise, but still felt the pain of the tight turnaround times and corporate stringency. Tomb Raider III couldn’t muster the same critical success as the prior games, and the franchise began feeling outdated. Despite the updated engine and improved graphics, it didn’t match up well to its contemporaries like Metal Gear Solid and Half-Life. The team was running out of ideas, and suffering fatigue, resulting in physical and mental health problems. The staff even secretly planned to kill off Lara to prevent more games from being made. That obviously didn’t work.
While the next game, The Last Revelation, had improved from the previous in terms of graphics and gameplay, the franchise felt stale. Each year a new game was released to increasingly negative reviews. But the games kept selling and those sales kept Eidos afloat, even though the profits decreased too. It wasn’t until 2003, with the release of the sixth installment, did Eidos give in. Angel of Darkness was meant to be a big step forward for their franchise as their first release on the brand new PlayStation 2. The game spent 3 years in development, but the first year of work was completely scrapped, the remainder of the time was a fractured mess of development. Rummery, the last remaining member of the original team, said, “It didn't have any organization to it. It wasn't clear who was in charge, who the leads were.” It was an overly ambitious project, for a broken development team, trying to develop for a brand new console, under strict deadlines. What resulted was the poorest review Tomb Raider yet. Despite better graphics, music, and a good story, the gameplay they delivered was a relic of the past. Douglass Perry said it clearly in his review for IGN, “[we] have a title far behind the times, one that's stuck in mid-transformation, presenting gamers with the undisputable notion that Core Design is struggling with Lara's present -- and future.” Eidos couldn’t ignore the problem any longer, and scrapped all plans for coming Tomb Raider games at Core Design. Instead they moved the franchise over to another subsidiary of theirs, Crystal Dynamics, where it remains to this day.
It’s Alive!
The yearly release cycle was broken, and the world would have to wait another 3 years for another Tomb Raider. What they got was Legend, a reboot of the franchise that scrapped the old movement mechanics and sent Lara back to raiding tombs. The tank controls and grid-based levels that had made the series feel ancient were replaced with a new, more fluid system, and a new game engine was built that provided more flexibility than ever before. Also seeking to recapture the adventurer spirit of the original games, they refocused the game on Lara and her hunt for a mystical relic. They had even brought back Toby Garb to refresh his creation. This combination of modernization and finding their roots proved successful as the game was deemed a return to form for the franchise. The following two titles Anniversary and Underworld met similar praise, and critically the games helped restore the brand’s image. However sales figures hadn’t fully recovered. While the original 4 games enjoyed more than 5 million in sales each, no games since then had broken above 3 million. This didn’t bode well for the people paying the bills.
The hype was real. Players were promised a game unlike any other in franchise history. Just like a gritty superhero remake, this would be a more realistic Lara Croft, faced with unforgiving circumstances and forced to make the hard decisions. It was first in the series to earn an M rating. Ultimately the game, simply named Tomb Raider, delivered, selling 11 million copies, more than the last decade’s worth of Tomb Raiders combined. This was undoubtedly a win for the studio, and they quickly followed up with two more games, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Critically the former remained on par, but the latter dropped the ball a bit. The sales indicated something was wrong, as they dropped from 11 million, down to 7, then down to 4. Not a great trajectory for a trilogy. Compare that to the Uncharted series, which started off at 4 million, then to 7, and then 6. Then with a three year hiatus, 15 million with the final main series entry. That’s a franchise with staying power.
A better comparison may be with the newest Star Wars film trilogy, which started off pushing past $2 billion, but then dropped to $1.3 billion, and then finished barely squeaking by $1 billion. The initial shock of the franchise returning in a manner more exciting than ever before was sure to shock fans and grab a lot of attention. The next entries lose that glamour and make sales that are a bit more indicative of their quality. I enjoyed the first game in the trilogy; it was a fresh take on the franchise. But as you play the following games, you can see seams that bind the games together begin to fall apart. Slowly you can tell how Crystal Dynamics made the initial game in the first place, and why their franchise doesn’t stack up to the competition.
