Rise of the Tomb Raider

• 1. Introduction

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  Rise of the Tomb Raider, a 2015 action-adventure game from Crystal Dynamics, opens a year after Lara Croft's ordeal on Yamatai. She is an archaeologist who cannot explain the supernatural events she lived through there, and she is struggling with post-traumatic stress. Microsoft Studios and Square Enix published the game. It is the eleventh main entry in the Tomb Raider series and the second chapter of the Survivor trilogy. Lara's search for answers leads her to Siberia, to a legendary city called Kitezh, and to a promise of immortality. Who else is hunting for that promise, and what would it cost the person who finds it? Why did a business arrangement around the game anger part of its own audience? And how did a team of developers turn a frozen landscape into something critics called gorgeous?

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• 2. Chasing Immortality

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  In the Forgotten Cities of northwestern Syria, Lara hopes to find the tomb of the Prophet of Constantinople. The Prophet is a key figure in the legend of Kitezh. Her late father, Lord Croft, spent years on that legend. His partner Ana warns Lara that the obsession drove him to ruin and suicide. Lara ignores her. The tomb turns out to be empty, and Lara is interrupted by Trinity. Trinity is an ancient order of knights that became a paramilitary organization investigating the supernatural. Its task force leader is a man named Konstantin.

  A symbol carved inside the empty tomb points Lara to a book on Russian religious history in her father's study at Croft Manor. The book describes the Divine Source, an artifact said to grant immortality. Lara argues with her friend Jonah Maiava about whether it can exist. Then a Trinity assassin slips into the manor and steals the book. The two friends set out for Siberia.

  An avalanche separates Lara and Jonah as they climb a Siberian mountain. Alone, she finds that Trinity has turned a Soviet-era installation into its base of operations. She is caught trying to retrieve the book and is imprisoned with Ana. Konstantin slowly strangles Ana to pressure Lara into talking. When he accepts that Lara does not know where the source is, Ana reveals that she is a Trinity agent and that Konstantin is her brother. Ana asks Lara to join Trinity, and Lara refuses.

  In the Gulag cells, Lara meets a man named Jacob. Together they escape with Trinity chasing them. Lara is incapacitated during the chase and nearly drowns, and Jacob saves her. She agrees to help him and his people fight off Trinity. They are the Remnants, descendants of the Prophet's followers, and they live in a valley of hot springs. Trinity attacks them again and again, and describes the slaughter as God's will.

  Lara learns that Ana has a terminal illness and wants the Divine Source to cure herself. Jacob warns Lara that the source is real but is not what she expects. Undeterred, Lara goes looking for the Atlas, an artifact that shows the way to Kitezh. She finds it in the archives beneath the ruins of a Cathedral. Jacob's daughter Sofia warns her about the Deathless Ones, the immortal guardians of Kitezh. Jonah, rescued by the Remnants, rejoins Lara in the valley. Then Trinity returns, takes the Atlas and captures Jonah. Lara goes back to the Gulag, where Konstantin mortally wounds Jonah. She carries him to Jacob, who heals him, and the speed of the recovery tells Lara that Jacob is the Prophet himself.

  Lara enters Kitezh by a dangerous path while Trinity advances on the glacier above the city. Journals written by a Trinity agent confirm Jacob's warning. Anyone who looks upon the Divine Source becomes immortal, but their soul is stored inside the Source to keep them from dying. Trinity breaks through the ice and reaches the chamber that houses it. With help from Sofia and the Remnants, Lara fights her way toward the chamber. Konstantin ambushes her, and she mortally wounds him. Before dying, he tells her that her father was not a suicide but was assassinated by Trinity.

  Inside the chamber, Ana has already taken the Divine Source. Jacob and Lara try to reason with her, without success. As the Deathless Ones close in, Ana activates the Source and is overwhelmed by its power. That gives Lara the chance to grab it and smash it to pieces, and the Deathless Ones perish. Jacob loses his immortality and is glad that his time has finally come. He tells Lara she has made a difference and peacefully disintegrates. Two weeks later, at Croft Manor, Lara and Jonah study their next expedition, and Lara vows to thwart Trinity's plans. A post-credits scene returns to Siberia, two weeks earlier, where Lara asks Ana whether she killed her father. Ana says Trinity gave the order but she could not carry it out because she loved him. A sniper then kills Ana, and his unseen superior tells him to stand down from killing Lara for the time being.

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• 3. Tools of Survival

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  Three skill trees named Brawler, Hunter and Survivor shape how Lara grows over the course of the game. Finishing objectives, side missions and fights earns experience points. Each level gained awards a skill point to spend. Brawler improves her handling of weapons, with abilities such as pulling arrows out of corpses and aiming steadily. It also toughens her against attacks and adds combat moves such as the dodge kill. Hunter helps her deal with environments and animals. Survivor covers a wide range of skills, including incendiary bombs and booby traps.

  Assault rifles, shotguns and pistols make up part of Lara's arsenal, and some weapons have an alternate firing mode. Players who prefer quiet can use bows and arrows, throw distractions or hide in bushes. Lara can also turn the terrain against enemies. She can shoot explosive barrels, bring down rope-wrapped structures with rope arrows, or ambush from high ground. Her ice axe and combat knife handle close fights.

