A lot of people were surprised when Eidos announced that the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot, which ships in March, would have online multiplayer. Many people began to claim the studio was just trying to capitalize on the success of other shooters.
Eidos took a moment to explain Tomb Raider’s need for multiplayer to Eurogamer.
“There are two reasons. The first is a selfish reason of mine. With single player, there’s a start and there’s an end. And you have some games with a rich universe, and you think you want to stay there forever and then it ends.
“You want to stay in that universe – there are some games like that. One of things that was pitched was can we make that Tomb Raider universe persistent? We wanted to do that, and we explored new maps and new types of gameplay, and for me that’s very meaningful – taking that world and making it persistent.”
“The second thing comes from Crystal. I think they had some success with Guardian of Light, but when they were doing it people were asking why they were doing it. They stuck to their guns and they ended up with something pretty successful, and that was pretty good, and Darryl [Gallagher, Crystal Dynamics' head] came in and said he wanted to push that, he wanted to create that core experience and have it also a competitive experience.”
Good enough reason for me I suppose. I loved Uncharted’s online play and if this is anything like that I’m fine with it.
Eidos explains why Tomb Raider has online multiplayer,
