TOMB RAIDER el ANGEL de la OSCURIDAD salio INCOMPLETO hace años, pero ¿Conoces TODO lo que no llegamos a ver?¿La VERDADERA HISTORIA de este juego?¿Lo que nos llegamos a PERDER, la otra posible SAGA que NUNCA llego a crearse?¿De TODOS y CADA UNO de los personajes eliminados?¿O de su trilogia? Hoy estas y muchas mas preguntas y dudas que ni imaginarias que existían serán al fin respondidas.
¿Vale la pena FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH?:
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Now I feel stronger. No, I said I wasn’t going to start the video like this… A few weeks ago Tomb Raider 4, 5 and 6 remastered came out respectively, games from the PS1 and PS2 generations, in this video we will focus on the PS2 one, the Angel of Darkness. This Tomb Raider, the Angel of Darkness, is one of the ones that has had the most improvements, well, not really since it should have come out like this or better, since originally in the Angel of Darkness there were neither Lara’s dual pistols, nor the dual ones of the Scorpion X nor many of the things that this remastered has. To give a few examples, without going any further in the first level in the alleys of Paris there was only one route, the one of climbing the building, the one in front could not be accessed unless you used tricks and it was also not finished, also audios like the one Lara says at the beginning if you get close to the dog, if you stay too long in the level of abandoned buildings Lara will be poisoned by the gas, literally, the health bar will turn green, which will make life go down more quickly, so either you change levels or you will have to use a large first aid kit to cure yourself of the poison. And poison is a state that did not exist in the original game, but in the game code there was the antidote object, so very possibly they did not have time to program the poison itself, also in the Paris ghetto there are several new things, such as that in René’s pawn shop you can buy objects for the first time, such as chargers for the scorpion or Lara’s duals in addition to 2 objects that were not in the game but were in the code, a silencer and a laser sight, that is, although it is called a laser sight you will not see the laser as you see for example in Jak 2 and 3 in weapons like the blaster, it is a shame the truth that they have not included it. Also for the first time in the game, the herbalist will sell you antidotes and items to recover health, this is because again, there were many deleted audios from Lara and the herbalist in which they said things like herbal extracts or that you recommend to have more energy, and you better buy antidotes because for the biological laboratory level if you don’t have antidotes you’ll have to use large first aid kits to remove the poison, and it’s not a short level exactly, and in the Paris ghetto it will be the only time you can buy them. And let’s not forget something else, in the original game there are also no audios of Kurtis and Lara in the cafeteria, which would be the first time they see each other, but in the original there is nothing at all. And for the first time, weapons like the K2 impactor or the darts kill rats, but for example against Gunderson’s henchmen they do not affect them. A very important thing that they have included and that gives more context to the end of the game where Lara says “Karel” when in theory she doesn’t know him at all, is when she is with the reporter in Prague who shows her photos and notes of the cabal members, where you see Eckhardt, Karel, Boaz, Gunderson, Muller and a totally unknown character, Luther, who we will talk about later. Regarding the dual weapons, which I know will interest you a lot, Lara’s second pistol is in the Louvre, and once you pick it up instead of adding an extra magazine, the pistol will be added, becoming a dual, that is, the curious thing is that you can choose whether to carry dual weapons or on the contrary just one. The Scorpion are a bit more complicated, you must have 800 euros before accessing Bouchard’s hideout, because if you haven’t obtained them before by selling items to René you won’t be able to get more money unless you take advantage of the bug in the sewers that resets the items, anyway, when you talk to Ludic in Prague you will have to talk to him nicely and the conversation has to end with Lara saying don’t get too cold, because at the end of that level you will meet him, who will give you a pass to enter the Strahov, this is not missable, because otherwise the story does not progress, and he will sell you the Scorpion for 800 euros as long as you have them and you have spoken to him nicely before, otherwise you will be left without it, which the game will buy automatically because at this point the money is no longer useless. And already in the Strahov in what we could call the second part of the level, you will meet Ludic not very alive let’s say and in bed the other Scorpion, which will be added to the other having the Scorpion duals. Another thing to highlight of the things eliminated and that they have restored is Kurtis’s churigai, in addition to creating a shield that reduces damage, since in the original yes, we see the churigai in scenes, but we would have loved to use it, and now finally in the remastered they have finally included it, yes, it is quite broken since apart from the shield that you can create it is a lethal weapon since those in the sanatorium die more easily than shooting them with the boran X, apart from, of course, several deleted audios of Kurtis which have also been restored, apart from that they have put music in the battle against the boss the Proto, yes, in the original this battle does not have music or anything. The thing about the deleted audios is strange, since they had them already recorded but they didn’t put them in the final game, but as I’ve seen in some people’s gameplays, there have been bugs that didn’t exist in the original, so I can assume that by touching the original code, because obviously they had to touch it to put in everything that wasn’t there already, they have created bugs that didn’t exist, that or that those who programmed the game weren’t able to fix the bugs and that’s why instead of putting everything in they removed things like dialogues, duals and objects in addition to the options to buy things in the Paris ghetto, or as many people thought at first and even today we can assume, they didn’t have time to put everything in. Likewise, there are things that have not been added like the flashlight for the machine gun that is obtained from Gunderson’s guards or the deleted audio that plays in Von Croy’s apartment from a radio in which Carvier’s death is confirmed, Janice lets it fall, but here it is more than confirmed. Then another important topic about the remastering, there are things that are not remastered, and there are several characters that are not, the herbalist is not, Janice is, Gunderson is not, Carvier is not, the proto is not, Muller is, Boaz the monster is not, Eckhardt… oh but what have they done to you Eckhardt… Eckhardt has received a remastering that… they shouldn’t have touched the glove, I don’t know why they changed it, they could have left the original and not made that strange change, it is not as sinister as the other one that seemed to have been made with pieces of human skin. Likewise, I believe that over time they will release several patches to remaster what is not remastered, but it has happened again , Tomb Raider, the Angel of Darkness comes out years later with things half done and again due to lack of time, what about this game I don’t know if it’s because the original code is a complete mess, which I totally believe, setting dates before starting with the project and not knowing how long they will take or simply how it comes out and we will fix it as the days go by. Also, apart from the dialogues and the description of the objects is a debatable thing, since either an AI has put them or someone who has no idea of the human language, since look at how this is translated, antidote for poison, or wow, I thought the antidotes were used to heal wounds, pills, increased resistance, what? Not even the phrase is well formulated, since it would give an increase in resistance, I did not take any because I did not realize it, I just saw it now, but in the original game it did not give resistance or anything, it only recovers health. The shotgun ammunition? 6 firing cartridges. The K2 impactor ammunition? Powerful rapid charge. What human person in their right mind speaks like that? And this is not the worst, there are dialogues in which the translation sometimes changes the meaning of the sentence. If it were not translated, okay, I could understand it, but the game came out translated years ago! So there is no excuse for using an AI, if it has been dubbed by an AI, which I also do not know, but everything points to yes. And aspyr, which is basically a subsidiary company that makes ports and has made this remastered according to Steam, was acquired by Embracer Group in 2021, which has a not inconsiderable income, so no, if they have done things with AI, I do not approve of them at all since it is not an Indie studio. And these remastereds already sounded strange to me because if you remember, Square Enix had the license, but embracer group bought several of the licenses they had for 300 million dollars. Don’t worry, among those they bought are obviously not their flagships like final fantasy or kingdom hearts, and thank goodness because otherwise I’d have a heart attack and want the third part of 7 now! And well, obviously they’re not crazy enough to sell a saga as important as final fantasy, it’s better that they have it than other people who have no idea of the importance and affection that people have for this great video game saga. And if you want me to make a video about embracer group, leave it in the comments, because I don’t know who they are and they’re loaded, it’s crazy. Thanks to this remastered many people have played it again, it will have gained both more defenders and haters, the latter could become extinct, just as a fact, because the latter are always going to criticize something for the sake of criticizing without knowing the context of anything, there are games that are highly criticizable and with good reason, either because of the director’s decisions or because the game is