FRIDAY GOODNESS - Official Tomb Raider Underworld Podcast!!

[tlr online]

Eidos and Mona Sax from Tomb Raider Forums proudly announce the first official Tomb Raider Underworld Podcast, a fantastic audio commentary focusing on the development of Lara Croft's latest adventure under the aegis of Crystal Dynamics. This is the first in a series of official podcasts offering a valuable insight into the inner workings of a top flight video-game developer.

Keir Edmonds, Eidos Community Manager, and Mona Sax, polled members of Tomb Raider Forums back in January 2008 for a collection of questions for Crystal Dynamics. Keir ardently took those questions to California for a recent studio tour where both Keir and the team sat down and recorded the first official Tomb Raider Underworld Podcast.

We would like to extend our thanks to members of Tomb Raider Forums, who admirably rose to the challenge, Mona Sax and of course Keir Edmonds for his continued efforts working alongside community-based web sites. Collect the first official Tomb Raider Underworld Podcast below.

Official Tomb Raider Underworld Podcast



Transcript:

Keir Edmonds (Community Manager)
Eric Lindstrom (Creative Director)
Alex Jones (Producer)

Keir: Hello everyone, it’s Keir from Eidos, I’m over here on holiday in the US and I’ve popped into Crystal Dynamics, and I’ve got some questions here from tombraiderforums.com, and they’re going to be answered for you by Eric Lindstrom, who’s the creative director on Underworld, and Alex Jones, who’s the project producer. So without further ado, here’s the first question, and this comes from Peyn_OTHfan, and he wants to know: How long have you been working on this game, is it since you finished Legend, or even earlier?

Eric: It was even earlier, actually, because while we were working on Legend, I was already logging things I wanted to do differently, not so much because we were doing them wrong in Legend, but because we would have the time to pursue things farther than we were able to do on Legend, so we were trying to finish up all of our Legend commitments but weekends, driving home, it was already churning on Underworld.

Alex: Yeah, it started for me a couple of months before we actually put Legend out the door that we were working on budget and manpower projections and all this sort of this preliminary planning stuff that you need to do as well as giving Eric the tee up, some of the creative vision of the game.

Keir: Okay...And the next question comes from Evan C., he wants to know: How important are long-time fans in the development of this game? Are they a deciding factor when it comes to making controversial decisions?

Eric: Well, absolutely, but I would say that deciding factor, currently, is a different scenario because the game is so far in development that we're on execution across all areas of the game. But in the earlier conceptual, pre-production phases, I was definitely lurking on the forums and looking up what kinds of things people were saying about Legend and Anniversary, how they reacted to things, what they wanted. One of the biggest things that I got out of it early on was the complaints about how much Alister and Zip were ruining the moment. Which was something that I actually was personally responsible for in Legend because I was the story designer, and we were playing with how much we wanted to hear Lara's voice and her interacting, so we kind of went overboard on it, and we liked what we had, but I definitely missed that sense of isolation, explorer on the top of the world, you're the first one there, you're all on your own, nobody to count on, and so we wanted to find a way to be able to get Lara to express herself, to get that kind of hear her voice and interact with her but without having the boys constantly chattering over your earpiece.

Keir: So the sense of isolation is something we can expect in Underworld?

Eric: Absolutely.

Keir: Cool. The next question comes from george_croft, and it's a quite tricky one, and he asks if you compare Underworld to any classic Tomb Raider game, which would it have most in common with, which has influenced Underworld the most?

Eric: Alex, do you wanna...

Alex: I'm gonna kick that one right over to Eric.

Eric: Hmm... Alex, you wanna answer this one? [Both laugh] The reason I don't wanna answer this question's because when it comes to the classic Tomb Raider games, I can not say anything right. I really enjoyed all the early Tomb Raider games but we did something pretty different when we started again with Legend in bringing it into a different audience and a new era of gaming. And that was something that was going to change the landscape of Tomb Raider irrevocably. Some fans didn't like it and still don't, and that's unfortunate. We try to keep all of what made Tomb Raider really vibrant at the time - the exploration, the sense of freedom, the sense of context, of you being down in these tombs - so when I think about the early games, I usually spend most of my time in Tomb Raider 1 and Tomb Raider 2 in my head, but to say that Underworld is most like those, if you showed Tomb Raider 1 and Tomb Raider: Underworld to somebody who didn't know anything about Tomb Raider, they wouldn't say they're alike. They have the same emotional frequencies, I guess, but it's a different gaming community now.

Keir: So is it fair to say the root of the game is similar in terms of the isolation you get in Tomb Raider 1, is that something you were going for when you were making Underworld?

Eric: Absolutely.

Alex: Absolutely.

Keir: Awesome. Okay, the next question comes from disneyprincess20, and she asks: How do you think the experiences you made while and after creating Legend and Anniversary have affected the development of Underworld? So I guess that's kind of asking how much you've learnt since you've taken on Tomb Raider.

Alex: Well, I'll let Eric go into the zesty, sexy for him creative aspect of it, but from a production side, I didn't have... I was not on Anniversary, that was running concurrently with our pre-production for the most part, but one of the big takeaways for me from Legend, from just a production standpoint, were the ways in which we wanted to frontload design thought as much as possible and get as much work done upfront so that we didn't have as much time iterating on the game in 3D in ways that were radical and destructive. And on Legend, I think we came together with a very good game at the end, but the process of getting there was painful and we have definitely taken efforts to streamline that, by trying to frontload design thought and putting an emphasis on having mechanics done earlier so that you can see their practical in-game effects and you're know you're working with something fun before you get to final art on everything and have to move stuff around; and while I think we've made a lot of progress in that area there's still more to do, but I think that was the one big takeaway of coming out of Legend for me.

