Tomb Raider Writer Halved Lara's Kills For Narrative's Sake Update: No, She Didn't

Karloff

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Tomb Raider Writer Halved Lara's Kills For Narrative's Sake Update: No, She Didn't




Update: This article was based on an apparent error in transcription, which has since been corrected in the source. The original interview stated "halve the first death count," which should have read "have the first death count."

"It's very difficult to keep that good affable character when they're having to slaughter loads of people," says Rhianna Pratchett, writer of Tomb Raider and crafter of the current Lara Croft, one of gaming's more bloodthirsty protagonists [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122744-Tomb-Raider-Players-Munch-1-4-Million-Crabs]. "But what we tried to do with Lara," Pratchett goes on to say, "was at least halve the first death count," in an attempt to balance narrative needs against the action-oriented demands of gameplay.

There's only so far a writer can go down that road, particularly in a game like Tomb Raider, where the combat is one of the main draws. "I'd say from a narrative perspective, we would have liked the ramp-up to be a bit slower," Pratchett says "[But] when players get a gun, they generally want to use the gun." That was why Lara spent so much time, in-game, unarmed, and why, after that, Lara still had to make do with the bow for a while before getting her hands on a firearm. Narrative demanded that restraint; but gameplay demands action, and that means a rapid increase in the body count as soon as Lara gets her hands on a firearm.

"Narrative can't always win," Pratchett admits. "ometimes combat, or gameplay or whatever, has to win out." Pratchett hopes that games will start to focus more on character and characterization in the years to come, describing it as an "undercooked" area of game development. She knows there's no magic bullet but hopes that, with time and perhaps also with shifting perceptions of what a character can or ought to be, character - and with it, narrative - will become more of a focus in gaming.

Source: Kill Screen Daily [http://killscreendaily.com/articles/interviews/tomb-raider-writer-rhianna-pratchett-why-every-kill-cant-be-first-and-why-she-wanted-make-lara-croft-gay/]


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Zhukov

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Dec 29, 2009
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VINDICATION!

Vin-Dee-Cay-Shun!

At least she's aware of it. Personally I wouldn't having minded going a lot longer without killing. However, I don't know how much I represent the typical gamer.

On the other hand, the combat was very fun. The second firefight in the shanty town was a stand out.
 

Thaluikhain

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Nevermind that, the writer is called "Rhianna Pratchett". That is much more of a videogamey name than the actual character has.

Oh, cap is "good samaritan", same as last time, except less blurry this time
 

teebeeohh

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i actually would not have minded going a lot longer without guns, i love the bow in this game(despite hating it in all the other games it showed up recently).
 

IronMit

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And there lies the problem with Tomb Raider and the problem with 90% of the gaming industry;

You are trying to fit some sort of survival character driven narrative on an action game template. No matter how much you tweak it, it will jar.

The most famous games don't suffer from this, the settings and game mechanics are made side by side and fully thought through.
The first 3 Tomb Raiders are an example of this, ico, shadow of the colossus, dark souls, portal, zelda, mario, thief, hitman 1-4, and to a lesser extent even games like Halo- (shields regenerating fits the setting).
 

Treblaine

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The original Tomb Raider, the classic 1996 game, you know what Lara Croft's body count was in that game? 50? 100? 1'000??!

Six

Yes, only six people does Lara actively kill. The games don't have a lot of combat and most of that is with wild animals or monster but not "people" per se. Each of them was named as a distinct character even:

Larson Conway
Pierre Dupont
The Cowboy
Jerome "The Kid" Johnson
"Kold" Kin Kade
then Jacqueline Natla

particularly in a game like Tomb Raider, where the combat is one of the main draws.
Wasn't the case for the original Tomb Raider.

Which is why I'm going to be skipping this reboot. Games didn't used to need this. So many levels in the original Tomb Raider series Lara has either lost her guns, hasn't gotten them yet, or cannot use them.

Now I like shooting people in the face as much as the next man, but that wasn't Tomb Raider's bag, baby. It was about solving a puzzle of the environment and the MOOD set by the environment, the feeling of isolation and almost survival horror level of tension sometimes.


This is the soundtrack as swimming around a capsized ship. You have to make decision like diving into water filled with hungry sharks and recover a solve a key puzzle at the same time.