a total lie, but there are games like this where the hate is totally unjustified and now we are going to talk about it. This game already had many problems from the beginning, the Tomb Raider team was divided into 2 groups, those who would create the last Tomb Raider for PS1 and those who would create the one for PS2, but that was where the first key problem was created, those in charge of the PS2 one were a much less experienced team and in the past the generational leaps were enormous at all levels, both technical and graphic programming, not like today when it is barely noticeable in graphics. And when the fifth part finished and entered the Angel of Darkness project, they had to discard almost everything, leaving only the story, the art section and the character modeling of which one of those that was eliminated was Luther, who was a librarian and expert in dead languages, he was also a Nephilim who was in the service of Eckhardt, it was said that he would appear in the second part. Another character that was eliminated was Putai. According to the wiki this is what is known about her: Putai is a shaman from North Africa who rescued Lara from the ruins of the Temple of Horus. The character was going to appear in a flashback of Lara in Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, but the scene was deleted. Also, it was the first Tomb Raider game to have a great story but they realized that they could not fit everything in a single video game and they would opt for a triology or even chapters, something impossible years ago, but today by chapters it would have been feasible. They also realized that the first part of the development was too extensive for the little time they had, so of the 4 locations for the game, which were Paris, Prague, Germany and Turkey, only two were left, Paris and Prague, leaving the other 2 for a second part that never came to light. The Paris ghetto itself is also cut in half, because people discovered that there are Lara’s dialogues in the other area of the city across the bridge. Another thing is that they also wanted to include many mechanics in the game, such as the option of dialogues as a graphic adventure that in itself is only seen in Paris and with Ludic or the stealth system to give a few examples, but with the little time they had that was left half done as well as Lara’s resistance progression system, since the sprint and the sprint jump are achieved near the end of the game when, for example, the station chamber is one of the places where it would have been most needed. And as I said, in the original game with Kurtis you can’t use the churigai in any way. There’s a rumor out there that Kurtis was going to be controlled in Serpent Red, but I don’t know if that’s true since it’s also strange that if you choose Pierre’s path you see him leave there and leave on the motorcycle. Many people criticized Kurtis at the time saying that he was a character that was created to take the spotlight from Lara and far from it, since how many duos of protagonists exist and more at that time? There were Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, in fact, the developers wanted the character to be liked since they were planning to release a game called Demon Hunter with him as the protagonist. The game was released incomplete because Eidos was having financial problems, and remember that years ago companies had 1 or at most 2 ips they worked on and not as many employees as today who work on several ips and Eidos could only focus on Tomb Raider, therefore the game came out incomplete and was left without a trilogy. Hopefully today, with the release of Angel of Darkness, they consider remaking Angel of Darkness with next- generation graphics and recreating all those levels that at the time were left half done in addition to the characters that were eliminated. There are people who want this trilogy to be created, and today thanks to the internet and social networks, one of the few good things they have, making enough noise on the subject, we fans could make this dream that we have been demanding for years come true. I would also like you to leave a comment about what you think of this Tomb Raider, if you liked it, if you didn’t like it, and if you want them to finally create the trilogy that so many people want to see and play. Also, I have to tell you something about the Putai scene, years later the scene was released and can be found today on YouTube, in fact, due to the re-release of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, Charo dubbed Lara in this scene, so yes, after many years this scene that was only in English is now also in Spanish, and yes, the voice is very different from the game’s, but you have to understand that many years have passed since the game was dubbed. We all know Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness since a remastered game was recently released, a game where we control Lara Croft and Kurtis, but did you know that Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness was going to be a trilogy and that the second playable character, Kurtis Trent, was going to be a character with much more potential? We will talk about the story that they never told you about Kurtis Trent. First of all, it will be divided into 2 sections that will be crucial to understand it , the first will deal with the life around Kurtis and the Lux Veritatis, in other words, the life of his grandfather, his father and the Lux Veritaris, and Kurtis himself, to understand this first part it will be divided into several years. And then in the second section we will talk about the game that Kurtis himself was going to star in, who already announced that it would not be a Tomb Raider , or maybe it would be? This information, which is not easy to find, has been extracted from English sources. In 1954, Kurtis’s grandfather, Gerhardt, was captured and killed by Eckhardt and the Cabal. Kurtis’s father, Konstantin, at the age of 21, inherited the condition, here I assume meaning he became a Lux Veritatis, from his father. From that moment on, Konstantin became the target of the Cabal’s attacks, which sought to completely eradicate the Lux Veritatis order. There were only a few survivors of the order, who waged a constant struggle against Eckhardt and the Cabal. The world lived oblivious to this dark war that was being waged behind the incredulous eyes of humanity. In 1966, Konstantin, at the age of 33, met a Navajo Indian woman, Marie Cornel, this woman is important. She managed to survive the crossfire of the Cabal’s assault on Konstantin. I also tell you that what bad luck to find yourself in the middle of the fight, because she showed herself to have unexpected innate powers. Then she returned to the NB States. If, like me, you don’t know what the NB states are, I’ll explain now. New Brunswick, not to be confused with John Wick, is one of the ten provinces that, along with the three territories, make up the thirteen federal entities of Canada. Now we can continue with the video. Marie Cornel’s father had been one of the marine officers working with the Navajo code during World War II, which explains his specialist area of interest. In 1969, on a Lux Veritatis mission against the Cabal, Konstantin arrives in the United States looking for Marie Cornel. While visiting the ruins of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, he met her again. Shortly after, Konstantin and Marie were secretly married in a Navajo tribe ceremony. The next few years were spent traveling back and forth between the United States and Europe. In 1972, Konstantin took Marie to a Lux Veritatis safe house in Utah, the Salt Flats. There their son was born, whom they named Kurtis. As soon as Kurtis and his mother were safe, Konstantin returned and traveled throughout Europe to assist in the “Shadow Wars,” the eternal conflict between the Cabal and Lux Veritatis. In 1975, when the family returned to Europe, Kurtis was 3 years old. They passed through a variety of Lux Veritatis safe houses in ancient fortresses throughout Europe and the Middle East. Kurtis had a tough childhood: one day he was in Germany, the next night he was in Turkey. In 1976, Kurtis and his mother spent a year hiding in Scotland while Konstantin was away at sea in the battle centered on underground cities in Anatolia, central Turkey, where Eckhardt appeared to have been killed, but it turned out to be a trap. Only six members of the Lux Veritatis survived, apart from Konstantin. In 1988, Kurtis, now 16 years old, was initiated under the supervision of the six remaining members. His father was absent for a few years from Lux Veritatis missions. In 1991, at 19 years old, Kurtis joined the Legion. He wanted no part of “The War of Shadows” that had devastated his life and that of three survivors of the order, in addition to his father, if he was still alive, as he had not seen him since he was a child. Kurtis changed his name to Trent and attempted to hide within the Legion for five years, long enough to become a French citizen. But even while fleeing from all that, he was constantly surprised by strange paranormal phenomena. It was then that he took the nickname Demon Hunter. In 1996, Kurtis left the Foreign Legion after suffering many unexplained events that couldn’t be recorded in the Legion’s official archives, and began working on his own as a mercenary for various illegal agencies under the command of Marten Gunderson. This is odd, since Gunderson was working for Eckhardt, as seen in the game. Kurtis gained fame from his father and learned that he was still alive, but he felt unable to reconcile with him due to the differences between them. He would never see him alive again. In 2001, Konstantin was finally cornered and killed by the Dark Alchemist, Pieter Van Eckhardt, as were all the remaining members of the Lux Veritatis. In fact, this is what Eckhardt says to Lara Croft before they begin to fight in what would be the most boring battle in history if it weren’t for the fact that in the remastered they changed the battle, also what Eckhardt says is related to the history of Kurtis’s father and grandfather, so they are not random words. As a result of this death, Kurtis’s mother, Marie, separated the three Orb Fragments that together formed a dagger, which was the only one that could kill Eckhardt. Kurtis inherited these two mythical fragments of the talisman that his mother kept and that belonged to his father. In fact, in the game, Kurtis tells Lara that Eckhardt killed his father to prevent them from falling into his hands, but it’s never said how he got them back then. Well, here you have the answer: he got them thanks to his mother. He also inherited the fearsome Churigai blade, a disc of blades made of a beryllium alloy taken from a meteorite that fell to Earth millions of years ago. The Churigai can be thrown at enemies and directed using telekinetic powers, or telekinesis. But only an experienced man familiar with the secrets of Lux Veritates is capable of wielding it. From that moment on, Kurtis would feel remorse for not having gone in search of his father and would not stop until he found and killed his murderer. In 2003, Kurtis would cross paths with Lara Croft, who is after Von Croy’s killer, whom he would recognize as the famous British archaeologist and renowned adventurer, and both would join forces in Prague to fight the Cabal and Eckhardt. This is where both stories, that of Lara Croft and Kurtis Trent come together, as we see in the game, the only one we know and are familiar with, now after knowing Kurtis’s past we can talk about the game in which he was going to star. What you’ll hear from now on is information translated from an English page. I’ve made some adjustments to make it more intelligible, but if I’ve missed anything, I apologize in advance. What you’re about to hear now is a very interesting interview with one of the creators of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. Murti Schofield, the writer of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, also sent us his notes on their proposed game, Kurtis Trent: Demon Hunter. Kurtis Trent: Demon Hunter, for those of us who aren’t Oxford graduates, had three alternatives for the next game: Kurtis acts completely solo. Kurtis Trent: Demon Hunter, or something similar, with no trace of Lara. Kurtis has his own game, with Lara appearing as a guest in one or two levels, like Kurtis in The Angel of Darkness, which only appears in three levels. Lara has disappeared, and Kurtis plays the initial levels investigating what happened to her. If Kurtis goes solo, he’ll be delving into Lovecraftian territory, the Cthulhu Mythos, or however you pronounce it, I’ll leave it here on screen. Hellboy, John Constantine’s Hellblazer, or Clive Barker. We already have a lot of background material on Kurtis that can be expanded upon starting with Game 6; with Game 6, they mean the Angel of Darkness. If Kurtis gets his own game, it won’t be an attempt to recreate Tomb Raider; instead, it will seek to completely innovate, creating something as unique and powerful as Tomb Raider was in 1996. Because Kurtis and Lara shared pixels in Next Gen, certain details will have to be maintained, but there are basically no limits. We can expand on the special universe he inhabits , his unique abilities, and the dark forces he must face. Kurtis’s game wouldn’t be as narratively dense, but more linear and action-focused. The second game in this arc or cycle could leverage some of the elements from Next Gen, such as the Cabal, the Nephilim, and the Lux Veritatis storyline. It could revisit some (or none) of the narrative threads intentionally left in the first game. It could reveal how Kurtis survived in the aftermath of Castle Kriegler through a flashback when Lara returns at the end of Game 6 and finds him still alive (albeit barely) among the ruins. This is unfortunately never seen in the game, but instead flashes back to where he fought Boaz. This would provide established material we could use. Or, we could create something entirely new and explore the dark side of Kurtis’s past as a demon hunter. Possible Plot: The story could tie into Lara’s disappearance or be entirely standalone, with Kurtis caught up in events triggered by his family’s ties to the macabre and the grotesque. It could begin with Kurtis on a mission, fighting other mercenaries in a remote desert region. Suddenly, a series of demonic events unfold, and Kurtis realizes that, once again, the occult has intruded into his life, just as it did back in his days in the Foreign Legion. Despite renouncing his Lux Veritatis heritage, changing his name, and joining the Legion, the hidden chaos of the Shadow Worlds always reached out to him, as if somehow beckoning him. And this time, he seems more determined than ever to kill it. He always fought to deny his legacy and stayed out of it until his father was killed by the Monstrum/Pieter Van Eckhardt. After this, he became deeply involved with Lara in the fight against the alchemist Pieter Van Eckhardt and the Nephilim. He barely escaped with his life from Castle Kriegler and returned to his work as a mercenary, hoping to prevent further encounters with the occult. He couldn’t have been more wrong… When Kurtis tries to contact Lara, he discovers she has mysteriously disappeared. Strongly suspecting the cabal, he decides to investigate their whereabouts using his contacts in the world of professional crime. Events lead him to remote regions used by Eckhardt for his 15th-century experiments. At every turn, he faces fierce opposition from well-equipped mercenaries, hired by the cabal. But, in addition to these squads, demonic presences constantly pursue him. Arcane powers are seeping into the world, threatening its stability, and Kurtis seems to be the epicenter of these disturbances. And somehow, it’s all related to Lara’s disappearance… or not, if this is a game with only Kurtis as the protagonist. Kurtis must delve into his past as Lux Veritatis to combat the forces that stalk him. As an initiate of Lux Veritatis, he has access to skills and knowledge inaccessible to other people. Ultimately, he must accept command of the ancient Order to confront the Nephilim, who seek to complete the forces that Eckhardt set in motion to bring about the New Age of their race. Or, he may face another Lovecraftian horror if we prefer to leave the story of the Nephilim for Lara to take up alone. list of loose ideas Demonic infestations that spread through human beings. Ordinary people can be willing hosts, possessed, or infected. A kinetic shield that absorbs impacts and energy projectiles, stores them, and then returns them to the enemy. A telescopic baton with two retractable blades, similar to an ice axe, is carried in a sheath on the shoulder. The shield is stored in a secure location, as it is too dangerous to be out in the world. The staff is destroyed. Kurtis’s mentor is a contemporary of his father, a Lux Veritatis adept. An illegal Lux Veritatis bloodline comes from the guardians of a count or a countess? Why illegal, I ask. Portals in the jungle are being opened by savage (possessed?) tribes. Kurtis has tattoos and a ring. Kurtis is hired as a bodyguard, but the client is infected, and he is trapped in an enclosed space. A shadow beast or hellhound constantly pursues Kurtis and appears in all sorts of unexpected situations while he is exploring or fighting other enemies. Broadly speaking this is the untold story of Kurtis Trent, it seems they wanted to make it but after all the scorn it received in addition to the bad reputation of the angel of darkness it could never happen, a shame, but maybe today as the industry is currently at an incredible point, do not be fooled by the 4 fools on duty, it would be a story much more accepted than years ago, also with the current technology, capacity and resources in addition to the fact that now many companies have more than one IP they can invest more time in developing a game and I think that both completing the trilogy of the Angel of Darkness as well as a game or saga of Kurtis Trent could like today, I would buy it. Also, lately remakes are in fashion and if they did something similar like they did with Final Fantasy 7 remake and especially Rebirth it would be impressive, a thousand times better than the original, if you have the time and money I recommend that you buy the remake and the rebirth of 7, the great game of the year it came out. If you don’t believe me, watch the video that I will leave in the description and I emphasize that I am not paid by YouTube or Square Enix. At the last minute I found out that Murti Schofield, the writer of Angel of Darkness, revealed in 2016 that both Kurtis and Karel survived the events of the game, yes, both Karel and Kurtis were going to be in the second part, I suppose he said it with the hope of resuming the trilogy, which never happened. Did you know Kurtis’s whole story? Would you have liked them to have made a game about him telling his past as Lux Veritatis? Or is he a character that you liked at the time or did you hate him because he supposedly took the spotlight from Lara? And I say supposedly because that’s not the case, we only played 3 levels with him. But look at games from that time like Primal where the protagonist is Jennifer and we can switch between her and Scree who is a gargoyle or even in Final Fantasy where we control several characters in combat. In Final Fantasy X, the protagonist is Tidus but Yuna has a lot of weight in the story since she is also the protagonist as well as the rest who have their important parts for the plot. The best game in the world. But before continuing with the video, I’ll show you the channel’s banner, which will change every month as the goals are met. Before, it was like this, and now it’s like this. It’s never been so much fun to subscribe and like a channel’s videos. So, subscribe, like, and tap the bell to see the banner change. Now, let’s continue with the video. Tomb Raider The Angel of Darkness, The Angel of Darkness, The Angel of Darkness, I think that’s what it is called in Japanese. It is a somewhat controversial game, it came out with bugs, terrible control, a second playable character called Kurtis who received a tremendous amount of totally unjustified hatred and many things due to lack of time were left in the game files such as Lara’s dual pistols in the original from years ago, to give a few examples, due to all this and the poor reception the game was left without its trilogy, because yes, it was going to be a trilogy and that can be seen in the material that they could not put due to lack of time. Today we’ll talk about how Lara Croft’s story for the Angel of Darkness was going to be . Because yes, there are things about the Angel of Darkness that remain unfinished, and in this video they will be better explained. In addition to several very interesting facts that we never knew, in addition to talking a little more about the trilogy about one of the stories they already had prepared that couldn’t be, in addition to discarded characters that I recently found. What you’re about to hear now is from an interview that the developers did years ago and translated from English, which is basically the only thing we have today, so if I make any mistakes, I apologize. To put it chronologically, this is about when Lara was still in Egypt, in the Temple of Horus. Internally, we call this period “Lara of Arabia.” We’ve tried throughout this period to justify what happened to Lara: what happened to her? Where is she? And also another period of time when she returned to London. We think Lara’s near-death experience when she survived the temple made her lay down her weapons. We seriously considered turning her into an alcoholic—yes, that’s what they were planning to do, personally thank goodness not because it doesn’t suit Lara at all—by burning Miss Croft’s mansion down . We turned her life upside down, and she experienced one catastrophe after another, but we thought it was a bit extreme. We also had doubts about what people thought of the game. Well, thank goodness not because if people already hated the Angel of Darkness at the time, I don’t, I like him, this would have made them go downhill and without brakes, and especially those who like to speak ill of him the most, the press, but let’s forget about them and continue, since this is what happened: Lara Croft is buried under the rubble of the collapsed Temple of Horus, after her fatal accident in the Egyptian tombs. Lara wakes up in a kind of dream where a mythical Egyptian goddess talks about a coveted enigmatic amulet called “Mareish”. Badly injured and at the end of her strength, Lara manages to get out of the Temple of Horus on her own, by chance she is found by a Bedouin tribe from the Dark North who were making one of their usual nomadic journeys through Edfu. The healer Shaman (Putai) restores her physical health through her black magic. A few years later, she returns to London, unsure of what to believe about all that happened, but her life has changed. Lara has withdrawn from contact with anyone connected to her past life, refusing to confirm or deny the rumors about her time spent among shadowy North African tribes. After her return home, she became a recluse in her ancestral mansion in Surrey. The dark memories that haunt her remain trapped inside, and no one dares to get close enough to question her. Lara is back, but she will never be the same again. Radically changed after her near-death experience, Lara has become harder, darker, and less tolerant. She was reported missing and presumed dead after a disastrous trip to the Egyptian tombs, where she encountered Von Croy, who was later possessed by a malevolent entity. that Lara accidentally released the god Seth, a mistake that nearly cost her her life and now makes her distrust almost everything. So we decided to charge her with Von Croy’s murder. Something that would turn her life upside down, considering she’s famous and well-known for her discoveries and exploits. Just one murder wasn’t enough; because people knew Lara hadn’t done it, we invented several murders in Europe and around the world. We gave all of these murders a name: Monstrum. The Monstrum has periodically terrorized Paris and other European capitals over the past decade. A common feature of these attacks is strange metallic eruptions from different parts of the victims’ bodies. Forensic experts are baffled and don’t know the exact processes that cause them. There are no reports of survivors from these attacks. Although if that had been the case, like the rest of the victims, she would have had metallic parts, which, as we can see in Von Croy, she doesn’t. At least from the little we can see of her body, it can only be seen in Arnour, one of Bouchard’s men who survived four attacks. Paris has been tormented by this series of unexplained murders. Where the corpses present numerous, I’m going to say that they are missing body parts because if I say the word that came from it, it would harm my channel. Thank you, YouTube, for always being so open, so brilliant , and so childish. Let’s continue. And strange symbols painted with her blood. Lara is accused of these murders and tried by the entire world. The story begins with Lara visiting Von Croy’s apartment after receiving a call asking for her help. He has been hired by a mysterious organization to find an obscure engraving. While Lara argues with him about what happened in Egypt, someone hits Lara, leaving her unconscious. When she wakes up, she discovers Von Croy lying on the floor. After a series of events , Lara ends up with blood on her hands. A trap has been set for her, but who? The game begins with Lara on the run from the police. So far, no arrests have been made in connection with the “Monstrum” crime wave that the capital is suffering. For now, there are 17 known victims. A woman was seen leaving the apartment of the last victim, Professor Werner Von Croy. She is described as Caucasian, brunette, around 1.80 meters tall and of slim build; she was wearing a jacket and jeans and had her hair in a ponytail. She is dangerous and probably armed. Officers are advised to exercise extreme caution when arresting the suspect. The press has sensationally dubbed this latest spate of murders “The Dark Rebirth of the Monstrum,” referring to similarly heinous crimes committed in the capital in the last decade and possibly dating back to the 1950s. These crimes can undoubtedly be linked to those committed in other European cities over the last fifty years. Forensic experts have made no progress in their investigation into the strange metallic eruptions seen on the bodies of all the victims. So far, no connection has been discovered between the victims; only that a significant number of victims are among Parisian gangs. Everything seems to indicate that we are dealing with a single murder, undoubtedly marked by extreme psychosis. The desecrated bodies and the unintelligible graffiti smearing the crime scenes reinforce the theory of a macabre ritual. No one attacked has survived, so far. The arrest of the suspect must be the highest priority. The Parisian Monster murders continue. Lara Croft is being sought for questioning. The latest victim of the Parisian Monster was discovered yesterday. The body, missing parts, of Professor Margot Carvier of the Louvre’s Department of Medieval and Renaissance Studies was found shortly after a woman was seen leaving the building under suspicious circumstances. She is described as Caucasian, dark-skinned, and of thin build. The last English: once she was seen she was wearing jeans, a dark jacket and her hair was in a braid. Two days before the incident, world-famous archaeologist Professor Werner Von Croy was murdered in a similar manner in his apartment, in what appears to be a precursor to the events. The Cabal is a powerful alliance of alchemists ruled by Eckhardt, in the 15th century he managed to take power of the sect by seducing a good part of the members with promises of eternal life and killing those who did not want to follow him. In the 14th century, Eckhardt made a pact with the last Nephilim, an ancient race mentioned in the gospels of (Enoch), the hybrid descendants of Angels and mortals, they gave him eternal life and in return he promised to resurrect his race with his alchemical powers. He needs the five dark paintings, symbols of occult power that make up the griffin or sangrifo, a kind of alchemical object, the symbols were separated by an order called Lux Veritatis and placed in different Christian fortresses in Europe, the paintings are hidden and safe under Christian images. The Lux Veritatis were also in charge of the dark engraving, which was actually a coded map showing the location of each painting, this is what Von Croy was looking for, the fourth engraving. She has fled accused of the murder, and the only clue she has is that everything is related to the engraving, she has a contact name Carvier and the plot begins to develop from here, in the course of her adventure, Lara breaks into the Louvres to find the engraving, at which point she meets Kurtis, a new character with whom she will share the spotlight. The only thing that can kill Eckhardt and the Nephilim is a dagger made of three Periapt fragments, Kurtis inherited two of them through the inheritance of Lux Veritatis. The events will take them to Prague, to a building called the Bio Dome, where Eckhardt plans to resurrect the Nephilim. Eckhardt is a ruthless Alchemist who kills people by extracting different parts of their bodies as raw material for his summons. The big plan is to resurrect a Nephilim monster called the Sleeper, the sleeper of the game basically, which is huge, but will not appear in this game, although it is finally the one we end up seeing although not fighting against it, although it will open another fight against the Nephilim prototypes, Eckhardt’s first failed spawns, so to speak. Between those are the Proto and those from the sanatorium, there were possibly more, but we will never know, although the proto according to the fat Muller tells it was created by Boaz, so if those from the sanatorium are not, we never saw a Nephilim created by Eckhardt. Eckhardt is immortal and is the Monstrum, he has been removing body parts from his victims that together with his alchemical powers has recreated the essence necessary to awaken the Sleeper, a prototype that would culminate in a new race of Cubiculum Nephilim. Eckhardt did not know that Karel was a Nephilim, because they thought that they had brought from Turkey the last living Nephilim specimen, with whom they were conducting tests to create the new race. Karel finally discovers Eckhardt’s true intentions, which is that he wants to create a new world order at his service and thus dominate the Earth by subduing and killing all those who do not follow him. Lara will confront Eckhardt after obtaining the three Fragments of the Orb, but when she is about to deal the final stab, Karel will stop her. His Nephilim blood will not allow him to let a mortal take away the pleasure of avenging his betrayal and he will be the one to kill him. If you remember in the game it is never explained why Karel suddenly kills Eckhardt without hesitation and without even thinking about it, he said that he stopped being useful, but it is a bit vague a phrase did he use Von Croy and kill him because he stopped being useful to him? Yes, but in this case Eckhardt was his right hand man, although he himself did not know it and thought he was the leader of all and for us the villain of the game, and Karel could continue using him for other purposes, you can think, things of bad guys who kill each other when they are no longer useful, but here in the original idea they had for the game, Karel does not kill him as a cliché, but he had his reasons. And it may be ironic since Eckhardt killed the rest of the cabal for failing him, although we don’t know what happened to Gunderson, maybe he vaporized him, and Eckhardt himself ended up killed by one of his supposed allies. Later Karel will ask Lara to join him to reborn the new race and thus rule the world of weak mortals at his side. Karel confesses that he has been helping her achieve her goal, that he was the one who has been guiding her, that she is still alive thanks to him. Here Lara begins to remember what happened in Von Croy’s apartment, that in reality it was not Eckhardt who killed his friend Wener but him, who is also seen in the cinematic at the end of the siege of the galleries with Karel instead of Eckhardt. This enrages Karel who realizes that Lara is not going to follow him in his ascension to glory and ends up confronting her. Lara after fighting with Karel manages to jump in the direction of the Sleeper who is suspended by cables in the middle of this battle. Lara uses the Symbols of Light , supposedly what Eckhardt is gathering at the beginning are the dark paintings transformed into that kind of disc, which looks a lot like this disc that we see in the title screen and in the game menu and is what Lara puts on the sleeper, which causes a large amount of energy to concentrate on the Sleeper who, not being able to channel it, creates a magnetic field where bursts of light pass through Karel, which everything seems to indicate that he dies. In the first game, Karel is presumed dead, but he escapes with the paintings, later obtaining all the power he needs to follow the Nephilim. He showed his true self at the end of Angel of Darkness and gave us to understand that the Nephilim can change their appearance. In this way, he managed to manipulate Lara and guide her by taking the form of various people and implicating her in Von Croy’s murder so that she would get involved in finding the paintings. It was a whole web of plot twists with Karel pulling the strings. Eckhardt appeared as the villain in this story, but at the end of “Angel of Darkness,” he ended up dead, and we saw that the power of evil was above him, in the figure of Karel. He shows that he’s a Nephilim, he escapes, and there’s no way to kill him. So, just when it seemed like everything was over, something was just beginning that Lara will have to stop. The last time we see Kurtis is when he’s wounded and falls to the ground dead. We were considering him for the second game, and he could be a really important part of it, but if the players came to hate him, we could consider him dead. However, I hope not, because there’s a piece written for him in the second and third games. That’s why Lara collects the Chirugai from Kurtis at the end of “Angel of Darkness.” From a distance, you can see it glowing brightly, showing that he still has energy and that Kurtis is still alive. The goal for us was to use the Nephilim theme and storyline across all three games. For us, that’s great because the second game is going to be even better; it’s very Tomb Raider-esque. The game picks up where Lara was left off in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelations, when Lara was falling into an abyss despite Von Croy’s best efforts to save her. The Angel of Darkness is the first in a carefully planned trilogy; the idea is that this game will plant the seed. We’re trying to introduce characters who don’t have a predominant role in this game but play an important role in the subsequent installments. This is the case, for example, with the Nephilim. They are introduced towards the end of The Angel of Darkness; in the next game, they become the central focus of the plot. We never intended to reveal the Nephilim in their true form. We showed the “Sleeper,” but that was too much of what we wanted to show. What we’re doing now for the second game is redesigning the entire Nephilim race. In Angel of Darkness, we had to introduce the Nephilim and put Lara in a situation that was different from what we’ve done in the past. Lara is always clean, coming and going looking for artifacts, coming and going to save the world. We can’t change Lara’s character, absolutely not. We can’t turn her into a murderer. We couldn’t release a game like that because otherwise little kids wouldn’t be able to play it. If that were the case, since at that time Tomb Raider games, and all video games in general, were mostly played by kids. You know, video games used to be considered only for kids and other such nonsense. Let’s continue. The end of Tomb Raider The Last Revelation was the last game for us. Lara was lost. This is a clean start, something really important. What I understand from this paragraph is that they wanted to create something totally new with Lara Croft, something never seen before that would differentiate her from the rest of the games and that the turning point was the Angel of Darkness, since unlike the previous ones, the Angel of Darkness is darker. In the second game Lara goes to the Nephilim stronghold beneath Cappadocia, it’s going to be really cool, we’ll go to the city and create huge imaginary towns, hidden underground, with truly epic tombs and temples, full of fantasy surrounding reality. There are no aliens with arms full of tentacles, but there are some strange beings that will look like humans. Possibly like the Draeneir, that race with tentacles for beards from WoW, who are very strongly inspired by, not that word again, Cthulhu, however it’s pronounced, I’ll leave it here on the screen, which belong to Lovecraft’s books. The entire game will be under Turkey in Cappadocia, in fact in Strahov there are some boxes that you have to climb and in the remastered Lara says, those boxes are from Cappadocia, Turkey and in the sanatorium there’s a truck driver who says that the Nephilim were brought from Turkey. Lara finds a secret passage, and this is where the Nephilim race was hidden. Open other levels in Germany, and Tomb Raider 8 will likely take place in a single location— well, maybe, but if it were set in a specific place to follow the plot. It will also be here where many characters who weren’t included in Tomb Raider 6 will appear, and where we will finally learn what happened in Egypt. There’s a large period of time between the collapse of the Egyptian temple in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation and the beginning of this game, which isn’t covered in Angel of Darkness but will be included in the second of the trilogy. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any information about what the third part of the trilogy would be like, or maybe there isn’t even a script for it, which would be the most likely scenario since the next part doesn’t exist. But what I have found are very interesting sketches, too interesting to pass up, which you should definitely see if you’re a fan of this game, because they are, well, very interesting. What I’ve found is concept art of the game that you’ll be seeing on screen now, I can’t put everything I’d like because you already know what YouTube is like and this video has to be available for everyone to see just as the angel of darkness was going to be, but we’ll talk about the interesting stuff, previously we talked about deleted characters that at least had names, the ones we’re going to see don’t even have names but they have their concept art. First let’s start with one that I don’t really know what it is, a man a priori of blue color, with a black and blue cloak that carries a scepter and is bald, in itself I don’t know what it can be, is it a human, a nephilim in a very, very, very early phase or maybe it was going to be another ghost like the dark brother and was going to protect a sacred site? Whoever it is, I think they either didn’t put it in due to lack of time since it doesn’t even have a name or for some other reason, whoever it is it’s very likely that they based it on this character, for those who don’t know it’s Zemus, from Final Fantasy 4, and the illustration is by Yoshitaka Amano, in case you’re interested in the name and such. And I have to say that if we remove the scepter they look very similar, only the other one has feet and Zemus doesn’t. We move on to another image where we can see a woman at the top right, who by the looks I would say is Carvier, but then we have what appears to be a Nephilim and a man that I have no idea about. This other one is an undead rider that if this were Final Fantasy I would throw a phoenix tail at it and the fight would be over. Maybe it could just be a model of a statue, but I get the impression it could be an enemy or a boss, in the remastered the skeletons run a lot, it could simply be that they wouldn’t know where to fit it and that’s ruled out, the only places where there are undead enemies are the Tomb of the Ancestors, the Chamber of Seasons, Wrath of the Beast, Neptune’s Chamber, the Trophy Crypt and Eckhardt’s Laboratory, which by the way, why does Eckhardt have skeletons in his laboratory? that are also very alive. The following image is interesting, since you can see Bouchard, Renne, Boaz and a man with a syringe that could be from the sanatorium, because of the syringe or from another section of the Strahov that they never created, then the bottom part you can see Eckhardt, Luther, Lara and a mysterious woman with bandages in which I have 2 theories, it looks a lot like Boaz, so it is a relative, mother or sister or it is another design of hers, because it really looks quite similar except that on the face it has 2 lines that each crosses an eye, I zoomed in quite a bit, specifically 400 and although it cannot be seen well, both eyes are closed so they could be 2 wounds, or they were sewn up like Uzu from Kill la Kill, I am going to put both designs together so you can see them and compare, that of Boaz and that of this woman. Is Boaz another design of hers or a relative? I think it’s her but I’d like to know what you guys think, leave me your opinion in the comments. And now we’re going to move on to a very well-known and at the same time a totally unknown one. First of the unknown, this Franchesken-style aberration… it’s that I have many doubts that the Strahov was only what was seen in the game and that there were more areas apart from the sanatorium, aquatic laboratory and biological laboratory, tell me what you think about this but it seems that there would be more. but to put a place where this enemy could appear, it could have been an enemy of Kurtis in the sanatorium because of that phrase of, with this my quota of demons ends, when killing the proto, or maybe one of Lara and that would have been a Nephilim prototype of Eckhardt. Now let’s move on to the other, if you remember, this one appears in the form of a statue in the Wrath of the Beast chamber, a statue that people thought would be a very powerful boss but they were disappointed, well look, those who thought that were right, it is not confirmed but I doubt that the sword is for decoration so yes, possibly we could have fought against the statue, in fact the name of the chamber is Wrath of the Beast and the only imposing beast in the room is the statue because then what appears are some ordinary skeletons that have no more mystery, if they burn you go to the jet of water or throw them into the pit, whatever you like best, to finish before talking about the next one, let’s give the room an ultimatum. There isn’t much mystery here, there’s Kurtis, the one in the white suit is Bouchard, and this one with his bandaged arm looks like an Inquisition soldier because of the cross. But if we look closer, we’ll see that the right side of his face is burned and that one eye isn’t human. Could he be a Nephilim like Luther? These are more enemies; they don’t hold much mystery. Finally, we have this somewhat strange image, an image of a character that is detailed, a woman with a helmet and something on her back that could be ammunition for that weapon she’s carrying that looks like a harpoon in one hand and a kind of spear in the other. This character isn’t just a sketch; it’s already painted and detailed, but it’s very strange. What we can make clear is that they had a lot of ideas, since there are so many sketches, and among these many discarded characters, it’s a shame they couldn’t carry them out because they look very, very interesting. The Angel of Darkness offered much more than what was seen. As you know, Tomb Raider, the Angel of Darkness, had many problems in its development, suffering delays for its release, a large part of the objects remained in the game files, eliminating the alternative route of the alleys of Paris in addition to also completely eliminating the playable part crossing the Paris ghetto bridge, creating bugs that could leave you stuck, creating moments within from the same game that have no correlation like Kurtis leaving the red segment and leaving quickly on the motorcycle when we just saw him quietly in the metro cafe having a Parisian breakfast or worst of all, that due to low sales he ran out of his trilogy and left the story unfinished, we already know all that, but what we never knew or saw was the interesting interview with the directors and developers of the game where they explained their expectations, motivations and what they thought of the game and the story they wanted to make known to the world, since there are several betas of the game where you see things that are not seen in the final version of it, both things are very interesting to know if you liked the game, but first let’s meet the parents of Lara Croft who deserve some credit for creating this saga and know the goals they had for the future and to make it more comfortable for you and not miss a detail I will leave each question in the upper left and remember that this is taken from an interview in English, so if there is any mistake I ask Apologies in advance, and with all that said, let’s start with the first mystery of this story. Why so many delays? We asked this question to Core boss Jeremy Heath Smith. It seems the problem was the frame rate. They wanted the animation to be unprecedentedly smooth. Now it’s running at 60 frames per second, or 60 frames or fps, an acronym that wasn’t as common in the past as it is today. Something that is almost never seen on PS2, explains Jeremy, I think they didn’t achieve that in the end, we’ve been looking for this graphical speed since day one , the problem is that when you get it, in the parts where the speed is reduced you don’t notice the barely perceptible slowdown of Vice City, but rather it seems like the game is going in slow motion, we even had Sony technicians come to us, we still have the toys they brought here, but we don’t need them anymore, although we will use them to do some final tests, so in the end we achieved it, we asked ourselves over and over again why it has been delayed so much, and that is the answer, but it is not only that. Another delay was because Eidos Interactive, one of the main publishers in Europe, has announced a future delay in the launch of the TR AOD to make its commercial appearance on PC and Playstation 2 next month. Eidos surprises with its announcement that it has postponed the game again until at least the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal year, or in other words, between April and May 2003. In a press release, Eidos CEO Mike McGarvey explains the reasons for the new delay: “Significant progress has been made in the final stages of the game’s development, but more time is needed for further improvements to the gameplay. I am confident that this new delay will not affect the company’s profits,” he concludes, as Eidos’ sales figures for the last six months come to light: no less than 50 million pounds, which lifts the company straight out of the crisis it was experiencing before Christmas. Core Design will be in charge of gradually revealing the sordid plot of the solid plot that has been prepared, in the words of Adrian Smith, director of operations, (When we write the story, we write a book; this game contains only the first chapters). In the complicated process of making the game, programs such as Maya 4.0 and Motion Capture were used to bring the characters designed by the artists to life, and the game’s soundtrack was composed by the London Symphony Orchestra and recorded at Abbey Road Studios, where legends like the Beatles have performed. Deciding on the story for the new Tomb Raider game was one of the least difficult parts of its creation. Well before fully designing it, we had already decided where it would take place and its plot. In fact, almost two years ago we cut the original locations in half since the game was on track to have 70+ hours of gameplay and probably another 12 months of development—no, I’ll tell you, more. The interesting thing is that we were able to extract the middle section, making the game flow as if it had never been there. There, then please explain to me about Kurtis Trent, because unless the Lux Veritatis teleport to another place, you’ll have to explain this scene to me because it makes no sense. The reasons for using Paris and Prague were because these two locations fit into the story we had planned. Paris is a city steeped in history and, since the plot is based on finding 5 paintings, where better than the capital of art. Prague suited us very well because until now it hasn’t really been known in the rest of the world, and it projects a very attractive image mixed with a touch of mystery of the unknown, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere we needed for the game’s levels. As we said, we want the player to truly understand the story of the game and to do that we had to decide between using rendered cinematics (FMV) or game-play animations (CUTS). Both have their advantages. Rendered cutscenes look impressive, but they’re not truly part of the game, while animations offer greater flexibility in their use, but are much more difficult to fit into the game. In the end, we decided on 20% FMV and 80% gameplay cutscenes. For those who don’t know, FMV or CG were widely used in the PS1 and PS2 era. On PS3, there may be some, but nowadays, all scenes are usually rendered with the game engine. That’s why I insist we’ve reached a graphical level that’s practically impossible to go beyond. The next step would be to get into a game like SAO. And no, I didn’t watch that anime because it was trendy, simply because Backbeard had featured it and it caught my attention. We knew that using the latter would give us more flexibility in creating the story. We ended up with about 30 minutes of game animations, which required a team of animators for almost 12 months. Then, we had to do the voice work for the actors and the music. Once again, we decided to go one step further and hired the London Symphony Orchestra, one of the best orchestras in Europe. And the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra that plays every New Year’s Eve? I think that one’s better, but of course, we’re talking about many years ago, the 2000s. Using the best always greatly improves the final result. Writing music for the game the same way you write for a film has opened our eyes to how the two industries are getting closer in certain areas. Whether film has as much of an influence on our industry as people think or not is a constant subject of debate. We believe that television has influenced us much more. Since we knew from the beginning that we were going to make a trilogy, there’s nothing better than watching television. They’ve been releasing series about it for years and have hooked millions of viewers week after week. One of the series that most moved us was The X-Files. The best thing about it is that it really ends week after week. That’s the kind of feeling we want to convey in our game. Let’s see, an explanation for the young people watching the video. I know that nowadays you watch YouTube to eat, have a snack, and whatever, but this interview is from the 2000s. There was no YouTube here, and the internet wasn’t like it is today. Back then, having a television was one of the few means available to avoid