Keir: So when you say 'frontload design', does that mean look at the bigger picture from the off or...

Alex: Well, on Legend, we were starting over from scratch in lots of ways, sort of defining what the game was going to be again, what it meant to make a Tomb Raider game, what the core gameplay values were, so we were operating in a darkened room. So we had the ability to leverage, 'so okay, we basically want to do this game plus this much more.' So starting just from that gave us a huge leg up in terms of we knew what game we were making in the main, but even going beyond that and extending it and saying, 'okay, how can we try to make the design more solid upfront, how can we get more certain that what we're doing is going to be fun and is going to net out to a good experience such that we don't need to redo art once it's already been finalized', which is a loop that we'd gotten into. In any game where you crawl on the art as opposed to run past it you will have to iterate in 3D in ways that can drive a producer a little batty, but I think we've done a pretty good job at trying to get ahead of that, and I think that is bearing fruit right now, we're actually polishing rather than just trying to get stuff playable.

Keir: Cool.

Eric: Yeah. Alex pretty much covered it. In the action adventure genre, Tomb Raider is about the hardest game you could possibly make. And the fact that we've done two of them - there's hundreds of little lessons here and there, they're all pretty boring to listen to, but they all add up to 'it is really hard to make these kinds of games', and by this being the third one, we can now do it much better and easier than we ever did before.

Alex: Yeah, and in a lot of ways, the Anniversary team really had almost the experience that you'd like to have straight out the gate because they didn't do a lot of extending on the feature set, so from day one they were ready to go on blockmeshing a game that was working before, you know, we had to actually go through months of getting the moves done over again to see exactly how they were gonna work, so we were much better than Legend, but Anniversary started off with you could actually blockmesh out the whole game and start playing it and moving it around in 3D and actually doing an additional layer of checking to make sure it's fun before you started putting art on it, but a game like ours is just irreducably, you will be iterating in 3D, and so the lesson to take away is how to continue to erode at the amount of iterating you need to do on the back end.

Eric: Yeah, and because we have this jump into next gen, that's such a big problem in and of itself - there used to be three textures per wallface, now we've got 12 textures per wallface - that's a big enough hill to climb. If we had to climb that hill and climb the hill of how do you actually make a Tomb Raider game, that would've been crazy, that's what sinks games into four year development cycles, whereas with us, we knew how to make that kind of game, we could concentrate our effort on making it in next gen.

Keir: So the next question comes from Pietras, who asks: Assassin's Creed has free climbing, Uncharted has incredible graphics. What's the one thing that will make Tomb Raider: Underworld unique and better compared to other titles when released?

Eric: Well, it's going to sound like I'm cheating by saying two things, but it's really just one thing, but... We're going to have amazing graphics. People are going to be just blown away. The stuff that people have seen in the screenshots so far, they're nothing to what we have on the artists' screens right now, what we're building. But the one thing that we have is, when I bring other designers, other artists from different projects in the building, other people from different departements, and I let them play through the later parts of the game that we haven't shown in any of our demos or screenshots, they almost all say the same thing when they're done, they say, 'Wow, that was epic.' And it's because the things you are doing are on such a large scale and they have such a great impact, and the spaces you get to go into and explore and do things in and see the effects of that manipulation, it's... it's epic.

Alex: Yeah, I really can't put it much better than that. Scale, payoff, epic. That sums it up.

Keir: And Lara's animations - awesome as well, from what I've seen. I guess you guys will see that soon. And the next question, quite a few guys touched on this one, but could you estimate how long the game will take to complete if a player who enjoyed exploring, solving puzzles and finding secrets and playing on the hardest difficulty was in control? Or how about an average player, so just kind of a general indication of the length of the game?

Eric: Well, we're still too early to be able to tell that in all the respects that you just asked because we haven't done enough focus testing yet to know what the spectrum of average users are, but we know that if you went through it as fast as you possibly could, without making a single mistake and knowing all the answers to all the puzzles and everything, it's twice as long as Legend. And that's literally if you had the strat guide in your lap and did things out of order just for the purpose of trying to get as fast as you could. No actual player could do that. It's gonna be upwards of ten hours. How much beyond that is gonna really depend on the player and on what happens between now and ship.

Keir: Okay, cool.

Alex: Yeah, no player. And that means you, Scion05.

Keir: And there's a final question here, I don't know if you guys are going to be able to answer, but can you tell us about when we might see a trailer or some actual in-game footage?

Eric: Yeah, we're... I just came out of a meeting to talk about the trailer, we're looking at something coming out this summer.

Keir: Sweet. Okay, so that concludes the first Tomb Raider podcast. Over the next few months, we'll be doing a lot more of these. So thanks to Eric and to Alex, and we'll be seeing you soon with some more of your questions.

[Endow]

Downloading

[george_croft]

Awesome! Gonna listen to it right now.

[Crystal girl]

Thank you all!!

[mikelcroft]

Pretty cool. thanks!

[b0bb13]

Thank you!

[Explorer]

Downloading also

[Wana b like Lara]

Woot! Woot! Guess what i'm doing? =)

[KC Mraz]

Mmm, Ahhh... YEY! . Thanks .

*Starts downloading it*

[Drone]

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaaaa !