The fourth episode of Final Hours take us to Eidos Montreal where a team works on the multiplayer mode of Tomb Raider.
New - The Final Hours of Tomb Raider: Multiplayer Edition Now Live
LONDON (8th January, 2013) – While Crystal Dynamics is putting the finishing touches to its re-imagining of Lara Croft™ in the new Tomb Raider®, a dedicated team at sister studio Eidos-Montréal has been working on the game’s first versus multiplayer mode: breaking new ground for the franchise and an experience that has only been made possible through close collaboration between the two Square Enix studios.
“It’s something we talked about when creating the initial design for Tomb Raider, but it was very important that there weren't any distractions from our focus on delivering a great single player experience, so we parked the idea of creating multiplayer at Crystal Dynamics and looked to our sister studio, Eidos-Montréal” said Darrell Gallagher, Head of Studio at Crystal Dynamics.
Stephane D’Astous, General Manager at Eidos-Montréal, added, “It’s been a privilege for the team at Eidos-Montréal to be a part of Tomb Raider. We built multiplayer from the ground-up, around the core theme of survival, using some of the key elements of the single player campaign and re-purposing them for a fast and exciting experience. It’s been an amazing project, one we’re immensely proud of and one which we really think gamers will have a lot of fun with.”
Multiplayer in Tomb Raider sees the island’s indigenous Scavengers pitted against the crew members from the shipwrecked Endurance. Set in some of the island’s hostile landscapes, players will use traversal and hunting skills from single player, plus trap setting to create fast-paced combat in a selection of versus gaming modes.
Darrell Gallagher concluded, “For me, the multi-player has to fit and it has to be fun, so we’ve worked hard to make multiplayer fit seamlessly with the single player game and its key themes and we’ve play-tested the hell out of the multiplayer game, it’s working well and gamers are enjoying it. Now we’re all just eager to get Tomb Raider into gamers’ hands in March so they can experience the entire game for themselves.”
All comments (20)
Is that the guy from Chuck?
christ..
but you never know uncharted multiplayer was good fun (aside from wall glitching bastards)
“We’re ducking behind waist-high concrete block,” opens the preview, “taking potshots at some armed goons, and we’re thinking to ourselves, is this Tomb Raider? We played the game for two hours, and most of it was spent in combat – so it’s basically a third-person shooter, despite pretensions of it being a wilderness exploration game.”
They didn’t have much good to say about the exploration aspects, either, describing levels as “winding, linear trails”, and going on to say that “You don’t feel like you’re exploring at all. Some sections open up, which serve as Arkham Asylum-style hubs, but mostly you’re pushing forward through a set path.”
They also didn't sound too keen on the characters or the lack of interactivity. The supporting characters were described as “a bunch of laughable stereotypes. A Scottish sailor? A nerdy tech guy with glasses? Spiritual Maori guy? Oh, please.” “Tomb Raider is one of those ‘experiences’ modern developers love so much. Most of the time you feel like you’re just moving a cutscene forward by holding forward on the analogue stick.” said the magazine. “In one scene towards the end of our hands-on, she has to climb a huge radio tower atop a blizzard-battered mountain. This is ripe for an awesome climbing puzzle, but instead we just hold forward, and scripted scenes do the rest. It’s a well made game, with great production values and some dazzling visuals (especially the weather effects), but it’s a pretty big departure from made the old games so special”