Crystal Dynamics game director Daniel Bisson reveals first gameplay of the multiplayer in upcoming Tomb Raider game.
These days, a standard video game is essentially a bundle, where it must feature a multiplayer mode along with the single player. While this may prove beneficial for gamers, or give the impression they’re getting more content for their money – not all games turn out as well as they could. Developers split their time into both aspects of the game, making it difficult to produce top tier quality because they only have a set amount of time to make it, so that only the top companies can pull that kind of feature off successfully.
However the upcoming Tomb Raider game which everyone knows about, with Lara Croft’s latest adventure (although if we’re speaking in terms of timelines this will be her first show) has Eidos Montreal; the development team who made Deus Ex: Human Revolution creating the multiplayer aspect of Tomb Raider. This could potentially have solid single player and multiplayer content, since both development teams are working on a primary part of the game. Eidos Montreal producer Joe Khoury, talked about the multiplayer mode of Tomb Raider:
“The project basically came to light two years ago. Tomb Raider as a reboot had already been in existence. Crystal [Dynamics] had really wanted to do a multiplayer component but they didn’t want to fragment their team so they looked at other opportunities within Square Enix and Eidos Montreal — first of all there’s a big pool of talent in Montreal — and they said that if we wanted to do this correctly, a fully dedicated team would need to put their attention on it. Which is where we came in.”
“Being fans ourselves; we didn’t want to necessarily do something we didn’t feel convinced about.”
“We recruited a team specifically for it,” Khoury said of his team. “We had some great talent from other projects inside Eidos Montreal but we also picked talent from Montreal that had worked on multiplayer before. And we really studied single-player correctly to see if we could do something that didn’t feel like a last-minute addition. We didn’t want to do that. That was never the mandate, just to make sure we add a mode that’s not necessary.”
“We had to make some adjustments for things to work well in multiplayer, and we looked to single-player for inspiration but also other games that had done single-player and multiplayer components,” Khoury explained.
“It’s easy to see what games provided that influence when playing Tomb Raider’s multiplayer mode. You can see the influence of versatility and climbing from Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed’s multiplayer, or the environmental hazards from Gears of War 2. “We have people that worked on Assassin’s Creed and that helped with all the climbing,” Khoury said. “There’s inspiration everywhere.”
In the new video, it shows a multiplayer mode called ‘Rescue’, where it has two different factions: namely, Lara’s ‘Survivors’ and Yamatai (Yamatai is the island the game takes place) ‘Scavengers’. The character you choose doesn’t seem to make a difference in terms of skills or abilities, as was asked in the video interview, however, each faction has distinct abilities that the other can’t perform. For example the Survivors have a Last Man standing ability when they are at near death, and the Scavengers can move along the environments quicker.
The aim of the Survivors is to collect medic packs and return them to a specific point, while the Scavengers are trying to prevent them by any means necessary. The map shown in the video was a fairly open environment, with key trap placements scattered all over the place. The Survivors can place traps to diffuse the Scavenger team and have a chance of returning the favour their way.
There wasn’t much else shown besides a level-up system for gaining experience when playing. You can unlock new characters at certain levels; whether they are more powerful or have more skills is unclear, as it wasn’t mentioned by Daniel Bission, but judging by some of the characters you can choose from, some appeared more skilled and deadly than others.
It’s uncertain what other multiplayer modes will appear but most likely they’ll be more than just ‘Rescue’. More information is rumoured to appear in February.
Tomb Raider will be released on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 on March 5th.
For more information on Tomb Raider, visit the official site at: http://www.tombraider.com
