This mud will collect and persistently stay on Lara and her clothes, although during the demo, the rain that continually poured from the sky washed Lara clean quickly. Along with this, Lara will get dirty from her activities, such as running through puddles or climbing along ledges. For instance, if Lara walks into an area with lush vegetation, the light cast will pull out the green tones of the leaves and foliage and bathe Lara in natural light.ĭon't look down. Underworld also uses a number of lighting and shadow models on her, including a hybridized mix of dynamic lighting and pre-set light maps for the environments, and spherical harmonics to bring out the color and tone of the world around her and take light from her surroundings. First of all, this is the most detailed Lara that players have seen to date: a dozen texture and shaders are being used for Lara alone, and Rob pointed out that there's easily ten times the number of polygons for her in Underworld than there were used in TR: Legend. This allowed Eric to point out some of the new presentational elements that the team has put into place for Underworld. Once all of the threats were eliminated, Lara climbed a flight of steps and mounted a platform with ruined pillars. This lets her take down multiple enemies at once, or force one into cover so she can then concentrate her fire on a nearby threat. She can also use grenades or her pistols, although she now has the ability to split her focus to target two separate enemies at the same time. For instance, Lara can use a pole to smack a jaguar across the nose, forcing it to run away in pain. Melee objects, such as poles, can be picked up and swung against opponents. For one thing, she can knock down enemies with a full set of punches, kicks, knees and acrobatic tumbles. To give Lara a hand within combat, the developers gave her a new set of fighting abilities. It also meant that she had to be careful, because your opponents won't blindly fling themselves towards you either both sets of enemies would use ambush and squad tactics to eliminate their targets, actively seek cover to protect themselves, and retreat if they needed. This meant that Lara could use the confusion of battle to get the poachers and jaguars to target each other while she stayed back and picked off the survivors. Both the enemy AI and animals reacted to and attacked based on the threat they perceived from their line of sight. These jaguars and poachers don't have a chance. This section highlighted the emergent nature of the combat, which, according to Eric, has been designed "to get enemies in your face as quickly and as aggressively as possible." It wasn't going to be as simple as it sounded, particularly because the area she was exploring was swarming with poachers that were looking for jaguars to kill. Set halfway through the fourth level amidst Mayan ruins in Chiapas, Lara had to try to find a missing skull artifact that she needed to solve a puzzle. While it was a pre-alpha build of the game, the demo was designed as a showcase to highlight some of Lara's new abilities, as well as the improvements that the design team have been bringing to the series. This became more clear as we went into the demo. This last choice was made so that players had the ability to take chances with Lara as they explored the various pathways of the title, trying different moves or actions that seemed realistic or believable as they made their way through each level. Finally, the team wanted Lara to be able to do anything players expected her to. By saying that, the developers wanted to give players the feeling that they were explorers, and that they could manipulate items or elements of the world freely, but in a natural way to help them choose their paths or solutions to puzzles. Secondly, the team wanted Lara to affect the world and the world to affect Lara. To focus upon this, they isolated three key innovations that they chose to hone in on: the first was the concept of Lara against the world – she'll explore treacherous terrain in the game that very few, if any, humans have been to, and she'll have to react to any threats or hazards that may arise. While Rob showed off Lara's moves, Eric pointed out that the design team wanted to focus on taking "the core elements of Tomb Raider and translate them into next-generation gameplay," using the various systems and their elements to tell a large scale story with impressive mechanics. Eric Lindstrom, the Creative Director, and Rob Pavey, the Lead Programmer of Tomb Raider Underworld were our guides as we embarked on this demo.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |