Tomb Raider: Underworld Preview

VideoGamer: At the time the original Tomb Raider came out, it seemed to feel that there was something of an unofficial alliance between that game and the PlayStation. Do you feel that this could happen with the 360? Is there an argument that it's now the dominant platform of this generation?

EL: I think it was more timing and circumstances than anything else. The Xbox was on site, they were ready to go and the PlayStation had a longer strategy plan that they [Sony] were implementing. I think that 10 years from now, looking back, we'll have a different view about the way these platforms ultimately succeeded and the audiences they captured. But right now we're in the middle of it, and we're still on the wave that the 360 caught. The PlayStation is still ramping up, so we're still in the middle of it.

VideoGamer.com: Underworld has a hints system that can either offer clues or tell the player outright what it is they have to do to progress. Did you have any concerns about this? Did you worry that it might be open to abuse?

EL: This is something I've wanted to do from the beginning, and I've been having conversations on the other side, convincing people that it's a good idea. I actually only explained half of it in the presentation we did today. There's also player tailoring within the menu structure, where you can go and alter multiple settings that are initially set with your choice of difficulty at the beginning. But it's not really about difficulty, it's about what kind of challenge you want. You can set how strong Lara is, how strong her enemies are, how much time you have to perform a recovery grab when one of your hands slips off a ledge. It's really about giving players the ability to tailor the kind of experience they want. Some people love to explore and solve puzzles but find the combat tedious. 'I don't want something to be attacking me any more. I want to get back to figuring stuff out'. They can dial that down - not because they're not good enough, but because they don't want that to be emphasised in their experience.

The one really controversial point is the one you touched on, which is people giving in to temptation. While the hardcore gaming audience especially enjoys a tussle, and coming out on top in the end, there's also a very broad mainstream audience that would drop before they got there - particularly with the crowded field we have. There are so many games out there, and so many coming out this fall. It's a question of finding the balance. How much do we facilitate people wanting to experience the game in the way they want to experience it, and how much do we tempt them with what can not be resisted? I think in the end we've done more good for more people. Because the real hardcore gamers, they're not going to look up the answers. They're not. And even if they do it once, they'll be like, 'aw, I could have figured that out!'. And they won't do it again.

VideoGamer.com: So just to clarify - when you said you can make Lara stronger...?

EL: You can dial up the health of Lara, you can dial down the health of enemies, reduce or increase the amount of time you have to recover when you slip, and you can change the amount of ammo you bring in for your secondary weapon. You bring in a whole bunch of shotgun shells, or you can bring just a few - but you're not going to find any in the ancient ruins! No-one's been walking around leaving 12-gauge shells lying around.

VideoGamer.com: Are there any rewards for using the harder settings? Achievements and trophies, perhaps?

EL: Because this was really about the way people want to play, and not, 'here are the great players who can do this, here are the not-so-great players who can't do that', we only have one. If you dial everything down to the hardest settings, there's a master survivalist achievement that you can get. And that is really about survival. It doesn't check whether you use the help system or not, because you could always go on the internet It's about getting through the physical challenges to the end.

VideoGamer.com: Okay, I have one last question that I've always wanted to ask someone who works on a Tomb Raider game. You have all these ancient temples with amazingly complicated ways of opening up doors and the like... When you're designing these levels, how do you imagine that things used to work? Were all the monks super-trained acrobats, or what?

EL: That's funny! One of the things that makes Tomb Raider levels hard to design - at least under my watch - has been that the designers have to make everything twice. They need to design what the space looked like when it was first built, and then they need to design what it looks like now. So when you're swinging around poles or shimmying along ledges, that wasn't the way the ancient priests did it! The priests had a stone breezeway going up to the second level - so we build out those stairs and then destroy them. So if you look, you'll often find ways that the place made a lot more sense for the people who originally designed it. There's a corridor that's broken down, or a stairway that's collapsed. So we put a lot of work in to make both worlds exist.

Tomb Raider Underworld is out on November 21 on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PC and DS.