boredom. And if you had a PS2, you could play games or watch movies on it whenever you had them. If not, not even that. It’s a brief clarification. Let’s continue. Capturing the atmosphere of a location is a prerequisite for being able to build it. A team of level designers went to Paris for a couple of days to take hundreds of photos and walk through galleries and museums. Their main goal was to make sure Lara fit into this environment. One of the many skills our environmental reconstruction technicians possess is that they are able to imagine Lara playing her role when they look around the location. To help them in their task, we had a person in charge of the artistic plan. He would take one of the designer’s ideas and turn it into a sketch. This has been a huge step forward for us in the way we develop games. We made hundreds of sketches of locations and rooms that the level designers later used to model the maps. The overall story is what drove a lot of the inspiration needed to do this. Having a slightly darker side to Tomb Raider allowed us to give the graphics a slightly gothic feel, in Tim Burtonian detailing, for example. This eerie undertone made coming up with scenario ideas much easier. Once you have the location, it’s easy to break it down into zones. Then we start to really flesh out the storyline using the key scenario areas. The great thing about making a video game is that you can project it on paper before going near the computer, and that’s the position we take when we start a project. It seems to me that over the years, one of the few studios that maintains that illusion of transmitting sensations or recreating something is Square Enix. I wish a new company would appear on the market with the same enthusiasm as them, although I have to emphasize that with Dragon Quest XI S, when porting it back to PS4 or PC , they were a little lazy; thank goodness on PC you can add quality mods. Dividing the two central scenarios into play areas is the key to how the game is structured and it has to be established in the early stages of development. Otherwise, you can suffer from oversaturation of content. The reason we were able to reduce the number of levels without too many problems is because it was very well planned from the beginning and, consequently, it was flexible enough to support such a substantial change. A good story is what gives rise to the different enclaves of the game and we always had a good story. The team always saw the direction the levels should go, and what was clear to us from the beginning was that we didn’t want Lara to be in a “Tomb” all the time. We also wanted to see her wandering the streets. Although I’m afraid that, once the project is finished, we’ll all end up in the Prague Asylum with Kurtis. The head of Core raises the curtain – A succulent interview with Adrián Smith: Lara’s big boss, Adrián Smith, talks to us about delays, online games, the future of Lara, and Glups PS3 in the most revealing interview of his life. The game’s release is postponed until April or even May. Eidos insists that they won’t fail this time, but in any case, this new delay is due, in Core’s words, to the desire to optimize the title’s quality and playability. HOW DID YOU START WORKING ON THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS? When we finished Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, we started working on the flood of ideas we had, but the game didn’t really take shape until January 2001. We realized that we couldn’t change Lara’s personality (after all, it took us 5 years to build it), it was difficult to suddenly turn her into a Formula 1 driver, for example. In short, we couldn’t change Lara, but we could change her circumstances. We seriously considered turning her into an alcoholic, as I mentioned earlier that we wanted to do, but in the end we came up with the idea of setting a trap for her, that everything she represented would turn against her, everyone was chasing her because of how famous and well-known she is. Why did you introduce Kurtis? Kurtis allows us to change the gameplay, he is bent on revenge, he is the last member of Lux Veritatis fighting in this kind of holy war, he is the only one who knows about the Nephilim and how the new members will be reorganized into a new hierarchy of demigods, Lara will get involved in all this through the organization The Cabal, they need her to recover the engraving and she needs them to clear her name, Kurtis AI: reading between the lines, we believe that they are preparing Mr. Trent to star in his own game, that he was going to be a demon hunter. How do Lara’s conversations affect the game? They can convey important information, but they also affect the gameplay directly, I thought that no matter what she could say in the adventure games of before, what we have done is make the answers subtly different, more passive or aggressive, which will determine how they will respond in turn and the items they give you, for example, they might tell you that there are four paintings, but if you are not at the key point at the right time, no one will give you that information again in any other part of the game, if you speak to Madan Carvier aggressively, he will give you Von Croy’s notebook. This is the other way around in the game, if you speak to him aggressively instead of nicely, he won’t give it to you. Otherwise, he might not even mention it to you, even though it is actually in the room for you to find. I don’t know if the interview is poorly translated or this is what they really had in mind, but normally speaking badly to someone achieves the opposite, but oh well. we’ve introduced context sensitive buttons so the timing of your button presses during a conversation can be crucial, the doorman might reveal one way into the Louvres, a girl on the street might reveal another, it’ll all lead you to the same place but you might miss things by not taking a predetermined route. I’ve never tried talking to the doorman instead of Janice before so I’m not sure if this is true, so please confirm this in the comments although I think the doorman telling you about the Louvre is totally impossible at the moment. How long will the new adventure last? I’m a little confused about this, I could sit down and play a game for 10 hours and think it was a good experience, but I’m not a consumer, I don’t pay for these games. Hey kid, not for nothing but you’re giving a very bad image, you should at least play your own series, take an example from Naoki Yoshida, he is a great director who fixed Final Fantasy XIV and was praised by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who is the father of the series, also Naoki was the director of Final Fantasy XVI, which if you have a PS5 or a good pc is worth playing, I haven’t been paid but I’m telling you, the 16th is a good game, if you liked the Witcher saga, you will love it, obviously I’m talking about the games, the series doesn’t exist. Let’s continue. How would I feel if I finished the game in 7 hours? We set a goal of 25 hours, but in reality, it’s more like 35 hours, well we’re still playing to find out, is that a lot of hours? I think so. But not as long as the Tomb Raider games of the past. People usually played them in 60 hours. The original Tomb Raider was difficult, devilishly difficult, and it wasn’t a mass-produced game. This game is much easier to control. Lara does more things automatically; you don’t have to bother calculating jumps. How many people have bought Tomb Raider and only finished half the game? I don’t want to even imagine, considering how much it cost us to create it. Personally, I play long games, and 35 is not enough. How come the game didn’t come out in November? We got to a point where we were close to getting it, but it wasn’t ready, so we sent Christmas to hell. It wasn’t finished, we hadn’t managed to meet the deadline, although we would have loved to have a great Christmas. Has the game changed as a result of the delay? No, we decided to go from four to two levels a year ago. There were things we put on a list and we said, look, we could do without this, we could remove the upgrade system, etc. But in the end we didn’t discard anything, the levels in Germany and Turkey will appear in the second chapter, the game goes from beginning to end, it’s not divided into levels like before, like the old Indiana Jones map that jumps from piece to piece, the third game will probably take place in a single location, well probably not, it will take place in a specific place. How will progress be saved in the game? I’m not sure what to think about it, we have to offer the ability to save the game at any time, but we wanted to offer a limited number of possibilities to do so, three per area, for example, and that there would be some kind of reward for not using them, I personally love the crystals that were used to save, it was a sign that a difficult moment was approaching in the rock-hard game and it gave you that feeling of suspense. as you were getting closer to it, but on this issue I’m invalidated, Americans love the (save anywhere) mode and the truth is that there’s nothing that annoys me more than playing Sly Racoon, dying and going back to the game. Why split the plot into three parts? Don’t you think that will disappoint people? We loved the idea of Blade, where there are vampires living among us and that’s the idea of the Nephilim, we like the X-Files approach, you can watch the six key episodes, the plot, or you can swallow the 600 chapters whole, they all have their own story but they are all part of a bigger plot, for us, the big plot is the Nephilim, are they good? Will they kill everyone? What we couldn’t agree on was that I’ve always believed Tomb Raider should offer fantasy. We’ve had this semi-believable character running around with her enormous breasts, but there’s always been a bit of fantasy, a bit of science fiction. Did you create the mythology from scratch? The Nephilim aren’t a hard rock band; the Bible refers to them. They’re the descendants of angels and humans. We combined elements of mythology and legend; it’s great to work with that. What did you think of the film? I have the trailer for the new movie if you want to see it. I have the feeling that it’s… um, I thought they were going to approach it differently and make Lara into some kind of James Bond. There were discussions about whether they should make her a