Just like in Tomb Raider, Lara Croft’s deaths in Rise of the Tomb Raider are fairly gruesome, as you can see in the above video (be warned though, as it does contain spoilers).
Speaking with Game Informer, Franchise Creative Director Noah Hughes explained that developer Crystal Dynamics goes over the top with Lara’s deaths to show the danger she faces:
For us, any of the violent outcomes for failure for the player are just meant to frame the stakes that Lara has in this situation. There are gameplay repercussions to dying that you restart at the checkpoint, but there are also narrative repercussions, which is that this is a hostile world and if Lara falls victim to its traps in a tomb – this is the gruesome end to her story.
After pointing out that they want you to be a part of Lara’s victories just as much as her failures, Hughes added, “We try to represent the high and low points of Lara’s journey in an impactful and honest way on screen, and death is a part of that when you’re dealing with high-stakes survival situations.”
Already available on Xbox One and Xbox 360, Rise of the Tomb Raider is coming to PC in early 2016, with a PlayStation 4 release scheduled for late 2016.
If you’re waiting for Rise of the Tomb Raider to hit PS4 next year, Hughes said, “One of the things that we try to do with the cast is that we don’t want people to have to play the previous game in order to understand the current game.”
“And we [do] look to the future about what characters should be included in Lara’s story,” he later added, “but it should be sort of a balance of leveraging the existing cast and building a world of believable characters we can take forward in the universe.”
As for the future of the series, Hughes noted that the different hubs in Rise of the Tomb Raider are roughly two or three times bigger this time around. In a potential sequel, he isn’t sure if an equivalent scale is necessarily the right answer:
What we always want to maintain is a sense of density and a sense of a unique crafting experience, so as much as scale was the right step this time, going forward we want to make sure we’re continuing to create worlds that are meaningful, well-crafted, and rich. It’s not about scale for scale’s sake.
Are you a fan of the gruesome deaths in Tomb Raider?
[Source: Game Informer]