Puzzles weren't obtuse "here is a gigantic puzzle box" they were navigation puzzles, formed naturally in the environment, not arbitrary combination of cogs or something like you get in Uncharted.

I think the original Tomb Raider did a better job than this reboot did at getting to the goal this writer describes.
 

Miss Layton

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All due respect Ms. Pratchett... huge fan of your dad's, love Discworld, and I'm well aware you're bringing the City Watch on the small screen. I will be religiously watching that show, believe you me. But, this being said, I'm going to have to call bullshit. There are ways you could have accomplished your goal without sacrificing gameplay or narrative. Some of the greatest games of all time are able to marry the two harmoniously, with each complimenting the other.

Take Spec Ops The Line, for instance. As the narrative progresses, as Captain Walker's sanity dwindles and his own soul spirals downwards into a damnation of his own making, the gameplay gradually comes to reflect this. His takedowns, which at the beginning were silent and professional, become more brutal, sadistic and barbaric. Near the end, he outright screams like a barbarian and throws any of that professionalism out the window as he just beats a man to death.

Or how about Shadow of the Colossus? By keeping the narrative minimalistic and driven by action and implication, we see how Wander is losing his own humanity in the pursuit of his quest. Each time he slays a colossus, his appearance becomes more haggard, more disheveled, and by the end of the game he's lost all trace of his earlier bishonen good looks. While there's no other way of advancing through the narrative without taking on the colossi, by simply framing the deaths of each beast in a certain way, we see the real context is that of a complete tragedy.

I can go on. Silent Hill 2, Deus Ex, Persona 4, Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne, either Portal, and so on so forth.

If you wanted to minimize Lara's need to murder people, you could have taken the Metro 2033 approach and make bullets scarce. You could have added more emphasis on stealth, Thief-it up a bit. Or how about taking the Far Cry 3 route and have Lara wrestling with the startling revelation she seems to have a great gift at mass murder? That would have added something to her character arc.

The point is, there could have been other ways of going about it.
 

Fasckira

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Oct 22, 2009
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Treblaine said:
particularly in a game like Tomb Raider, where the combat is one of the main draws.
Wasn't the case for the original Tomb Raider.
Thing is their logic is its a reboot to bring Lara to the current "popular" demographic. I genuinely think that if they had stuck to the traditional formula it wouldn't have sold nearly as well.
 

teqrevisited

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Maybe if more time was devoted to puzzles and platforming, not having so many gunfights or other such encounters, then the kills would have had more meaning.
 

Metalrocks

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i do agree that this game had too much action for my liking. yes, i like a good action game and shoot down tones of bad guys but this doenst really fit in a TR game.
many people in the TR forum also wanted less action and more exploration and surviving the environment. but yet, they still enjoyed the game.
i still think they did a good job explaining the character as such, but it could have dealt with less action. keep it at least for the end, this could have worked.
 

Bakonon

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Jul 29, 2010
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I think there's a typo in the source article. "Halve the first death count," should probably be, "Have the first death count." Especially if you look at the context, it seems to make more sense that way.
 

Canadish

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Treblaine said:
TLDR #YOLO
PFFFT.

Get with the times grandpa. You seriously want me to sit there and have to think and explore when I play a video game? Where's the fun in that? What if I can't figure it out and get frustrated?

You probably just need to take off your nostalgia goggles.


Seriously though, good post. Someone put me onto a good video last night that talked about developers falling back on violence in gaming, which was pretty interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZM2jXyvGOc

Somewhat different in what he's talking about, but there is also more then a few links as well.
 

Monsterfurby

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To be honest, I actually think playing someone inexperienced in killing people could be an interesting game mechanic. It would be interesting if the game would consider self-preservation instinct and getting used to killing.

For example, Lara would not be able to aim properly in the beginning, trying to prevent killing other living beings. When her life is threatened however (wolves in clear sight, enemy firing at her or chasing her), her aim would get steadier and she would be faster in reloading and so forth.

This would force the player, especially in the beginning, to let the enemy have the first shot, to hesitate, like someone not used to killing would, thus making the whole survival theme more apparent. Eventually, depending on how many kills she actually carried out, Lara would slowly become the jaded killer she is known as.

