I want my chosen industry, the tabletop gaming industry, to be so successful overall that it can afford to take people away from the computer gaming industry instead of keep feeding them in to the computer gaming industry.

How do we, all the gaming professionals out there, make that happen? Is it even possible?

The assumption behind her observation and question goes to the question of making the tabletop business more “grown-up” — a place where real, gainful, fulfulling careers can be had. Setting aside that there are some tabletop jobs like that even now, I think that making those opportunities even more widespread is absolutely possible. Three key ideas come most forcefully to mind.

First, most of the publishers I’ve worked for in the past do very little to establish and follow good creative and publishing practices. Editorial change-tracking, disciplined end-to-end text styling (character and paragraph styles, please!), sensible data organization and archiving, solid file-naming conventions… All of these practices are well-known among professional creative organizations across the world. Disciplined processes eliminate friction from the publishing process. They make the products better and they make publishers more nimble as new opportunities that arise from technological advances and market changes. Small publishers, especially, in the tabletop industry, should be better than this.

Second, the tabletop gaming industry doesn’t do a very good job of sales and marketing, especially compared to other businesses run by grown-ups. The number of publishers with detailed — and useful — databases of their fans, customers, and retail outlets is very small. The number of those companies that use them effectively is even smaller. The tabletop game industry should get a lot better at this. “Salesman” does not mean “order taker,” and “marketer” does not mean “blogger.”

Finally, the tabletop business should be aware of and promote the advantages that it has over other creative businesses. Unlike the computer game business, the tabletop business can bring real, playable products to market quickly, and each contributor can make a much more substantial contribution, than anything that all but the smallest mobile app publishers and Facebook-style Flash publishers can match on the digital side. Designing tabletop games can be promoted as much a creative and lifestyle choice as a financial one, even while diligent and disciplined publishers strive to make the financial rewards more competitive.

Long, deep treatises and business plans could be written to answer Miranda’s question much more fully (and a deeper debate could be had about whether some of the assumptions that are part of it are completely warranted), but these three ideas would be an excellent beginning to the question of how to make the tabletop game business a more grown-up industry.

Tomb Raider is about fear and bravery, growth and change, in its gameplay, its story, its characters. The game’s marketing campaign (and, indeed, the game itself) tells us “a survivor is born,” but is that true? What does it mean?

That theme of survival is woven into virtually every aspect of Tomb Raider’s narrative, from its abrupt beginning to its stirring end. Every character is a riff on the theme. The whole experience is a dramatization of the challenges and costs of survival. It’s bloody wonderful.

Massive spoilers from here on out.

You saw the spoiler warning, right?

You’re pretty familiar with the game, probably, but let’s set the stage. Tomb Raider is set on a Pacific island isolated by geography (it lies within a feared stretch of ocean called the Devil’s Triangle) and weather (bizarrely powerful storms catch ships that draw too close and destroy those that attempt to leave). Remnants of previous expeditions, accidents, and passing vessels dwell on the island now, eking out a squalid and feral existence with only a meager hope of escape from the place. We call these people Scavengers. They use the island’s wreckage, from ships and planes, to build themselves a shanty town and other settlements to support their cult. For they believe in an ancient and unhappy Sun Queen that decides who leaves (no one, yet) and who lives and dies on the island.

We’ll come to know this place as the ancient realm of Yamatai, which the game presents as a kind of Atlantis-style lost civilization. Despite its isolation, despite its age, some aspects of Yamatai have survived in the form of ruins, ancient documents, relics, and the frighteningly deathless guards called Oni who protect the island’s holy sites.

Into this mess sails a ship called the Endurance, which breaks at the island’s edge, stranding its crew and passengers in a horrific struggle with the Scavengers. Those passengers are on an archaeological expedition in search of Yamatai. The expedition includes documentarians and scholars… like an untested Lara Croft.

Thus Tomb Raider puts its theme on every character through a pervasive situation that dramatizes that theme: stranded on a remote and haunted island with no hope of rescue. The environment itself is cultivated to dramatize the theme in a way that no character can really escape, and so the theme soaks into every participant in the tale. The shared hell of the lost island puts everyone into the same situation, the same test of character: fight (to survive) or die.

Lara Croft from Tomb Raider

Lara begins the tale almost without agency or awareness, just like us. We don’t know what specifically is happening to the Endurance during the opening disaster sequence because Lara doesn’t know. We don’t have any control over her fate; she’s at the mercy first of a cutscene and later of the island’s scavenging prowlers, who take her captive before so much as a tutorial on the game’s controls. Lara has no chance to change her fate, and neither do we, until she is in a low and horrific place—quite literally. It’s when she’s trapped and near death that she gains agency by becoming a playable character. Then she and we, the player, are in it together.

Consider that moment early on when Lara has to pry the shrapnel from her side. She cries out and our screen goes haywire with pain. We can’t ignore what Lara feels. Yes, of course there’s a layer of reality between us, but we aren’t very far removed from the inside of Lara’s head in this game. We have no ornate HUD to offer us the cold comfort of straight-up data. We’re asked to feel the mist on our face when we clamber near waterfalls or in the rain. We’re asked to look the consequences of failure right in the eye through a collection of gruesome death animations, too. (I took to thinking of those brief and horrifying glances at death as Lara imagining her failure since, of course, she canonically survives the game.)

So, then, our job as the protagonist is to survive the adventure to come. At first. In time, we’ll find that survival isn’t enough. Survival may be desirable and admirable and praiseworthy, but it is not virtuous. It depends what you do with your survival.

