We wanted to make this the hardest Tomb Raider! Our playtests confirmed that players were hungry for more challenge across all pillars.įor exploration, we also know from playtests and the community that players were eager to play the game without the white markings suggesting the next ledge to climb on. As Lara has grown more capable, so have players – not only did we need to up the challenge for Lara by dumping her into the jungle with new threats, we needed a new layer of challenge for players familiar with the series. This was the third game of the origin trilogy. The second reason was equally important to us. Rather than remove combat, we increased the amount and variety of the other two pillars – hopefully creating a more balanced gameplay experience, and mirroring Lara’s growth into a more intellectual, strategic person. This also aligned with the feedback we’d received from the community that, for some, Tomb Raider had become too combat-focussed. Our goal was that, by the end of the game, she would become a new interpretation of the classic Tomb Raider. That meant increasing her challenge socially (through having Lara talk with the locals), intellectually (through more and harder puzzles) and in traversal (deadlier traps).
With Shadow, we knew we wanted Lara to feel the most capable she ever has.
While Rise of the Tomb Raider brought back the tombs and puzzles in a big way, there was also still a relatively large focus on assault combat and a wider variety of pre-combat stealth options. Tomb Raider 2013 skewed more towards the combat side of things as it re-introduced the series through the survival action lens and thus had a lot of heavy lifting to do to establish the new mechanics and abilities.
Our goal was that each of the game’s pillars – combat, exploration and puzzles – should have as equal play time as possible, especially on the main path. From the earliest days in the development, we knew we wanted this to be the most balanced Tomb Raider of the survivor trilogy. The first reason for separating the difficulty levels? To honor the fact that players would be spending an equal amount of time playing each one. I’d like to illuminate how and why we came up with Shadow‘s customizable difficulty settings – individual settings for not just combat, but exploration’ and puzzles as well.
My name is Heath Smith, Lead Game Designer on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
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