secret agent, but they didn’t do it that way. I’m not going to say what I thought about the first movie, but anyway, it was a huge success for Paramount, they made 380 million dollars or something like that, but whether it was a great movie or not, I don’t know. I saw it many times, I was disappointed. I think it could have been milked more. It was obvious that there were some big gaps in that movie. I think they’ve tried to improve it. The new script is much stronger, but how they’re going to film it is another story. There are some great scenes, I suppose you know that it’s about Pandora’s box. We have put a lot of interest in the project and also, in one daring scene that we supervised very happily. How much influence do you have over the producers of the film? This time we were more aggressive, we didn’t approve the scripts but, of course, they don’t get involved in how we make video games, so we don’t get involved in how they make the movie, they invite us and show us the whole rigmarole, but everything ends up being very Hollywood. As long as a good product comes out, because we already see what the Resident Evil saga is like in the movies, they are nothing like the games and they don’t even make sense within the world of the movies, and then let’s not even talk about Monster Hunter. Why do you think Capcom recently decided to release their own movies instead of commissioning them to that person who makes his wife the protagonist in every one he makes? This was to give you an idea, let’s continue with the video. And Angelina? What do you think? This is stunning, even more so than the first film, in the original casting, they had a short list of people, they chose Angelina from the beginning, but she was going for the Oscar and this changes the panorama, she was somewhat reluctant to accept the role, they did casting across 20 states , anyone could come and try to be Lara, Liz Hurley? Ffffzzz, Angelina is faithful to the character and she’s also a little crazy in the best sense of the word, she throws herself fully into the role, she’s been practicing with jet skis, horseback riding, she’s deeply involved, they had a double, the girl from Gladiator, Yunis, the original winner, the girl from Liverpool, it was strange to see them next to each other. Are you going to continue focusing on Tomb Raider in the future? No, that’s the quickest answer, we tried it with Herdy Gerdy and maybe we made some mistakes, we still like the game mechanics, but maybe the levels were too long, with a mediocre camera, we’ve been analyzing where we failed, now we’re developing two games, both are very different, but equally exciting, I think my life would be much more bearable if I had 100 people on the Tomb Raider development team, just make an EA and get the game out there. Like FIFA, in Tomb Raider we have 44 people, which is a pretty small number if we take into account that, more or less, 15 of them are programmers. We want to do other things. Lara is really great, but it’s equally exciting to create something new. I have to explain this here so that young people understand, since having only 44 or 100 people working on a video game today seems unthinkable unless it’s an indie studio. Yes, a long time ago there were only a few people working on a video game, but 100 is nothing like today. Monster Hunter World, for example, was created by 500 people. Final Fantasy VII for PS1? There were between 100 and 150, but the 2020 remake was no more and no less than 2,535 people. But why, if more people work in the development of a game today, does it take much longer to release them? I’m not going to talk about that because otherwise the video would become very long, but just look at the graphics and what can be done today in any triple A game. So if a part or a game is delayed in coming out, don’t get angry, be patient and wait and support the product, I always recommend that if you like a saga, buy it directly from the company’s store day 1 if they have it so that most of the profits go to them, that’s what I do and I encourage you to do the same, and nobody is paying me to say this, for the record, but it’s my way of thinking, if you really like something and you can directly support the person, do it so that they can continue creating what you like the most and can continue giving you more experiences, increasingly more incredible and better, and I prefer that they are the ones who keep the profits instead of third-party companies like Game, who don’t deserve anything. That said and making this explanation and clarification clear, let’s continue. When will these new games be released? I have no idea, in the middle of next year , we have very few people and time is running out, it will probably be released after Christmas, first we have to be satisfied with the games, Jeremy (his brother) and I were like two kids in a candy store with all these new ideas, we’ve created too many teams with too few staff, now we’re going to be more careful. What game have you been playing? The Getaway has some truly brilliant moments, I liked Sly Racoon more than Ratchet & Clank, The Lord of the Rings was spectacular, you have a lot of material for you to criticize, it is short and repetitive, but it is a true game of learning and playing, I think that today’s games have lost that. Nowadays, in 2025, I think you release a game like that and it doesn’t sell anything. Do you have plans for online modes? Yes, and many, if we were able to smooth out the rough edges with Sony, it could be relevant for the new Nightfall and Fighting Force games, but it is still difficult to get logical answers from Sony, last week they gave us more news and new ideas, we have a couple of games in the group (Eidos) that are being created for Online mode (TimeSplitters 2), What genres? Well guess what, at Core (not Eidos) we are not very sure about all this Online stuff. PS3? I have a lot more to say on that subject but I can’t really say for now. I think Sony’s whole philosophy, well I was talking to Ken Kuturagi and it was all about online, online, online and it was like, ugh, we don’t want to be involved in that, we want to be somewhere else. Everyone was looking at the US before England launches in the spring. It’s still not very clear from a developer perspective. I mean, what’s not very clear is how it’s going to work. They’re about to announce deals with certain companies that will become Internet service providers. When will the next Tomb Raider come out? We’ve already started in a way. What I don’t know is when we’ll finish. It’s a question of graphical resources. I think a lot of people would like to see Tomb Raider in November, as was the intention, so it’s potentially possible to have the games released in the same year. We could achieve that logically speaking, but It’s not a decision we should make. Any idea what the next game will be called? Well, no, but I didn’t like the title The Angel of Darkness! But why didn’t you like it? But it fits perfectly with the game, the setting and everything, so I don’t know what title I wanted to give it back then. And now that we’ve talked about the interview, which was very interesting about what the developers had in mind, let’s talk about the game’s betas, which are very interesting, given how the game changed. Paris ghetto at night. Below you will see a very short video of the beta of the alleys of Paris in the middle of the night, sorry for the poor quality but this is from quite a few years ago, but at least you can see quite well what we are interested in. Where we can see a light on in front of Renne’s pawn shop, in addition to the fact that the fences that are seen next to Renne’s shop in the final version are not there, the serpent rouge with the lights on both the letters and the windows, Janice who has changed places, the streetlights also have light as we can see in the beta, so now it makes more sense that there were streetlights since there was going to be a section of the ghetto at night and further in front we see the truck that is in the final version, but here, in the beta, it is not. So I have 2 theories, either there was going to be a day and night system like in the dragon quest, which I doubt and even totally rule out this possibility due to the nature of the game levels or something else It is feasible that it would be a part where we would see the Paris ghetto at night where we could access the other area of the ghetto that said section was left unfinished in the final version and that is why they blocked it with that fence and that badly parked truck. Honestly right now I do not know where the dark part of the ghetto could go. Maybe there would be another route to access Bouchard’s hideout that would be achieved by going through that route? Unfortunately, we will never know. The seesaw Yes, it lasts very little, but you can see something very interesting that would be that to enter the chamber of the stations instead of doing that circuit against the clock you would have to swing from a flag and then jump on a statue and the momentum throw it which would destroy the wall behind it, I like it more, it is short but intense. The cameras of the stations in one. This is a demonstration of several videos where you can see very different things, you will have it in order and you will be able to understand it better, I had to give it some turns to see the correct order since there is no complete video, first the central room of the chamber of the stations, the center, where the buttons to open the doors are and where the pillars would come out to climb the room, because they do not exist, instead the center is totally flooded and, surprise surprise, that area is what would be the Neptune chamber, continuing through that area you reach the bridge of the tomb of the ancestors through one of the doors, said area the background, it looks blue, which can be deduced that it is flooded, as seen in the beta both doors are open, so you would have to jump and continue through the door in front which would lead to what would be the Hades chamber, Hades, Hades, Hades, what a change, each and every one of the tests of the chamber of the stations and the tomb of the ancestors was a single level which is something that surprised me quite a bit when I saw it for the first time, so I’m very intrigued to know how it was going to be in the beginning. 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