Methods

Consider the difference between the methods and motives for survival in the game’s various characters. Lara’s motives and methods change the most over the course of the game, of course, because she’s the main character, yet both her motives and methods are constantly in a kind of thematic interplay with the survivalism of her friends and enemies.

First, Lara fights off the Scavenger in the tunnel such that he dies and she lives amid the tunnel’s collapse. Later, Lara commits her first kill to save herself in a life-or-death situation that’s violently imposed on her. By the last quarter of the game, Lara is stalking purposefully into life-or-death situations to prevent the deaths of others.

Lara’s methods start off desperate, flailing, and uncertain. As she gains skill points, she can hone her abilities to better locate animals for food (which is more essential thematically than to actual gameplay). Later she learns to track useful (but not essential) things like relics and lore; as she adapts to her environment, her personal interests in archaeology and history shine through the mud and blood. She also sharpens her tools and her instincts for combat. Given the island hell where she’s trapped, this is vital to her survival and the survival of her allies. That doesn’t blunt the edge on her progression from lucky survivor to active agent, from defender to protector.

Lara eventually becomes as skilled in combat methodology as the Scavengers. By the end, she’s not sneaking around trying to avoid combat, she’s calling out to them in defiance, in warning, in rage. Eventually she surpasses them all in methodology—devising deadlier and deadlier weapons with which to kill them—and proving that she is as willing and as able to kill as they are.

The real, lasting difference between Lara and her various enemies is in motivation.

Motivation

The Scavengers don’t kill to survive. They let each other live, such as they do. The Scavengers kill to get what they want: escape. They kill to protect and enact the plan of their leader, Matthias—a plan that itself requires someone (a woman pleasing or suitable to the Sun Queen) to surrender their life. How many women has the cult sacrificed to their goddess in the hopes of pleasing her? How many women have Matthias and company burned to see if the Sun Queen would blow out the flames? We don’t know but there don’t seem to be any female Scavengers, so…

Matthias wants to deliver a sacrificial victim to the Sun Queen to please her, so she will allow him (and perhaps his people) to leave the island. Matthias kills to get what he wants and his people learn their ways from him.

Compare Lara, who kills to survive—and kills so that others may survive—to Matthias and his men. Are their motives opposite? We’ll get back to that. First, let’s look at the Oni.

The Oni don’t kill to survive, they survive to kill. They slay the likes of jerkwad archaeologists that pose no threat to them. They exist because they believe it is their purpose to end other lives for the sake of protecting their queen, Himiko. The Oni don’t thrive or apparently long for escape. All they do is endure. All they do is survive. That’s the duty they swore to their mad queen.

Himiko the Sun Queen kills so that she can survive beyond the natural bounds of a mortal lifetime. She imposes her life on someone else’s body. She doesn’t end lives, she takes them for her own. She imposes her life onto her victims’s bodies, denying them their lifetime so that she can extend her own. She has placed her survival above countless other lives, from the succession of her personal victims to the heaps of gory remains piled in her palace. She is plainly a monster.

So, is Lara Croft the neat mirror image of Himiko or Matthias? Lara Croft kills so that others may live. She kills to keep Sam and the rest of the Endurance crew alive as best she can.

No. Lara differs from Matthias and Himiko, but she’s not their opposites. She may be perpendicular to them in motive but she’s not unlike them in methodology. This is, by and large, a result the actions taken by Himiko and her Scavengers. Lara’s transformation is the result of a culture of fear and violence built by Matthias and Himiko on the island. If Lara and her team had been welcomed by Matthias and his people as experts who might be able to help them slay Himiko and end her storms, things might be different. That such an approach wouldn’t occur to Matthias and his Scavengers is evidence of how corrosive and corrupting their way of life is. (And there’s the ugly question of whether anyone could successfully defeat the Oni and slay Himiko without Lara having gone through the crucible to become more than a survivor.)

Surviving in the Crucible

Survival isn’t enough. Getting to the next sunrise isn’t enough. Tomb Raider is full of characters trying to survive in different ways and for different reasons and many of them are nasty, awful, evil people. Survival is neither virtuous nor wicked in itself. Why we survive, what we survive to protect, matters more. When Matthias says there are no heroes at the end of the game, he’s blind to what Lara’s doing. Lara is covered in mud and blood, but she’s taken on the antihero’s mantle to do something heroic. She’s pitted herself through bravery against forces that others feared. She braved the Oni and Himiko herself.

My initial instinct, playing Tomb Raider, was that the message was artfully obfuscating itself: “A survivor is born.” Survivors aren’t born, they’re made. They enter the testing ground and they survive to emerge from it… or they don’t. Lara Croft was forged from raw materials into a survivor in the fires of that hellish island. Sometimes she swung the hammer and sometimes circumstances swung it at her, but the badass character we know was made there by her choices.

Having finished the game and looked back on it, I think the game’s both more tangled and more earnest than I thought—and both in good ways. Lara was forged on that island… but she brought the raw materials with her in herself. While Lara’s choices made her the antiheroine necessary to secure escape from the island—choices she was forced to make in harrowing situations—she changed on that island in a way that no one else did. That isn’t just because of what she went through; it’s because of how she reacted and responded to what she went through. How many people entered the crucible of Yamatai and became Scavengers or corpses? And how many entered that place and emerged as the Tomb Raider?

Just her.

Some games call for rich conversation webs with major, persistent ramifications. The Mass Effects and Walking Deads of the world seem to make great use of dialogue choices and effects. I don’t think what I’m seeking in my action/adventure games is revolutionary but its underutilized so let’s talk about it some more.

Weirdly, to my mind, conversations are considered the stuff of RPGs. If Mass Effect 3 didn’t have robust dialogue, it’d be a shooter with character-customization mechanics. When you add NPC interaction and consequences to dialogue choices, that’s often considered an inherited feature from, or defining feature of, RPGs.

Why aren’t inter-character interactions a feature of more narrative games? Why aren’t they just a feature of play?

Frankly, I think it’s an arbitrary thing. I think it’s about whether or not a character is thought to be drawn with detail by the developers (as with your Sam Fishers, Lara Crofts, and Nathan Drakes) or whether the character is meant to be a sketched gesture or blank slate filled in by the player (as with your Commander Shepards and your Hawkes). In actual practice, the play through any game changes every character a bit, drifting him or her from one identity towards another. My Sam Fisher from Chaos Theory may be a more measured, less violent man than yours, for example.

What matters most to me is that we can add non-violent character interactions to all sorts of games to give them additional play, options, and layers of text, subtext, and context. Consider the impact of documents and overheard conversations in stealth games like Splinter Cell and Thief or the way fixed exchanges of dialogue contextualize what you do in a Halo game. Dialogues and monologues are precious tools for narrative and world-building already. And these are games. So why aren’t more conversations even modestly interactive?

The Simplest Interactivity

The simplest interactions are those where the added info or dialogue is just an optional on/off switch. In Halo, you walk up to UNSC soldiers and they maybe talk to you. In Tomb Raider, you press a button to converse with an NPC without making a whole cutscene out of it. These are slight expansions of the game world, small doses of additional fiction, but they count. Suddenly one soldier is nervous and another’s a jerk. Gradually your involvement in the characters deepens… or doesn’t. You control the toggle (hear the dialogue or skip it) and interpret the result (like an NPC more or less, down to and including not giving a damn either way).

These interactions are fine. Sometimes they’re all that’s needed. They draw us in because we had to act, because we know not everyone heard the exchange we just did, even though the exchange was scripted and a lot of people did hear it just like we did. We glimpse the alternate play path where that exchange didn’t happen, where that content went unheard.

Richer Consequences

So, what can a conversation do to count in play, to make a change that doesn’t require the developer to design whole swaths of the game that occur only if you choose one dialogue path? What can a conversation do in addition to offering different endings?

Again, these aren’t revolutionary thoughts, but what I’d like to see more often:

• Adjust Difficulty: Allow the player to adjust difficulty on the fly during play by expressing to an NPC something like, “Bring ‘em on, I’d prefer a fair fight to all this sneaking around,” or, “Sounds tough; I hope we don’t encounter too much resistance.” This has an added ramification of personifying the character differently based on the player’s play style, though — because it becomes objectively harder to play a cocky character than a more cautious one — but that’s fine for some games.
• Environmental Choices: Enable the player to alter certain environmental variables in an upcoming level with options like: “We’ll go in at night, try to sneak around,” or, “Strike when the convoy arrives at noon so we can capture more weapons,” or, “Attack at dawn.”
• Enemy Forces: Define the nature of the enemy forces as a result of a conversation. While conversing with the villain, the PC can lie about the approach they’ll take and then gear up at the loading screen for a different kind of gambit. “I’ll do to your fortress just what we did to the Gauls back when we were still fighting as Romans.” Thus the player gets the game to stock a level with scouts or brutes or snipers and then goes in with the right tools to take them out.
• Enemy Reactions: Let the player badmouth the NPCs in a conversation so the NPC AIs prove more reckless, more cautious, or quicker to summon reinforcements (worth precious XP). “I’m not afraid of your soldiers. They should be afraid of mine.”
• Choice of Hints: NPCs can reveal clues in certain dialogue branches that, say, put different clues into Nathan Drake’s journal or come back as voiceover bits in later puzzle scenes. Or perhaps their guidance causes either relics, documents, or ammo caches to appear on your map for the next level — but not all three.
• Limited Supplies: NPCs who can’t part with much offer to share any one of food, medicine, or ammo with the player’s character. Through conversation, it’s possible to get any two of the three, maybe.
• Skip A Fight: Whole sequences or encounters can be bypassed, so that instead of fighting a slew of hired thugs, you can intimidate them. Consider the fight scene that didn’t happen in Raiders of the Lost Ark because Indy kept Belloq talking in that bar in Cairo. Indy didn’t draw his weapon until just the moment when the children arrived. That’s a decision point right there. So what if Indy and the audience missed a big fight scene there. The player got to choose. That’s even better.
• NPC Allies: Conversation is how the PC convinces NPCs to come into the Tombs of Peril with him. Is the player willing to lie to avoid going in there alone? Or will he lie to keep a loyal NPC away and alive for a later mission?

Notice that, because I still spend a lot of my time with action games (and direct most of my non-action-oriented play toward tabletop RPG play), most of these conversations are still about battles or action. Little steps. By adding conversations that count into action games, we add facets to them that could make Indiana Jones and the Game of Destiny more than just a puzzling shooter.

Notice, too, that these options can be done well or poorly — just implementing them’s not enough. Some of these choices should exist two or three levels deep in a conversation or be alluded to rather than discussed directly. Subtext is a lot of fun! Characters fronting and posturing can be a lot of fun, too.

Rather than providing dialogue only to define sketched-out RPG characters, and put meat on their bones, give us two or three ways to put our spin on your franchise’s hero or heroine. Otherwise you’ve got a movie character in a video game. That’s okay but it’s not the most robust use of the medium.

Some day, when time permits, I’ll write more about conversations in tabletop RPG play and how to add non-violent challenges to games of all sorts. Until then.

Indy and the Idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark

I’ve enjoyed a slew of Indiana Jones video games, like The Fate of Atlantis and The Emperor’s Tomb, but I haven’t played the Indiana Jones video game I really want right now. It doesn’t exist. Yet with Uncharted and Tomb Raider paying homage in some ways and setting precedents in others, I think the time is right for a new Indiana Jones video-game adventure.

Here’s what I want an Indiana Jones game to be: an adventure game played in the third-person style of Lara Croft and Nathan Drake with rich exploration of engrossing environments, puzzle-based combat, dialogue scenes that count, and rollicking set pieces. The idea is not to recreate the forward momentum of an Indiana Jones movie, because the movies do that already, but to create a uniquely interactive experience that draws on cinematic techniques and ludic mechanisms in equal measure.

From Uncharted Tombs…

We have lots to learn from the innovations, refinements, and polish of the Uncharted and Tomb Raider games. Set our Indiana Jones game earlier in Indy’s career — in the mid-1920s, perhaps — and I think a skill-point or crafting system like those from Tomb Raider could be put to good use. Maybe Indy has to learn a language, how to repair an engine, or how to reassemble artifacts found shattered at a dig site. Just don’t teach him how to fly a plane.

But the most obvious feature to borrow from the other games, probably, is the ability of those games to build remarkable set pieces that thrill even when they’re largely or wholly linear. A few of those per game are great because those kinds of roller-coasters guarantee an experience for the player even though they channel all choices through bottlenecks. Some of those bottlenecks are damned fun. I sort of don’t care that there’s only one way out of Uncharted 3‘s burning chateau. Finding that way turns out to be a puzzle that’s as quick as it is exciting.

Tomb Raider’s tumbling survival sequences and Uncharted 3′s foot chases are notably interesting to me because they create tense thrills but don’t require the gunning down of villainous mooks by the dozens.

I like a good fight scene plenty, but does the headshot have to be the pinnacle of combat expertise? The brawls in Uncharted 3 feel great to me — I’m always trying to rush bad guys in that game so I can fist-fight them. It’s more entertaining to me because it makes better use of the environment. (You should’ve seen my delight when a London thug got a refrigerator door to the face in that opening pub brawl.) I also like the idea that Indiana Jones, while antiheroically willing to shoot swordsmen intending to kill him, doesn’t have to kill quite so many bad guys to keep our attention. The sound effect of an Indiana Jones punch is plenty satisfying.

Lara’s dodging and dirty fighting in Tomb Raider feels like it could be a great fit for fist-fights like the flying-wing bout in Raiders. Add in environmental effects like giant spinning propellers and you’ve got a great fight scene where the goal is to fight a guy long enough that the propeller can take him out. If Raiders were a video game today, we might have to feed a dozen henchmen into that rotor. Ugh.

Let’s make Indy’s fight scenes into brawling puzzles. Uncharted 3′s London pub fight is a good start, but I want more.

Brawling Puzzles

The goal is to stay up and fighting, steering bad guys into situations throughout the scene that enable Indy to finally put them down. Some thugs might take two or three feats to put down; others might be vulnerable to only one specific threat in the environment, whether it’s the truck he’s driving or that propeller. Triggers for environmental effects reveal themselves through dialogue and objects that glow when you hit LB, maybe.

For example, let’s look at the fight scene in Marion’s bar, the Raven, in Nepal. That’s Indy against just a few thugs. While it might look like a gunfight mixed with a brawl, I think it’s actually an adventurous puzzle sequence. To take out one guy, Indy’s player  maneuvers the two of them to the bar and pushes the button to talk to Marion (instead of the button to fight) and thereby gets a bottle of whiskey. Once he gets to the bar, the fire starts to spread thanks to Toht, so Indy has to hit that interaction button and then that fight button quick or he’ll get hurt and have to work harder to survive the rest of the brawl.

Imagine each little victory not as a sure-thing scripted event but as something triggered by moving into a part of the environment. Grapple with that thug near the fireplace? “Shoot them,” Toht says, “shoot them both.” The trick then is to push the thumbstick toward the shooter and pull RT, even though Indy doesn’t have the gun. Or else you spend the rest of the scene dodging gunfire until you can punch that fella out, maybe.

Remember, the fight scenes we see in the films, which inspire the Indy style of action, are examples of one play-through of that environment. The trick, for freedom and replay value, is to have each fight scene feature twice as many environmental actions as are necessary to take out the available bad guys. Maybe Marion shoots the last guy automatically and its up to you to leave one of the toughest thugs for her to shoot at the end, once you know that.

This is fun not only in a puzzle-solving way but in a stage-direction way. It’s about moving the pieces around the board so that they interact in interesting ways with each other and the environmental factors. Replay comes from seeing other environmental factors and watching the combatants interact in different ways.

Animated Indiana Jones by Patrick Schoenmaker

Dig Sites and the Map

Let’s dig deeper into Indiana Jones’s game environments and offer up a degree of freedom to explore Indy’s world that Indiana Jones comics and movies can’t provide. Let’s use the exploration hubs and action sequences of Tomb Raider to let Indy explore a dig site before triggering the arrival of Forrestal’s goons (or whoever). Let’s add in relics and treasures that need to be inspected a bit before they give up all their secrets. Let’s hear Indiana Jones tell us why this knight’s shield or catacomb inscription is significant.

Flight to Nepal from Raiders of the Lost Ark

While the race-to-the-artifact stories that Indy is best known for are often chases, this Indiana Jones game adventure isn’t paced quite the same way. Three different dig sites at three different locales can be explored (and have action sequences triggered within them), allowing players to control a bit of their pacing. Do they want to explore each location first and then trigger one action sequence after another? That’s a legitimate way to play. Do they want to explore each location in turn, activating action sequences as they’re suggested? That’s also great.

