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After a few months of work the concept was deemed too ethereal and difficult to understand for Tomb Raider. Izumi would crawl into small places to help the player, thus creating asymmetric gameplay.Įventually the player would dicover Izumi’s magical ability to manipulate water and interact with the island. In Longo’s first pass at the design Lara Croft teamed up with a 6-year-old girl named Izumi as they adventured through a mysterious island inhabited by ghosts and monsters. The emotionally rich role-playing game Ico, the survival horror of Resident Evil, and the towering mythical creatures of Shadows of the Colossus all served as early inspiration. In early design meetings the team started thinking about other games that could inspire a new approach. Obvious biblical references aside, the team led by creative director Tim Longo was asked to come up with a radically different approach to a Lara Croft adventure.
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“The Tomb Raider name never appeared on Guardian of Light and there was a reason – Crystal was saving that for the next project, what was internally known as Tomb Raider 9, or Tomb Raider: Ascension. Before the final Tomb Raider 2013 was released, EIDOS published a promotional Digital Book “ Tomb Raider – The Final Hours” containing images and a video with the lost Ascension prototype: Taking inspiration from such titles as Resident Evil, ICO and Shadows of the Colossus, Lara’s reboot début was to be filled with giant supernatural enemies, a child companion that followed Lara, horse combat and explorations in a lavish open-world environment.Ĭoncept art was already released immediately after the initial game announcement which holds lots of things not included in Tomb Raider’s final draft, and the concept lead many people to believe Tomb Raider was going to become something of a horror-genre game. Dubbed Tomb Raider: Ascension(not to be confused with the 2007 fan-made movie), its conception was a world away from what gamers got in the end. This new Tomb Raider project was started in early 2009 and was originally meant to be a much more different game than the final one. However, it seems that the development process took a rather sharp turn.
#Tomb raider 3 pc game series
While the game was never announced by Eidos nor Crystal Dynamics, fans of the series found documents of the project online, preserving its existence from being forgotten.Īction Adventure Crystal Dynamics tomb raider Read moreĪ reboot of Tomb Raider was developed by Crystal Dynamics and released in 2013 to welcoming applaud and incredible reviews.
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In the end the game was canned in pre-production, when they just had some concept made with placeholder graphic and some gameplay ideas to pitch to the studio managers. It’s currently unclear if players would use these Doppelgangers as their playable characters, or if they were the main enemies. The story focused on the clones of Lara Croft, known as the Doppelgangers. Raiders’ concept was heavily different from The Guardian of Light, as it would have been much more similar to the original Tomb Raider games, with third person exploration, platforming and shooting combat. Raiders is a cancelled project in the Tomb Raider series, that would have been developed for Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC as a coop multiplayer spin-off, before Crystal Dynamics decided to instead working on Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light.
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