Nuevo Articulo sobre Tomb Raider Legend!!!!

[Evan Croft]

Tomb Raider rises again

 

 

As much as you'd like to, there are some things you simply can't share with others.

 

One of them, we've discovered, is the answer to the question: "What do you want from Tomb Raider Legend?"

 

Even an off-record brainstorming session with Eidos' senior European producer Greg Housnam fails to find the magic buzz-phrase to summarise our expectations, simply because such a thing doesn't exist. Not in words, at least.

 

Instead, the true appeal of Tomb Raider lies somewhere in among its sights, sounds and situations, communicable only between the player and the game.

 

So when the new Lara emerges - inventory strapped in its visible entirety around shoulders, waist and thighs - to look out over the most resplendent waterfall this side of Final Fantasy X-2, with a mental click we have our answer.

 

A few grid-free swings, shimmies and lever pulls later and the entire cascade of water splits and subsides to reveal the grand, overgrown face of a forgotten underworld. Another click. Our answer is confirmed.

 

"This being the seventh title that we've put out signifies how Lara, in many respects, is the face of Eidos," Housnam declares. "She's a videogame icon and a household name, and so the expectations are huge.

 

"We want to show that we recognise the need to push the brand and, indeed, the genre forward, and Crystal Dynamics was the developer with the experience and ability to do that."

 

Wrested from the hands of lifelong custodian Core Design, and from the brink of complete disownment by its jaded fans, Tomb Raider is looking surprisingly sprightly for a game so long in the tooth.

 

But isn't it the case, we ask lead designer Riley Cooper, that while Legend marks the reinvention of Lara Croft, it's also just a return visit to some of her oldest haunts?

 

"In setting out to do this project we very much did look at the original Tomb Raiders: what made them popular and why people like them, so in some ways that accusation is correct. But I think we have brought modern-day expectations to bear.

 

"The other part that's different is that we've gone for a more cohesive experience in terms of the game's systems, level design and story. Those things are more tightly interrelated than anything done on the series before."

 

Locked fittingly in a tomb of its own while Crystal formulates a more modern interpretation, the retired status of the series' previous code is Legend's greatest show of promise.

 

But as sincere as this return to the drawing board seems, aren't there inherent dangers in handing a characteristically Anglicised game over to Americans?

 

"I don't believe so," Cooper replies. "The biggest guard against that - no pun intended - is Mr Gard. He really is empowered to manage Lara, which means he has a big impact."

 

This is a return from voluntary exile for senior designer Toby Gard, a man who made such a break from both design tradition and his own resume with Galleon that the last place you'd have expected to find him was in a consultancy role here.

 

"I suppose it's been a lot more relaxing than normal," he reveals, his quintessentially British tones undiminished by Californian surrounds.

 

"You know, I'm used to having to call all the shots and that's not the case here, so it's been a somewhat more chilled-out experience because I've been able to apply myself to smaller, more detailed parts of the game across various different points. It's remained interesting without that need to pull the whole thing along."

 

Introduced to virgin territory in 1996, Lara Croft is returning to an industry overpopulated by purposefully engineered plunderers of her own legacy. It may writhe with sex objects rather than symbols, but this orgy of half-baked heroines is quite capable of drowning even its more sophisticated competitors.

 

Why, we ask Gard, should Lara still be considered relevant in such a crowded market? "I think it's exactly because she's not what you've just described the others to be," he suggests.

 

"Tomb Raider is about a character who's extremely dangerous, very refined and who goes after mysteries. That's it in a nutshell, isn't it? The fact that it's not supposed to be playing the blatant sex card - that's what makes her interesting in the first place.

 

"I'm not sure there are many others like that - Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, I guess. But it's rare."

 

So here we are, then, at the point a few paragraphs into any post-2003 Tomb Raider article where we pay tribute to just how catastrophic a game its sixth instalment was.

 

Pumped on to shelves by a gale of hot air about revolutionised controls and dramatic departures, it emerged a broken relic rather than a breakthrough. How else could you attempt to bury such ignominy than by starting over from scratch?

 

"That was the right approach that they chose," confirms Gard. "Crystal Dynamics didn't have a jot of code or a single bit of art from any of the previous games. So for them to have a stable base from which to really innovate the franchise, they needed to be able to create the fundamentals of what a Tomb Raider game is. That and push it forward in terms of implementation."

 

This, however, isn't to say that Darkness was completely ignored by the team. "I feel bad about how we occasionally ****ged on it," admits Cooper.

 

"But we also have to be careful about that because it reviewed horribly, so when we decided that we were going to compare ourselves to Angel of Darkness, we knew it could lull us into a false sense of security where if we beat that game by getting, say, a 5.6 in our reviews, we still wouldn't have accomplished anything."

 

Would it be right to suggest that Legend's back-to-basics approach is also a recognition that modern games of the genre have become too convoluted?

 

"Well, it's a tough call, isn't it?" suggests Gard. "That's the question of whether or not a sequel is designed for all the people who played the previous games, or whether it's designed to bring in new people.

 

"The people who've played it before need to have something new and so you've either got to add new things into the formula or shake things up whilst still keeping to the theme."