To do this, we give the player control over the Map, taking Indy from location to location as necessary to solve certain puzzles or challenges. (In the original drafts of Raiders, the medallion is in two parts and Indy has to go get them; those locales could be done in any order.) Once you find the knight’s tomb beneath Venice, you can explore it. Once you get the paper rubbing off his shield (necessary later in the game), you trigger a deathtrap action sequence followed by the boat chase. Then you can move on from Venice or keep looking around for documents of Henry Jones, Sr., or relics left behind.

This borrows a lot from the fast-travel camps, documents, and relics of Tomb Raider, of course. I think there’s a lot of good play to be had from placing Map locations worldwide and then making the gatekeeping around each departure be based on artifacts, on communication, on puzzle-solving, and XP for Dr. Jones, in addition to jumping and shooting. Giving the player multiple destinations from each hub can be a design headache, I know, but also presents fun choices for the player in control of the Map.

Professor, Adventurer

The video games where I tend to most enjoy playing characters are those with compelling characters already at their core: Tomb Raider‘s Lara Croft, Thief’s Garrett, Uncharted’s Nathan Drake. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn a bit from the RPG elements of games like the Mass Effects, too. So let’s.

I like playing a part — a specific part — as much as I like drifting my take on a character this way or that. My Nathan Drake is less lethal than some, brawling whenever he can. My Lara Croft might be stealthier than yours.

Let’s have dialogue scenes that count for something. This is a chance to not just move and fight like Indiana Jones but to talk and think like him, playing out scenes that add detail and color to the larger adventure. Think of Uncharted’s cutscenes and Mass Effect’s dialogue scenes blended together. You wouldn’t deeply change the nature and style of Indiana Jones the way you might change Commander Shephard, but you could impact the gameplay by changing the context or subtext of scenes even as you change their, you know, actual text. Maybe the Thuggee send more men to assassinate Indy and Short Round in the night if Indy chooses not to apologize at dinner in Temple of Doom, for example.

The dynamic of conversations that count in gameplay is something I want to write more about, but it goes beyond this game. So tune in tomorrow for that post.

I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers for the 2013 Tomb Raider here, but be aware that I’ll be making some direct references to that game as I proceed.

Here, then, is what would go into my Tomb Raider sequel.

Exploration First

Give me more and larger areas to explore. Give me the jungles at the feet of Meso-American pyramids, give me an Etruscan village once buried in ash, give me the Valley of the Kings. Make up the specific locales, if you need to, but keep them closely tied to real history or folklore.

Tomb Raider uses a series of hubs, linked together, to let players explore the environment between story-driven escapades. I loved that ability to influence the pacing of the experience for myself, to hold off the next frantic narrative experience so I could spend some time scouring a crumbling Japanese village or wreck-strewn beach. I’d like more to do in such areas, especially if those areas can be rich in atmosphere and loaded with background detail.

Something I loved about Tomb Raider: the documents. These aren’t new tech — they’ve been some of my favorite parts of several games for 20 years, now — but they’re strong here. The voice performances are good, the material is varied, and it all contributes to the sensation that the locations in the game exist under or on top of layers of history. The way those documents connect and interact to inform Lara about the truth of the island was skillfully handled. Thus we have exploration not just laterally through space but back into history.

In my sequel, the action would still be focused in one part of the world — whether it’s Mexico, Italy, Egypt, or wherever — but the fast-travel camps would be farther apart, representing journeys by boat, by hoof, or by plane within the story’s central area. (Save the world-wide jaunts between far-removed camps for a later sequel; build to it.) This makes part of the new Tomb Raider dynamic not just travel to exciting locales but digging deeper into them than, say, a roller-coaster adventure romp like Uncharted does.

Each area would contain loads of relics and documents to uncover and the localized errands might sometimes resemble side-quests from games like the Assassin’s Creed titles. Help locals rebuild following an intrusion by villainous looters, maybe. Reassemble antiquities for trade or delivery to local museum teams. Eavesdrop on someone (for a stealth jaunt). Hunt some predatory animals that are mysteriously attacking humans. That sort of thing.

Doing all of that would require new tools and simple mechanics for crafting or building, for example, which could easily be things in Lara’s repertoire now that just don’t come up on every adventure or that she learns to do over the course of this game. These sorts of side quests would help create a richer fictional world by characterizing the NPCs (as was done in Tomb Raider) and contributing to two other things I’d like to see in my sequel: More action than violence and new steps toward mastery.

More Action Than Violence

Tomb Raider is a bloody, violent, sometimes vicious game. I get why that is. I feel it went too far. So let’s change the nature of the violence and the action in the sequel.

The gunplay and melee mechanics can work about the same as they do now, let’s just change how often they come into play. The last two or three combats in Tomb Raider were not a lot of fun for me. I learned eventually to try really hard to take out bad guys using stealth just so I wouldn’t have to slog through longer fights. That’s a fine dynamic, in my opinion, but I could stand to see it come up less.

Replace some of the combats with different kinds of action, be they chases (on foot, on horseback, on motorcycles) through great locales (like bamboo forests or the ruins of Pompeii) or a roster of new survival sequences like those in the current game. I’m also rather a fan of puzzles and traps in these games, so there’s those. The point is, we can have peril and action and adventure without having to leave the kinds of body counts that Lara Croft and Nathan Drake have in previous titles.

