Lara Croft is stepping out with a new friend in this new download-only title from Crystal Dynamics. It blends the core action, exploration, and puzzle-solving aspects of the franchise, and introduces a new cooperative element.
No, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is not a Tomb Raider game. It’s something quite different. For a start, it's going to be a downloadable title, rather than a retail release -- but that's not the only thing that's unique about it. While it uses the same graphics engine and core technology as Crystal Dynamics' recent trilogy of Tomb Raider titles, the fundamental gameplay has more in common with an action RPG like Dungeon Siege, or even (brace yourself) Diablo II than it does with Tomb Raider: Underworld.
Core to this impression is the fact that the viewpoint has shifted from behind Lara to a fixed isometric viewpoint. This has freed the development team to focus more on the content of Guardian of Light, and less on managing camera angles or wrangling the graphics engine. It's also particularly useful for accommodating the title's fundamental shift toward being a two player co-operative action experience. Players work together to fight off large swarms of bad guys, and solve environmental puzzles by taking advantage of the key characters' core strengths.
Wait. Characters? As in more than one? Yes. While Lara is very much the focus of Guardian of Light, she is joined by a 2000 year-old hero named Totec, who joins her on a quest to foil his arch-enemy, in a somewhat complicated back story that seems to have a little in common with the whole “dark smokey” guy in Lost. Rather than paraphrase the story, here’s how it was presented to me by Producer Forest Swartout Large when I first spent time with the game at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
"Two thousand years ago, an epic battle was waged between the armies of good and evil for a powerful artifact, The Mirror of Smoke," she explained. "The fearless leader of the Army of Light, Totec, rose against all odds to defeat the evil overlord Xolotl and gain control over the item. Wielding the great power of the Mirror of Smoke, Totec banished Xolotl from the world. Now known now as The Guardian of Light, Totec entombed himself with the mirror in The Temple of Light with to prevent it from ever falling into sinister hands."
"Fast forward to today, where our heroine Lara Croft has found the long lost Temple of Light in the mountains of Central America,” Large continues. "Unbeknown to her she had been followed, and moments after Lara finds the Mirror of Smoke, mercenaries burst in and steal the artifact. With the mirror no longer safely entombed, Xolotl immediately returns from his banishment, kills the thieves, and vanishes. Totec rises from his entombed state and blames Lara for unleashing this evil force in the world, yet realizes that the only course of action is to work together to retrieve the Mirror of Smoke. If they do not succeed, Xolotl will harness the power of the mirror to plunge the world into eternal darkness."
Did you get all that? Good, because I got a little lost the first time she told me.
The bottom line is that the ensuing experience is a fast-paced, isometric action adventure that blends plenty of shooting with exploration and environmental puzzles, much like those found in classic Tomb Raider games. Core to the experience though is the dynamic of Lara and Totec working together, and players are encouraged to solve puzzles by leveraging the strengths of each character. Lara, true to her archetype, is very agile and athletic, and along with her pistols she is equipped with a grappling hook that enables her to reach otherwise inaccessible areas of the environment. She is also able to assist Totec by grappling her partner (sometimes in mid-jump) in order to help him swing across chasms, or even prevent him from falling to his death. She can also attach it to parts of the game world and then use it as a tightrope. If you've played Lego Batman: The Videogame you'll have some idea of the possibilities such a device can present in a cooperative experience.
Lara can fire a grappling hook and Totec can use it as a tightrope.
Totec, on the other hand, is more of a tank. He’s big, powerful, and less agile -- but he carries both a shield and an infinite supply of spears that allow him to assist Lara in some clever ways. His spears can be thrown at walls so that Lara can use them to scale otherwise treacherous areas, and he can pull his shield up over his head so that Lara can use it as a platform. By interacting in these different ways, a pair of communicative players (either online, or playing on the same screen) can develop some very interesting solutions to a variety of puzzles.
During our demonstration of the game, Large was joined by Brand Director Karl Stewart, who was keen to stress that this is a very different approach for Crystal Dynamics, and something that is enabling the team to change fans' expectations of the franchise. Earlier at GDC, Bungie Studios’ Design Director Joseph Staten had commented that, "if you try to build a franchise around a single character, that can be a problem. If you build it around a world, anything is possible."
I asked both Large and Stewart about this, and it was clearly something that they’d both been giving some thought to since working on the project. Large, who's background before joining Crystal Dynamics three years ago from Tippett Studio, where she worked on visual effects for Charlotte's Web and Enchanted, believes that Croft is certainly a larger-than-life character with lots of possibilities. Both she and Stewart spoke with great respect of how Bungie is making the Halo franchise about more than just Master Chief. "That's one of the reasons that we added Totec to Guardian of Light," Stewart told me. "While Lara still needs to be a focus because she’s so iconic, I think there’s a lot we can do in future with regard to her interactions with other characters in the game world."
It should be noted that while Guardian of Light is clearly designed as a cooperative experience, it can be enjoyed as a solo title too. The gameplay does change slightly though. There is no A.I. replacement for Totec, and instead Lara is given Totec's spear as an additional tool, and new items are introduced into the game world to replace Totec when switches need to be pressed, or platforms need to be stood on.
Though the demo they showed me was running on Xbox 360, Crystal Dynamics fully intends to bring Guardian of Light "to all three major platforms," Stewart told me. It will be a downloadable game only, and given the success of titles like Shadow Complex, they have very high hopes for it.
The next time the game will be shown in any great detail will be at E3 in June.
I live for the burn...and the sting of pleasure...
I live for the sword, the steel, and the gun...
- Wasteland - The Mission.
