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Read it here

A legend reborn, that's what SCI/Eidos are promising with the new version of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: Legend. After the back street abortion that was Angel of Darkness, the long running Tomb Raider series certainly needed some kind of rebirth; post-Angel, one of gaming's enduring icons could easily have sunk without a trace.

Yet with both a new developer and a new direction, there were strong hopes that Crystal Dynamics could inject new life into a fading franchise. We didn't hear much for ages after the initial announcement and then as fellow hacks first began to encounter the title, the whispering campaign began. "Have you seen the new Tomb Raider?"; "No really, it looks amazing, Legend could be Lara's reincarnation."

Despite their most convincing entreaties, we still maintained a healthy scepticism, as Public Enemy once noted, "Don't Believe The Hype." That scepticism endured until last week when we encountered Tomb Raider: Legend first hand behind closed doors at the Leipzig Games Show. Although we only saw one level based in Africa, by the end of one stunning 20 minute presentation we were more than half way to being convinced. Legend could indeed signal the rebirth of Lara Croft as gaming's premier icon.

We nabbed the chance to speak to Legend producer, Morgan W Gray, to hear the very latest on Lara's re-launch, new gameplay elements and of course, that untold origin.

Here's what we discovered.

Interviewer: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend is obviously a very new direction for the series, almost a rebirth, was that the way you looked at it when you were designing the game?

Morgan W Gray: All along, all along, that was the entire goal. We realised Lara Croft was very strong and the franchise was very well loved, but we've had some disappointment from the fans [over the previous version]. We looked at the core of the game, some of the best things we've done in the past and we wanted to make sure we propel them forward and bring in some new additions that the fans want. We also asked 'what if we were back in 1994, Tomb Raider one, what would we do with that as a starting point?'

Interviewer: So you've adopted a very back-to-basics approach with Legend?

Morgan W Gray: Exactly, we feel Lara Croft is an adventurer and the game is called Tomb Raider, so we wanted to get her back into the exotic locales where the game was based in the first place. Exploring places that no other person has ever been - let's focus on the tombs. We do it throughout multiple environments, that's one of our cornerstones. That's not to say we don't have a few urban locales but our main focus is on bringing you to corners of the world to do adventuring Croft-style.

Interviewer: One of the main draws is obviously the new Lara Croft model. Could you fill us in on some of the design decisions on the look and feel?

Morgan W Gray: Our new Lara model was obviously a very difficult undertaking. How do you re-define an icon, how do you make her modern and get the right look? So we spent a lot of time going back and forth but we're pretty happy with her athletic build, her facial features. We think she's still sexy and sensual, but without being cartoony. She looks like an adventurer.

We also really wanted a low interface in the game, we wanted everything to be natural so her equipment is all on her body, that's all she uses. She always has her dual pistols and her new magnetic grapple, which allows her to do numerous things like pull objects toward her, or use it like a rope. We've got a digital imaging device, her binoculars which have a host of new modes and functions. Grenades, weapons she picks up from her enemies. We wanted to keep the tools simple but give a lot of functionality and multi-purpose use. We felt like if we overloaded you with 80 million single-use type things, we'd diminish the overall experience.

Interviewer: Lara's movement style and animation system has obviously also had an extreme makeover too, can you tell us a little more about that process?

Morgan W Gray: That's one of the cornerstones of our technology base, it's called the fluid movement system, it's sort of a marriage of animation technology, art and design. We've already said that she's got her own movement AI and that's not hyperbole, we're actually calculating on the fly aspects of her movement and her animations, so that she can blend seamlessly between different animations and allow her to link with objects in the world in a natural way.

It's been a long process of trial and error as we focus in on really how good a player character can look and move in a game and have that be a goal. Normally it's an afterthought to other things.

Interviewer: You also appear to have refined the gameplay in terms of movement and by getting rid of some of the frustrating aspects of controlling Lara, for example the pointless falling off ledges and other collision detection issues?

Morgan W Gray: Our philosophy with Tomb Raider is that we want to encourage exploration, we want to encourage fun. I think often times by making things overly complex or overly difficult, the expectation is that you're creating gameplay. We think it's actually holding gameplay back when the player's worried every step of the way, they're not exploring, they're not giving it all it can have.

So we've given the player multiple ways Lara can save herself and be safe from the more stupid ways of dying. We have a very generous load and save checkpoint system to encourage exploration. You know we want the player to risk and have reward, we're very player-friendly. We can create much more action packed complicated sequences because we put in safety valves to keep the player safe and keep the frustration low.

Interviewer: Lara's new flair moves are certainly one of the more impressive advances...

Morgan W Gray: In this concept of fun, everyone identifies with Lara Croft in different ways and wants to do different things. We wanted to give players the chance to do something which could become repetitive - and then have options to make it fun or to show off. In the full game we'll actually have the concept of rewarding movement through the gameplay mechanic, so the riskier or more daredevil players will have a concrete gameplay benefit which we'll talk about more in the months to come.

Interviewer: One major advance this time around seems to be in the area of the camera system. How have you approached that aspect of Legend?

Morgan W Gray: The camera system is the platter on which third-person action adventure games are served so we spent a lot of time identifying not just the technology behind finding good algorithms for our run-time default camera but obviously giving the player easy control. Our cameras serve both gameplay and the presentation of the environments. We spent a lot of time finding a camera system that a) showed off Lara Croft in the most engaging way and b) filled in the player path and where you need to go but making both unobtrusive. 'If you notice the camera, we're doing something wrong' is our philosophy.

Interviewer: Talking of environment and locations, we start off in Africa, but tour around the world. What other locations are you talking about for Legend right now?

Morgan W Gray: Well there's Africa and Peru, we're going to go into some ancient ruins there. We're going to go to the Himalayas where you're going to get a little window peek into the birth of Lara Croft. We're also going to bring you across the globe to other locations but we're kind of piecing them out one by one. But you globe trot all over.

Interviewer: Lara's origin? Could you tease and tantalise us a little more on that?

Morgan W Gray: Well obviously Lara Croft didn't start life as a sixteen year-old adventurer, so you get to see a rather young Lara Croft for a sequence of the game and to see a bit of the family.

Interviewer: So Lara on Xbox, PS2 and PC - we realise you're probably gonna slap us with a 'no comment' here, but what about the prospects for Lara on the next generation and also maybe handheld systems?

Morgan W Gray: Heh, no comment.

Interviewer: Entirely predictable, but thanks for your time.

Source

Lara couldn't be much farther away from the Parisian night if she tried. Some of us may be in Leipzig, but Lara's in Africa. And, just as they said she would be, Lara is back to her old tricks - leaping from ledge to ledge, solving ancient puzzles and dancing through traps that would've claimed Indiana Jones many times over. She's not just clinging on any more; she's clinging on, hauling herself up, jumping and tumbling past circular blades and then using her new multi-purpose grapple hook to smoothly swing across a spike trap with a rope - all in one fluid motion. Those of you hoping for something closer to the Prince of Persia may yet be satisfied.

Of course, the Tomb Raider: Legend team have been very vocal about wanting to take Lara Croft back to her roots. Out of the random European city and back into the caves. Back to what she's good for. Their determination for the game to stand apart from recent versions is obvious from the name alone. None of this "Lara Croft Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness" pin the colon on the run-together-game-names nonsense - just simple and memorable. Today, we got our first chance to see just how far Toby Gard and Crystal Dynamics have lead Lara - and the only slight disappointment was that we did have to journey to a random European city to do so.

Having got to Leipzig without feeling stronger or killing any helpful professors en route, Eurogamer's Patrick Garratt was one of the first to take in the new-look Lara one-to-one, and phoned through his observations earlier this morning.

The demo focused on a level set deep in Africa. Running on PS2, the code at Leipzig apparently constitutes a quarter of one of eight huge levels that make up the game, which the team reckons will take 12-15 hours to finish. And "huge" is the operative word. Starting in a cave, Lara surveys the area and makes her way out through an entrance to be greeted by a gigantic waterfall - likely to be the one seen in the screenshots - and the sense of scale is said to be overpowering. Birds are flapping around, and Lara can be seen fiddling with an earpiece.

At this point we were told about Lara's new body. Crystal Dynamics wanted to give her "the look of action and athleticism, and retain her beauty and sensuality, but without making her look creepy". (Good grief.) They've certainly achieved the former by the sound of it, with a slightly more muscle-bound heroine - almost cartoon-esque, but still very identifiably Lara. In terms of getting back to her roots, she can take the literal path if she likes and wallow in the mud - the dirt clinging to her until she next takes a dip in nearby water. After that her clothes will be sodden, and water will drip off - she may even wring out her hair during quiet moments. Beyond making her look like a more advanced, athletic Lara, the team has tried to give her a broader range of animations - and she won't always be wearing her trademark shorts, green top and backpack either.

Having caught our attention with a gigantic waterfall, Lara pulls a lever and opens a gate behind it. It won't be long before she's leaping and, of course, fighting. One of the other things Crystal Dynamics wanted to do with Legend was modernise the control scheme - and that's obvious in various areas, including the way the combat works in a manner that's unlike any of the previous Tomb Raiders. Combat is said to be 35-40 percent of the whole game, and a lot of work has gone into it. A health bar and individual ammo stocks for your weapons spring up to remind you of the conditions as you fight. But instead of just giving you a gun and having you point, a new "combat lock mode" allows you to lock onto various enemies so that each is assigned a face button - in a manner not dissimilar to Sony's The Mark of Kri. Lara then uses her individual handguns to take shots at the enemy corresponding to the button you're hammering. As you dance back and forth trying to evade them, you can focus your attention without having to juggle the third mental ball of cycling through targets. A clever move.

Clever moves will be a common theme, by the sound of it. Solving puzzles demonstrated that Lara not only solves problems in various ways, but is also hugely versatile in terms of getting around and, crucially, not dying pointlessly and easily.

One puzzle involved starting a water wheel, where one of the paddles was obstructed. She surveyed the scene with binoculars first (these will apparently have different uses, but you can guess which was the only one we saw), and then got to it. The first option was to use her magnetic grappling hook - and this tool will serve her very often in Legend, from what we could make out. In this case, she found a way to swing toward it, Indy Jones' whip-style, and kick the obstruction. Another option, it turned out, was simply to chuck a grenade to clear the paddle's path. Another still involved clambering up the opposite side of the room and taking advantage of a stationary gun emplacement. The possibilities sound inviting, even if the early example is quite mundane - the idea of finishing a platform-puzzle game, starting over and saying "right, I'm not going to use any of the means I did last time" doesn't just appeal to us, it practically has our pants off. But back to Lara...

With the water wheel now clear, Lara can grab hold of the paddle and use it to reach higher platforms. Not the first time, mind you. The first time, she screwed it up. And this helpfully illustrates the point about not dying needlessly. In past Tomb Raiders, missing a ledge could be fatal and cost you lots of progress. Heck, walking down a corridor without watching your feet left you impaled on spikes - missing a ledge was like being told you were dead, and the developer had gone round your parents' house and told them about the time you stole £10 from your Mum's wallet and used it to buy pornography. Not so in Legend. Hanging from the paddle, Lara swung but failed to catch the lip of the ledge and tumbled - only to spring athletically back toward the paddle and not just grab it but actually stand up on it too. Like many recent platform games, Lara won't just fall off ledges either - she'll turn around and grab them if she stumbles off; the idea being that you'd have to make the game think you really wanted to leap off if you were to fall.

Having navigated this section, she started encountering traps. In the dark, her shoulder-mounted flashlight turns on automatically, and the red flares she can toss into deep pits add grim highlights to the darkened spikes at the bottom. With dynamic light and shadows, of course. Simple traps are like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark - spears hurtling forth from every crack in the wall and Lara having to time her run to avoid them - while some of the latter traps and puzzles are said to involve water currents. And we can't imagine they mean she just gets her phone wet and swept a bit off course.

Overall, Tomb Raider: Legend is looking like it could be focused in the right areas, smoothly pieced together and actually capable of proving the doubters wrong. After the farce that was Angel of Darkness, this was always going to be a critical moment for Lara, and early impressions are hugely positive. They even seem to have the camera right - it's automatic, and "loads" of work has gone into it, but during our demo it never became an issue, and could always be tweaked with the right analogue stick. With so many good ideas flowing into it from various sources - not just the first Tomb Raider - the signs are very positive. Just as the developer has worked hard to hang on to ideas that work and scrap the things that don't, their latest incarnation of Lara is equipped to grab hold of anything in her environment - an environment that she seems more than adequately equipped to navigate quickly, fluidly and beautifully. Hey, we don't know about the sensuality part yet, but we still left disappointed we couldn't take her home with us.