The Steps to Mastery

One of the challenges of creating a sequel to Tomb Raider must be finding either a new arc for Lara to undertake, so she has things on which to spend skill points. Another must be finding a reason to deny her some of the awesome tools she has at her disposal by the end of the current game (and can presumably afford better versions of for luckier expeditions). Otherwise every hub zone needs to accommodate all of her skills and tools in their puzzle design and, while I imagine that’s possible, it presents a bit of a steep learning curve and makes it trickier to predict and design for the order in which, say, key documents or relics are acquired. It also makes it potentially harder to keep XP as constant and compelling as it was in this game.

Does a Tomb Raider sequel even need XP anymore? Isn’t Lara Croft her accomplished self by the end of Tomb Raider? My Tomb Raider sequel answers “Yes” and “Yes, but.”

Establishing that Lara Croft is going to learn some new skill or set of skills in each Tomb Raider game does two great things, in my opinion. First, it says that her mastery encompasses more than survival and combat. Second, it says that bad-asses never stop learning, which I think is pretty terrific. (You could do that in a totally cheesy way, of course, so what? Learning and knowing stuff is bad-ass.)

So, in my sequel, Lara ventures to a part of the world she doesn’t know quite so much about yet and learns not only some of its history and culture through documents and relics, but she learns how to build things besides guns along the way, from her allies and contacts. Maybe she learns a language or two that help her to decipher documents after they’re recovered and speak to NPCs in more remote locations. (That’s not a bad key-and-gate mechanism, right?) Add these to her survivalist and battle skills, so she can start as an awesome heroine and learn some other lesson(s) this time out.

If we need to keep the salvage mechanics and the weapon-building system, we can strand Lara in some jungle somewhere for part of the game, but I think that system has served its purpose. I’d rather see it used next to repair machinery to travel to the next hub, to assemble relics or antiquities for trade or mystical usage, or for some other purpose. I’ll think on it.

Tombs

One last thing to keep from Tomb Raider, and it’s a brilliant choice that adds so much that I would’ve have expected: optional tombs. Having a supply of optional, puzzle-driven, evocative tomb-environments explorable for XP and bonuses that aren’t technically essential to play was a terrific choice. I don’t know what players would knowingly skip over the tombs in that game, but just knowing that they were optional had two great effects on me:

First, I was so sure that the next tomb I entered would be the one I wasn’t ready for yet — the one that would grind me up with deadly traps and spit out my bones. They became little packages of unknown rewards and challenges, playing with my expectations in interesting ways.

Second, because they were optional, they somehow felt to me more like rarely seen or lost spaces. They’re not, that’s ridiculous, but it was easier to imagine that I had stumbled upon something — something lost or forbidden — with each tomb. Nice touch.

So, in my sequel, I double or triple the number of those that are around and I make some of them a little more dangerous than they might seem. “Don’t go into those woods,” say the NPCs. “They’re haunted.” And a couple of those tombs really are haunted. The achievement you get for finding and completing this or that tomb feels like a treasure itself.

So, Then

Now, having said all that, I have to admit something to you. This is very nearly what I would do with the Uncharted franchise, too, I expect. But Tomb Raider introduced the crafting mechanics and enriched exploration rewards that really makes me want to see them expanded even further, so credit where it’s due.

You’ll notice, though, that I haven’t touched on story here. While I can think of several ways to structure a great Lara Croft story for a sequel that does what I’d want a sequel to do… I’m not going to give those away here. This is, in part, because I’d like to save them for future work. And this is, in part, because I’m channeling some of those ideas into tomorrow’s post about… a game that I hope has a chance at getting made, thanks to the lessons of Tomb Raider and Uncharted and their ilk.

Tune in tomorrow.

It’s not that I would’ve doubted whether there’s a great idea for a character-driven, narrative-driven adventure game in there, it’s that I’d doubt whether the realities of modern big-budget video-game production would be able to pull it off in the face of demographic data and audience testing and brand protection.

(I’m not just talking about the much-publicized controversial and problematic elements of the game’s promotion and production. In fact, I’m not talking about those elements in this review at all — I’m reviewing the game as it was during actual play for me, for whatever that’s worth.)

Making this game required facing some tough hurdles, like making a bad-ass character into a human character without undermining the badassery, if you will. The cunning within the new game’s approach, in my opinion, was that it didn’t really try to leap the more general hurdles. It focuses the game on a specific story, following a popular character through a particular arc, and pays attention to the needs of that story. I can’t say that this Tomb Raider damned every torpedo but I feel like it aimed to stay true to the story it wanted to tell. It’s a shame that story is so grueling and cruel.

Tomb Raider humanizes Lara Croft in a way that could be seen to undermine her bad-ass nature if you think of bad-asses as being necessarily or completely superhuman. So, it seems to me, the developers at Crystal Dynamics didn’t quite aim to clear those hurdles. Instead, they pursued a different path and aimed for a different game with a different voice and style. They bet that an audience exists for this game, this story, this experience.

I hope that bet pays off and I hope Crystal Dynamics learns the right lesson if it does. Here’s why…

While I quite like a lot about the new Tomb Raider, I found it more harrowing than fun in ways that almost made me stop playing. It’s a gruesome, vicious game sometimes. I could do with a sequel that’s less interested in violence and gore.

How gritty is this reboot? I’m filing this review under the “horror” category. Tomb Raider is about survival, yes — in horrific situations. This says a lot about the resolve and strength of Lara Croft, I admit, which makes me simultaneously understand how the game arrives at its over-the-top gore and also feel that it should be unnecessary in a sequel. Now that we’ve seen the crucible that Lara survived to become an ultra-resilient (anti?)heroine, let’s skip some of the viscera in the next one.

Because, seriously, while I find the skeletons of previous unfortunate explorers and travelers to be suitably spooky for perilous archaeological adventures, crawling through rivers of blood is more gore than I needed in this kind of game.

I mean, I can’t blame the friends of mine who saw death animations on YouTube and decided maybe this wasn’t the game for them. While I suppose those animations are motivation not to screw up the most tense action sequences, they’re pretty gross.

I say this because I feel like the really great gameplay of Tomb Raider — the action and adventure that I kept coming back to experience — is in its exploration, its running and jumping, and its little discoveries. The archery and gunplay and brutal melee combat are all well-done examples of what they are, but somewhere around the halfway point I’d had just enough of the combat. My hunger for beautiful (or grimly morose) environments to explore was still stoked, though, so I waded through desperate battles so I could get to the next exploratory bit.

For all that the game is about grit and dirt and blood and fear, for all that Lara is frequently sliding down ravines or dangling by her fingertips, the game handles with great certainty and control. While Lara’s leaps show that she’s giving it all she’s got, the game handles with ease, making it terrifically fun to jump, climb, and balance on dangerous edges at ridiculous heights. The physics of the game put fun first. This could work at odds with the game’s grim tone, but instead it reminded me that there’s a heart of adventure here. That runs in the face of Lara’s humanity, sometimes, but is handled in a way that feels like we’re following her from a place of human survival to a place of superhuman action.

The combination of harrowing visuals and audio design with great controls and environmental details allow for desperate sequences that feel harder than they are in hindsight. It doesn’t feel like I’ve moved a thumbstick to the left, it feels like I’ve rolled away from a crushing boulder. Pressing the blue button to grab an edge feels like I’m lucky to catch hold in time, even though the trip to the blue button’s not really that far. The experience is well calibrated.

Yes, Tomb Raider has learned a lot from the Uncharted series. I’m glad. It also adds some great refinements and expansions to this form of game, especially by expanding on the feeling of exploration and discovery. While the latter Uncharted games particularly shine in cinematics and set pieces, Tomb Raider opts for a slower build, revealing a multifaceted single environment gradually through vocal performances and uncovered relics. While I want the Uncharted games to keep being the Uncharted games, I’d be glad to get two or three more complete games that handle exploration and environmental details the way Tomb Raider does.

When you get near a waterfall and the mist beads up on the screen? The way a campfire’s light streaks in the lens? I love that stuff.

And yet Tomb Raider’s experiential details help it to feel like a game that makes character count. When I was spending skill points to unlock survival techniques, relic-detection abilities, or vicious finishing moves, I felt like Lara was changing as a character. Part of this hinges on small details like giving Lara voice-over dialogue when she sits down at a camp to train, giving an added dimension to the narrative and the character at the same time. Part of it is the way the game systematically builds up options, confining choices at the beginning and expanding them over time in a way that feels logical and derived from the fiction (even though it’s probably a gameplay decision first).

It’s the little things, adding up, that make Tomb Raider work so well in the face of its grosser tendencies, for me. I’ve seen derelict bunkers and burning buildings and rusting shipyards in adventure games before, but there’s a narrative drive to it all here that kept me playing even when it left me squeamish. I’m eager for another, different game in this series.

What might that game look like? Tune in tomorrow for what I’d like to see in a Tomb Raider sequel.

In the parlance of play, I’m hacking and drifting this game in bits and bobs to get a certain kind of play out of it. Some of the adjustments I’ve made come from ideas cooked up back when I was a playtester on the game. Other tweaks come from Nepitello’s own ongoing development of the game, including rules incorporated in later official supplements like Tales From Wilderland (written by the under-sung hero, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan). For example, we used the revised journey rules Nepitello’s been exploring on his blog (and talking about online) rather than those published in the official game rules.

A Stone Giant (War in the North)

Of Giants

In addition to tinkering with The One Ring, I’m tinkering a bit with Middle-earth’s lore and feel. I like playing in Middle-earth every now and again because of its combination of charm and menace. Plus, I like playing at Tolkien-style fantasy not just by recombining Tolkien lore into new adventures but by drawing on history and myth to add or expand the lore of Middle-earth for my own games—hacking and drifting Middle-earth into my own playable fanfic. I’m not just roleplaying as Hobbits and goblins, in other words; I’m also roleplaying as a mythopoeic romantic a la Professor Tolkien. It’s good fun.

One of the things I messed with in this weekend’s adventure was the notion of Giants in Middle-earth. Tolkien refers to giants in The Hobbit but isn’t real clear what they’re actually like. That’s fine with me; it gives adaptations room to explore, interpret, and play.

A Giant of the Misty Mountains (LOTRO)

Various adaptations of the material have portrayed Giants in different ways. Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) sees them in a sort of classic mold as really, really big people (actual size varies by Giant) with their own culture and agendas going on. I like the mix of fairy-tale simplicity and accessibility, there, and tried to get that across in some of the lore guides I wrote for LOTRO (like this one).

War in the North, on the other hand, features a Stone Giant who is as stony as he is gigantic: Bargrisar. He’s visually interesting, a little mysterious, and puzzling in his place in Middle-earth (remembering that War in the North leans more towards the movies than LOTRO does) while sort of evoking the rocks-and-moss equivalent of an Ent. I dug him, too.

For the giants in my TOR adventure, though, I leaned more toward those of LOTRO. I wanted them to bear a bit more resemblance to ordinary men and women (because it plays into later adventures) and I wanted the associations with giants from Norse myth, too. This doesn’t mean that “stone giants” or something like them won’t appear later on—my home-game version of Middle-earth sports a fair number of non-canonical monsters, I think.

Of Honey-wine and Wizards

I didn’t prepare a whole lot of notes for the adventure that I feel comfortable sharing with you (my notes are pretty rough), but I thought I’d share some things anyway. Here’s the read-aloud text I wrote (and read! for reals!) to kick off the Quest of the Lofty House in this first adventure (“Chapter 1: For A Drink of Mead”):

“The mead of the Mountain Hall has been stolen and spilled. This is an ill-tiding of perils abroad and at home. For while it has long been a draught of old tradition and autumnal peace, this year it shall be drank in woe and worry, hate and hope, by killers and kith alike.

“Once, long ago, that fabled honey-wine toasted to treasure and ruins, leading to spite and blood. Once, again, it shall flow for such dread days. But if poured in peace, the mead may celebrate new bonds and happy resolve, bringing fellowship and forgiveness in the face of looming Shadow.

“And a Shadow there is, up amid the peaks, dwelling ‘neath the mountain and seeking to poison the will of the Woodmen with the bitter bite of pride. Look to the memory of triumph, ruined upon the mountainside, and ye’ll find the bones of old friendship. May a drink of mead on a worthy day set hope moving against the winding Shadow, though, and new friendships gleam like gold amid the wreckage of old. Find there the fruit of the Lofty House and carry one day a token of it to the Brown Wizard. These are your quests, traveller, and not the task of the Woodmen of the Mountain Hall.”

That intro text stood in for a message from the Brown Wizard, Radagast, which was brought to each PC separately, dispatching them each to the Woodmen stronghold of Mountain Hall on their quest. Some of them got this message from a voice on the wind, some from messenger birds, one from the wizard himself. They related their account of the missive during the first tests of the campaign—ice-breaking tests that portrayed either how they replied to the wizard’s messengers or how they presented their tale to the Woodmen of Mountain Hall (using TOR’s roleplaying encounter rules with a Tolerance set equal to the number of PCs in the company).

Players used skills like Awe, Inspire, Courtesy, and Song to convince the Woodmen that their intent was true, their mission good, and it worked. The Woodmen, convinced the company was there to help, responded with a toast. They raised their tankards and shouted, “Skål!”

Up in the mountains, within the old Dwarf-hold of Zanurzandûm, beyond the looting goblins and the woeful giant, Hafnír the Small, our heroes also faced a Dwarf-door, complete with riddle, protecting ancient treasures beyond. Here’s the riddle on the Dwarf-door sealing the vault of the Dwarf-hold—a riddle I borrowed from Heidrek’s Saga:

Bring us the mind-whacker,
the word-thwarter,
the word-pourer,
and let us rise and fall
again as friends.

Can you guess the answer to this riddle? Highlight the following text to read the answer: The answer to the riddle is a simple toast in the old tongue of the Northmen (though I substituted Icelandic, ’cause it’s a language I know how to toast in): Skål! (End of spoiler.)

I tied some of this into proper Middle-earth lore about the Fram, slayer of the dragon called Scatha, and the hoard Fram kept from the Dwarves, which kicked off the war that took Fram’s life. (When Dwarves asked for their share of the dragon’s hoard, Fram responded by sending them a necklace of dragon teeth and this message: ”Jewels such as these you will not match in your treasuries, for they are hard to come by.”)

The business about giants questing at the behest of another “voice on the wind” I made up for this campaign. It ties into a torc discovered in the Dwarf-hold treasure hoard—a Dwarf-made torc wrought from lustrous gold and depicting a two-headed dragon. There’s more to that tale, for future adventures.

Of Combat and Play

In addition to altering the lore, I’m playing with the game mechanics of TOR a bit. Specifically, I like making adjustments to the combat system to reflect specific bouts and battles—something I was happy to see Tales From Wilderland does, too. (The more we play, the more I’ll tinker and make adjustments to reflect particular scenes and situations, I expect.) Our first battles were pretty straightforward, but I think there are some fun hooks to hang gameplay options on with this game. How can the “knockback” option be made more or less attractive in specific environments (like on narrow bridges over rushing waters)? When can defending an ally be more important than defeating foes (such as guarding a companion who bears a delicate treasure)?

In truth, we didn’t get into alternate combat options during our first session. (The only characters who ended up fighting a giant were the giant, Hafnír, and a Hobbit who took on points of Shadow using an instrument of foul sorcery to save Hafnír.) Future battles will be custom-designed to maximize and dramatize the player’s options, though, so I can get a good slew of diverse battle situations out of the system. I’ll share those as they occur.

As we keep playing, over the weekends leading up to the release of the first Hobbit film, I’ll check in with other notes and reports of actual play. In the meantime, if you’ve got experiences gaming in Middle-earth, let’s hear them in the comments!

Stick around, if you will. Interesting things ahead.

You have numerous outlets for games news, actual play, theory, and discussion, don’t you? Given the time we’re spending on projects for publication—both electronically and in print—we hope so, because it’ll be a while until we can blog here in any great capacity. It’s not that we’re not still thinking about games, stories, and the work. It’s that we’re pouring all of that into our work directly, lately. Stay tuned for announcements of new Gameplaywright Press books, down the line. I’m excited by the prospects but these things move slowly, these days.

In the meantime, I want to hear from you—you!—about where you are getting your news of games and stories. At what crossroads have you been standing, reading the postings put up by fellow travelers? In what ale houses are you trading tales of your games and the stories you’ve wrought? Who are you reading? What should we—all of us—be reading on these subjects?

Also, what have you been playing and what stories emerge from that play? Do tell.