Crystal Dynamics are working on putting the final touches to Tomb Raider before its launch in early-March 2013, but that doesn’t mean preview trailers will stop. A team at their sister studio – Eidos-Montreal have been working on the game’s first versus multiplayer mode. They hope this new mode breaks new ground for the franchise and is the focus of this “Surviving Together” trailer. In this fourth installment in the preview series, Zachary Levi travels to Montréal to sit and chat with some of the key team members from Crystal Dynamics about the rationale and direction for this new feature, and introduces viewers to the team from Eidos-Montréal. The team discusses the core focus to ensure they injected attributes from the single player with a multiplayer twist, such as team survival, verticality and the inclusion of environmental threats.
Darrell Gallagher | Head of Studio at Crystal Dynamics
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.
Stephane D’Astous | General Manager of Eidos-Montreal
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 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 multiplayer has to fit and has to be fun or no one will play it. 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.