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
So, yeah, they basically just copied Uncharted. That’s not a bad thing, all good games get their inspiration from somewhere. Would Captain Keen exist without Super Mario Bros? Or would Halo exist without Doom? As in all creative endeavors, there’s rarely anything new under the sun. And when designing action-adventure games, Uncharted was the right game to be copying.
As Crystal Dynamics finished up their first Tomb Raider reboot trilogy, Naughty Dog took their own crack at the genre and released Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune in 2007. Almost immediately the game drew comparison with Tomb Raider, earning the nickname “Dude Raider” among fans. When asked about the comparisons being made, co-president Evan Wells said “I completely understand them,” but went on to say that beyond being action adventure games based on more modern, treasure-hunting realistic characters, the games diverged pretty heavily. Gameplay-wise he said “we were very focused on third-person cover-based play, while theirs [Tomb Raider’s] is more auto-aiming and a little more heavy on the puzzle-solving.” They took their inspiration from Gears of War, as well as from that game’s progenitor Kill Switch. But rather than just copy and paste the formula from those games, they made sure to streamline the game’s processes and actively cut out elements that didn’t contribute to the intended experience. What resulted was a game that felt as closer to living a rip-roaring Indiana Jones type adventure than any other game had before. As Greg Miller at IGN said, “Uncharted does what few titles manage -- it completely immerses you in its experience.” Another feat few titles manage to do was maintain their quality with each release. That was no problem for Naughty Dog. The following games Among Thieves and Drake’s Deception were both equally lauded, and cemented the franchise’s status as the new benchmark for action-adventure games.
It must have been frustrating sitting in the design room at Crystal Dynamics watching Naughty Dog develop such a successful franchise with such a similar concept. It especially hurts when the co-president, Evan Wells, and creative director behind Uncharted, Amy Hennig, were both Crystal Dynamics alums. But on the flipside they’d laid the groundwork for a modern, action-adventure franchise, so the new Tomb Raider didn’t need to start from scratch. For their new reboot Crystal Dynamics borrowed Uncharted’s realistic, drama-laced storytelling and art, cover-based third person gunplay, and improved 3D platforming. It’s funny how the team saw Nathan Drake start off shipwrecked on an abandoned tropical island in the first game and then find himself on the summit of a frozen mountain in the next, and decided to do the same exact thing with Lara. At least they switched it up for the third game.
That said a lot of those shared elements can be attributed to parallel thinking. After all this was the heyday of games, tv shows, and movies becoming gritty and realistic, and the third-person cover based shooter had grown to become very popular. Being compared to another game shouldn’t hold back any title from being what it should be. As Meagan Marie, Community Manager at Crystal Dynamics, said when asked about the comparison “there's room for multiple franchises in the genre.” Ultimately, the similarities don’t matter. What’s important is how Tomb Raider differentiates itself. Unfortunately, that’s where it stumbles.
The Plot is Lost
Uncharted is grounded in the idea of allowing a player to experience a Spielberg-esque adventure, and all the elements in the game build towards developing that feeling. By placing that goal as their Northstar, Naughty Dog was able to develop unique mechanics that complemented their desired gameplay. For example, there is no backtracking, once players left an area they aren’t allowed to go back. A permissive auto-save system constantly makes sure the player doesn’t have to worry about retreading gameplay. Also, more-gamey elements like experience, skill trees, or weapon builds were all left out. A swashbuckling adventurer doesn’t need to worry about all of that.
This begs the question, what feel is the new Tomb Raider going for? Meagan, speaking for Crystal Dynamics, explained that “we really settled on survival as our key lens that we took traversal and combat and all these things through.” This was a large shift from the original games in the franchise. The OG Lara Croft is a cold, badass modelled after James Bond. She is calm, collected, and pushes herself into dangerous situations with measured risk. In contrast, this new Lara is much more inexperienced, vulnerable, and accessible. Over the games, she grows closer to her namesake, but not by much. But aside from the character and the story, gameplay is meant to be the real driver for a game’s feel. If the survival element is what makes this new Tomb Raider unique, from its previous games and Uncharted, then the game design differences between them all would be the part to define the new franchise.
Where Uncharted constantly pushes players forward, Tomb Raider does so in spurts. The level, and the gameplay, jolts Lara towards new areas or challenges, but then old locations beckon to be returned to. All environments allow and encourage backtracking. Hidden caches of loot and collectibles are strewn throughout the map. Wild animals roam freely, waiting to be killed for their skins and meat. Secret challenges and side quests ask players to wander around looking for blink-and-you’ll-miss-it artifacts. Players are incentivized to pursue all these tasks through a skill tree and weapon upgrade reward system. Completing tasks reward XP, which results in skill points. Finding the right materials allows weapons to be unlocked and upgraded. These RPG elements, seemingly stripped from franchises like Assassin’s Creed or Fall Out, spur players to explore. What they don’t do, however, is contribute to the theme of survival designers say they were pushing, nor do they add to the main game’s experience.
Similar to Uncharted, that main game consists largely of platforming challenges, shoot outs, and puzzle solving. Narratively there’s an impending sense of urgency to keep pushing you forward. You have to save your companions, you have to beat the bad guys to the treasure, you have to not die. This pressure is in stark contrast with the side content, which constantly begs you to forget your task and run around the map. Sure your friend may be dying, but there were some ruins back there that looked cool, so screw ‘em. Additionally acquiring skills and new weapons isn’t that useful in the main game. Skills are either dedicated to helping in combat, or more easily finding objects in the environment, and upgrading weapons obviously is meant for fighting. But because combat is largely limited to telegraphed sequences in the main game, there aren’t that many opportunities to use those skills or weapons. Additionally, those engagements are often so easy that the enhancements don’t come that much in handy. This may be anecdotal, but even playing on the hardest difficulty there were rarely times where I felt challenged by the gunplay. More often I would die because playing recklessly was the only way to have fun. On the other hand, the skills that enhance your vision just serve as a crutch to solve puzzles faster and easily find loot. I turned off those abilities completely and had no trouble. Ultimately these design elements are just add-ons to reward exploration, even though the main game doesn’t want you to explore.
What results is a game where the side-content and main game are completely out of sync. This hurts the pacing the main game tries so hard to set and leads to long stretches without any challenging gameplay. Alternatively you could have a good time just ignoring all the exploratory elements in the game and pursuing the main content. What you’re left with then is just a sub-par clone of Uncharted, with boring characters, a generic story, and less interesting gameplay.
Forming Focus
There’s nothing wrong with the idea of an action-adventure game with a focus on exploration or survival. There are plenty of games that have found great success with those themes. What differentiates them from Tomb Raider, however, is they’re able to meld side-content with the main game in such a way where they both lend themselves to a singular theme.
If you’re looking for a critically lauded, best selling, action adventure game with a focus on exploration look no further than Red Dead Redemption. Drawing from the successful mechanics of their Grand Theft Auto series, Rockstar Games synthesized a new series focused on allowing players to feel like a cowboy from classic American westerns. The team was able to place a narrative-driven main game within an open world free to explore. The side content didn’t feel like distractions, but rather contributed to building the fantasy of the lone ranger. If Tomb Raider truly desired a balance of exploration and a blood pumping narrative, that’s the balance to shoot for. Instead of designing the world in a segmented format, with disparate stretches of linearity and exploration, they could have designed an open world that simply housed linear missions. Instead of always having a singular narrative pushing the player forward, spread the narrative out among different missions, quests, and even side-quests. Side content should have a narrative purpose, and complement the gameplay of the main game. Exploration shouldn’t feel like a chore, or a diversion, but rather a natural part of the journey.
Survival is a bit more unique of a theme in the AAA gaming world. There are plenty of games that emphasize survival like the Resident Evil or Metro series, but they are often more horror focused and have a smaller audience. Survival in these games often centers around a lack of resources, an ever-present feeling of danger, and evading enemies rather than fighting them. Tomb Raider doesn’t effectively use any of these tools. Resource management is theoretically part of the gameplay, as you need to spend resources to maintain your health and supply of tools and ammo. But resources are so plentiful that managing them is rarely an issue. Narratively there is a presence of danger, and there are a handful of moments where Lara runs from enemies, though they’re usually cutscenes. Largely the gameplay in Tomb Raider buffs Lara up so much that she rarely feels like she’s simply surviving. Rather she tends to dominate her enemies relatively easily, even when the story tries to make her seem weak. If Crystal Dynamics’ focus was survival, there’s plenty they could have done to make that clear in the game, rather than having their community manager have to spell it out.
Whether Tomb Raider is based on survival or exploration, whether Lara is a cold badass or an empathetic hero, the game needs to focus itself on a singular vision. Sadly, it’s an all too familiar plight in video games to throw in mechanics just because they are trendy. The experience system, weapon upgrades, crafting, and looting have become a persistent design trope, and there are plenty of games where they feel unnecessary. In Tomb Raider they stand out even more because the older games didn’t have them. There was a conscious decision to include them in this new trilogy, just as there was a conscious decision to include Uncharted-like cover-based gunplay, persistent linear narratives, and platforming puzzles. In the early stages of development, it’s alright to go a bit wild in adding new ideas to the game. However, the best game designers are able to make the hard decisions to alter or abandon ideas that don’t help form a cohesive gaming experience.
To Rise Again
It’s not easy maintaining the quality of a franchise. It’s quite a challenge also to redefine a franchise that is cemented in gaming history. Take Sonic for example, a character that made a name for itself as a 2D platforming juggernaut. But as his rival Mario made an astounding triple jump into 3D, Sonic hit a road bump. Game after game after game, Sonic felt his legacy slipping away. On the other hand, Mario kept redefining himself with one new amazing game after another. Funny enough the best Sonic game in recent years was Sonic Mania, which went back to his roots in 2D. Even for the biggest gaming icons, staying on top ain’t easy.
A lot older franchises have leapt back into the modern gaming landscape in recent years. Among them Doom did it best, staying true to its roots as a heavy-metal, demon-slaying, blood-bath of a shooter. Rather than falling victim to the trend of cover-based gunplay, id Software chose to guide players to push themselves out in the open and embody the fearless Doom Slayer. Another franchise that does a great job of keeping itself fresh is Resident Evil, which, similar to Tomb Raider, started off as a third person game with tank controls. Unlike Tomb Raider though it didn’t take them a decade to redesign their control scheme, only a couple of years. Afterwards they consistently experimented with different gameplay mechanics, control schemes, and perspectives, while still maintaining their identity.
What sets these games apart, and on a higher tier than the new Tomb Raider trilogy, is a clear and consistent identity. When Uncharted originally came out it was able to escape the comparison to Tomb Raider by clearly defining its own gameplay style and themes. So, it’s a bit of a let down that when Tomb Raider was rebooted it couldn’t do the same; the mechanics and narrative elements in the game seemed ripped straight from Uncharted, and largely weren’t as well implemented. Latching onto modern gaming trends in a vain attempt to gain its own identity didn’t do enough of a good job. The mechanics they said differentiated them from Uncharted, skill-trees, weapon upgrades, exploration, ultimately only served to make the game worse. When Naughty Dog released their finale A Thief’s End in 2016, it easily blew Rise of the Tomb Raider out of the water, 15 million in sales compared to 7 million. Perhaps that may be why when Shadow of the Tomb Raider came out a few years later it only garnered 4 million in sales. It was just under the shadow of Uncharted.
The original Tomb Raider series suffered from poor management, corporate pressures, and strict timelines that hampered developers’ ability to deliver quality games. When devs actively try to kill a character and a franchise, something is wrong. As it moved over to a less murderous studio that was a bit better managed, the games perked up. They were received better critically and sold better. Still the studio was under a yearly release cycle and that same struggling parent company, so there wasn’t a whole lot of room for innovation. Then when Square Enix took corporate control and gave Crystal Dynamics the breathing room and flexibility to create a quality game, they delivered a few of the best games in franchise history. Now that the dust has settled though, I think it’s clear that more could have been done. From borrowing heavily from Uncharted, to lazily tacking on trendy mechanics, this new trilogy still feels like the studio was designing on crutches. Perhaps there were still internal challenges that held back proper game design and innovation. Studios like Naughty Dog and Rockstar can make games of consistently good quality largely due to their culture and situation. With the trilogy wrapped up though, I’m hoping that Crystal Dynamics once again learns from their past mistakes and delivers a new era of Tomb Raider that has a proper design vision. That is unless they decide to just let Lara retire. Not likely.
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