rise_of_the_tomb_raider_Dev_Blog_for_stealth_gamers

Dev Blog: Rise of the Tomb Raider for Stealth Gamers

Philippe Therien, Lead Combat Designer

Hello everyone! My name is Philippe Therien, I am the Lead Combat Designer on Rise of the Tomb Raider and I am here today to talk about some of the exciting new gameplay that we have in the game!

I guess I should start by saying that that we thought long and hard about what to do for this game, you the fans were a huge inspiration for this and after listening to your feedback, we came to a few conclusions…

Our first conclusion was that you all wanted more choices when it came down to stealth gameplay and you wanted to be able to play that way more often even if a small fight had gone loud.

Our second conclusion was that you wanted to see Lara grow as a person and learn to leverage her environment even more than she had before.

All this together gave us this vision that Lara would be a hunter for this game. She would learn to use the world to her advantage to avoid, engage, or mislead enemies so this is where we focused our efforts. We call this Guerilla combat…

rise_of_the_tomb_raider_Dev_Blog_for_stealth_gamers_lara_on_top_of_a_tree

Let’s start with Lara’s moves, she can now climb trees, hide in bushes and swim under water which gives her the ability to avoid enemies in many places or engage in stealthy take downs as needed from those places. Each has a cool custom animation that really reflects Lara’s ability to use the world to her advantage. Lara can avoid or engage from the ground, from below and from high as would any good hunter in her environment.

But Lara can also mislead her enemies, picking up and throwing many objects in the game will create a sound distraction that enemies will investigate on their own or as a group in some cases. This can be extremely useful to ambush hostiles or simply move them out the way.

rise_of_the_tomb_raider_Dev_Blog_for_stealth_gamers_lara_stealth_takedown

Simply picking up objects isn’t the full story though, in all cases Lara can craft something more interesting with the things she picks up in the world which is already cool but to top it off these have a use in both combat and stealth. For example: A bottle can be thrown to distract an enemy but it can also be crafted into a Molotov cocktail, a powerful combat weapon.

Combat in Rise of the Tomb Raider is always about choice, it’s which skills you choose depending on your play style, or when and how to engage enemies; all the way to weapon upgrades and what you craft.

Lara is a customizable guerilla fighter that you will shape based on your preferences.

So let me ask you this…What will YOUR Lara be like?