I'm always surprised that game designers don't work closer with the story writers in developing interesting game mechanics that are both thematic and challenging.
 

Proverbial Jon

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Nov 10, 2009
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Karloff said:
But, Rhianna Pratchett admits, there's only so much not-killing a combat heavy game can take.
*Spits feathers*

But... but this shouldn't have been a combat heavy game! If you're rebuilding the franchise from the ground up, why would you turn it into a third person cover shooter and then tack on a survival storyline? That makes no sense at all. Crystal Dynamics had a chance to make something new and interesting. Instead we get Uncharted minus the charm and personality.

Tomb Raider is about raiding tombs, that's all I wanted. Getting to see some development and character for Ms. Croft was going to be a brilliant bonus on top of that; I'm all about story and character development. But instead the whole thing came off as a bit of a failure.

It makes me wonder though, what would Pratchett's story have been like without the constraints of gameplay?

Treblaine said:
I think I love you.

But seriously, you're completely right. I'm not sure why Tomb Raider 2013's huge narrative/gameplay disconnect keeps getting this free pass from people who simply say: "Well you've got to get the gameplay in somewhere!" Yeah, gameplay, as in exploration and puzzle solving. Not a John McClane style killing spree through a jungle!

Also, those people who say that the "tombs" in this game are a nice homage because the originals were too complex are complete idiots. I don't play an RTS and then complain for it to be changed simply because I don't have a knack for strategy. God damn, I hate this dumbing down for the masses. Very soon all our games will be indistinguishable from one another.
 

Monsterfurby

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Proverbial Jon said:
But seriously, you're completely right. I'm not sure why Tomb Raider 2013's huge narrative/gameplay disconnect keeps getting this free pass from people who simply say: "Well you've got to get the gameplay in somewhere!" Yeah, gameplay, as in exploration and puzzle solving. Not a John McClane style killing spree through a jungle!

Also, those people who say that the "tombs" in this game are a nice homage because the originals were too complex are complete idiots. I don't play an RTS and then complain for it to be changed simply because I don't have a knack for strategy. God damn, I hate this dumbing down for the masses. Very soon all our games will be indistinguishable from one another.
Well, they kind of aimed for more of a "survival horror" angle than the "Indiana Jones" perspective of the old games. The problem is that they essentially kept the old mechanics in place and lifted some changes wholesale from the current genre reference - Dead Space.

Problem with that: the Dead Space main character is NOT Lara Croft. There is so much more they could do with the different perspective here. If they had put some effort in synchronizing gameplay and story instead of treating them separately like they did, this game could smell much less of "been there, done that"..
 

Dryk

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As I've been saying, this disconnect smacks of trying to have one's cake and eat it. These comments just confirm it. They wanted all the cred that comes from a gritty survival storyline without having to bother working it into the mechanics properly, and the game will suffer for it.
 

Proverbial Jon

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Nov 10, 2009
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Monsterfurby said:
Well, they kind of aimed for more of a "survival horror" angle than the "Indiana Jones" perspective of the old games. The problem is that they essentially kept the old mechanics in place and lifted some changes wholesale from the current genre reference - Dead Space.

Problem with that: the Dead Space main character is NOT Lara Croft. There is so much more they could do with the different perspective here. If they had put some effort in synchronizing gameplay and story instead of treating them separately like they did, this game could smell much less of "been there, done that"..
They may have aimed for "survival horror" but it was a swing and a miss. If "survival" is about living through a hectic gun fight, then pretty much every game made is a survival game. It's like Roleplaying Games, you play "roles" in every game but it doesn't make every game an RPG, there are certain markers you need to be hitting to be in a specific genre. Tomb Raider 2013 is no more about survival than Duke Nukem is about the virtue of sexual abstinence.

There was a lot more they could have done with this game, as you rightly say. It just pains me to see yet another beloved franchise succumb to the same fate as so many other rebooted games.
 

Ukomba

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Too bad it isn't the other Pratchett. I'd love to see Lara switched out with Angua.
 

LordMonty

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Good pr to blame us blood thirsty gamers... i only killed 30 or so crabs... i was hungery ok :p but its true componies wanting the triple A games seem to need them guns. We can hope for a more restrained future(in many walks of life) and more peaceful solutions(also in many walks of life).