 

And where, precisely, should the formula be augmented? Is it the job of the character to evolve, or should the surrounding environment and the events that transpire within provide the hook while the character itself provides the consistency?

 

"That's what Tomb Raider did, though, didn't it? For, like, six games or something - just different stories. I'm not entirely sure that you can do that and keep people's interest up, to be honest.

 

"They certainly didn't manage to with Tomb Raider because it was just like playing endless mission discs with the odd extra people chucked in. That's not good enough. The story has to be new, the environments have to be interesting. You've just got to mix up the actual gameplay so people can think there's freshness there."

 

Beating a path through eight environments encompassing Burkina Faso, Bolivia and a modern urban location that Housnam insists is there "for a very good reason", Legend has been accordingly mixed up to make us appreciate that, in game terms, Lara isn't about exploration as much as she's about movement.

 

This in turn highlights how potent the IP must have been to sustain the six comparatively handicapped adventures it has produced thus far.

 

From the signature swan dive that drops you over a hundred feet into an early swimming segment, Legend grabs you because its character, for the first time, moves exactly as she should.

 

Elsewhere, the game's combat is something of an unknown, its Devil May Cry-inspired pistol juggles, for example, lacking the kind of close-quarters context they require.

 

But the thoughtful rappel puzzles (do pay attention, EA), automatic ledge grabs (implemented to minimise 'silly deaths') and timing-dependent swing combos we've seen are already a convincing enough hook for now.

 

Novel, if unproven, touches such as a body-mounted torch that pops on automatically when darkness would otherwise impair your vision offer further assurance that Legend is at least thinking for itself.

 

Considering the rigid cutaways of previous Tomb Raiders, it's also uplifting to see a similar degree of thought informing the new game's story.

 

"We've done our best to bleed that edge - to get story deeper into the game," says Cooper. "It's actually one of my keen interests in action adventures. But there're a lot of limitations, particularly in third-person.

 

"Games like Half-Life have figured that in first-person you can do a lot of storytelling because you're not looking at the central character. In a third-person game, if you're trying to have serious dialogue and the player has the character jumping around like a bunny rabbit, it becomes completely ineffective.

 

"But some of the things we have done include making our cutscenes skippable. We have lines from many of them where if you skip the cutscene during gameplay, the characters will say the key objective-related information in-game instead.

 

"We've looked at some of our cinematics and said that if they're not tied directly to a location or referring directly to each other or to something in the scene, we'll let the dialogue continue during gameplay.

 

"Even that's a bit of a risk and a challenge, because she'll still be jumping around while she's supposed to be talking, but we just feel the trade-off of allowing the story to play during the game is worth it."

 

Satisfied with such an assured flow of ideas, we return to the difficult question: what will a consumer want from this revived franchise once it's been rebuilt?

 

"Because it's evolved so much, it's difficult to know what people want," admits Housnam. "But they're still interested in Lara Croft," Cooper later suggests.

 

"Her character is fine. The issues that we've seen have been that people, almost because of how much they've liked Lara Croft, have come to hate the franchise because of how the games have been done.

 

"Primarily, that's because they haven't changed for six titles. So really that's the biggest hurdle - to overcome the backlash."

 

Tomb Raider Legend is out for Xbox and Xbox 360 in spring 2006 and for PS2 and PC later in 2006

 

 

Traduccion:

 

Tomb Raider arrasa otra vez

 

Tanto como ustedes querian,aqui hay algunas cosas que simplemente ustedes no pueden compartir con otros.

 

Una de ellas,que nosotros hemos descubierto,es la respuesta a la pregunta"¿Que quieren ustedes para Tomb Raider Legend?"

 

Incluso en una seccion de reflexion(o algo asi)con el jefe de produccion europeo de Eidos,Greg Housnam,no puede encontrar la frase magica para resumir nuestras expectativas,simplemente porque es imposible.No en palabras,al menos.

 

La verdadera suplica de Tomb Raider miente en alguna parte(?) o almenos eso parece,sonidos y situaciones,solo comprensible entre el jugador y el juego.

 

Asi que cuando la nueva Lara emerge-el inventario esta atado enteramente visible en sus hombros,cintura y muslos-para poder mirar sobra la mas resplandeciente cascada,con solo un click mental ya sabremos que hacer.

(HASTA AQUI LO TRADUCI YO)

 

 

Bueno,espero que les haya gustado,sinceramente no se muy bien que es,pero parece un relato del juego jugado por alguien,yo lo saque de aqui http://www.tombraiderforums.com/forums/ult...c;f=21;t=002555 ,por si quieren checar algo.Bueno,espero que un alma caritativa se atreva a traducir lo que falta,o ir traduciendolo entre todos lo que falta....sino mañana lo sigo traduciendo yo.Saludos,espero que les haya gustado!!

:wave:

[lilo]

la verdad es que esta muy bueno, pero yo no lo puedo traducir porque yo con el ingles me dio mal.

Saludos y grasias por la informacion te quiero mucho Lilo

[JocLo]

Muchas Gracias por la info!!!!

[AnaCroft]

Gracias por la información Evan Croft, bechitos

[jesus c. croft]

asias

[Leocroft]

ahh, gracias evan croft.

[kaworu]

Gracias Evan pero k alguien traduccas mas cosas a mi el ingles se me da fatal