  The semi-open hubs of Siberia are full of materials and survival caches. A vision mode called Survival Instinct highlights items of interest, including relics and documents. Collected materials feed a crafting menu. Lara can make ammunition and poisoned arrows from death-cap mushrooms. She can also turn cans and bottles into Molotov cocktails and hand grenades. Wildlife in the open areas can be hunted for more resources.

  Base camps let Lara change her outfit, which affects her combat performance, and swap weapon loadouts. They also serve as fast travel points back to areas already searched. Challenge tombs reward her with new skills and outfits. Her ice axe lets her climb cliffs and glaciers, and her rope arrows can create ziplines. As she learns new languages, she can find relics such as coins and trade them for equipment. The puzzles follow in-game physics and often link together, so that solving several smaller ones opens a larger one.

  Unlike the 2013 reboot, Rise of the Tomb Raider has no multiplayer. It offers Expeditions instead, which let players replay the game under new constraints. The four modes are Chapter Replay, Chapter Replay Elite, Score Attack and Remnant Resistance. Elite lets players carry acquired skills and weapons into a level. Score Attack adds combo chains, and Remnant Resistance lets players build custom scenarios to share. Credits earned in Expeditions buy digital collectible cards that modify play. Common cards work once and foil cards can be reused. Players can also buy the cards through microtransactions.

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• 4. Learning From Players

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  Work on the game began two weeks after the team finished polishing the 2013 reboot. Noah Hughes and Brian Horton led it as the franchise's creative and game directors. Rhianna Pratchett returned as writer, and Camilla Luddington returned to play Lara. Crystal Dynamics declared the game gold on the 9th of October 2015, which meant it was being prepared for duplication and release.

  Player feedback on the reboot steered many decisions. The team cut back on quick time events, expanded the hunting system and gave more weight to traversal and stealth. Hughes said the team studied older Tomb Raider games and distilled their best features. They combined those with the reboot's physics-based puzzles. The tombs grew larger than in the reboot, and water puzzles from the older games returned. Puzzles were nested inside one another, and each tomb was harder than the last. Optional tombs now handed out unique skills and items instead of plain experience points.

  The story was meant to feel more personal. The team wanted to show the journey in which Lara becomes a tomb raider, and they gave her a driving need to uncover more myths. She was written as more confident and competent, yet still vulnerable in a crisis. The new languages she learns, including Greek, Mongolian and Russian, were meant to show her hunger for knowledge. Pratchett found this script harder to write than the reboot, because she had to work out Lara's starting mental state and how to introduce her. The cast was much smaller than before, which gave each character more screen time.

  To set the tone, Crystal Dynamics built a rippomatic, a collection of movie scenes. Rambo: First Blood Part II inspired the stealth mechanic. Terminator 2: Judgment Day mattered because Sarah Connor and Lara are both "burdened with a truth that no one believes". The Edge and The Grey shaped the scenes where Lara fights bears and wolves. Hanna and The Descent inspired the bows, arrows and pickaxe. Alien vs. Predator and The Day After Tomorrow helped the team imagine the tundra.

  Some ideas with gameplay potential were dropped because they did not fit the context. Vehicles went, along with an early scene in which Lara fought enemies from a jeep. Horton regarded pacing as just as important as the story itself. Survival remained the core theme, but the team avoided making a true survival game because they felt it would discourage exploration. They wanted Siberia to feel alive, in a structure similar to metroidvania. Design director Michael Brinker said the team aimed for a less "grindy" game, in which no one is forced to complete optional tasks.

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• 5. Sight and Sound

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  The team took six months to build the snow technology that produces footprints and avalanches. They also flew to Yosemite National Park and visited Cappadocia, Istanbul and Ephesus in Turkey. In Turkey they researched Byzantine culture and Greek architecture to design Syria and Kitezh. The art team coined the idea of "ominous beauty" to reflect Lara's distorted mental state. They drew on other video games and fine art, including the Russian realists, and chose a vibrant color scheme. For variety, they added the Oasis, a location that looks dramatically different from Siberia.

  Bobby Tahouri, known for his work on Game of Thrones, replaced Jason Graves as composer. He first spoke to Crystal Dynamics in 2012 and signed on to write the score in late 2013. He was delighted to have more time to compose than on earlier projects. To "immerse himself in the Tomb Raider world", he listened to the earlier soundtracks. A 52-piece string-and-brass orchestra recorded the score in Nashville. The instruments included cello, woodwinds, dulcimer and a handpan made by Saraz Musical Instruments. The Siberian music uses an instrument similar to a gusli and low-pitched male singing. Middleware called the Dynamic Percussion System builds music as the game is played. Karen O and the guitarist David Pajo produced the theme song, "I Shall Rise". The game also has a Dolby Atmos soundtrack.

  Camilla Luddington gave Lara her voice and her movements over two years at a Los Angeles studio. She said one of her hardest tasks was having to "yell over wind and snow". Experts taught her how to hold weapons. Because this was Lara's first game for the eighth generation of consoles, the team sprayed Mova fluorescent paint on Luddington's face and captured 7,000 points of reference. The result looked too realistic for the character the team wanted, so they worked to give the young Lara "subtle" expressions. In cutscenes they emphasized physical details, such as muscles tensing during a climb or skin turning blotchy in the cold. Pose-based deformers and wrinkle maps helped Lara move more naturally.

  The in-house Foundation engine powered the game. Global illumination and physics-based rendering produced its light and shadow. Designers used an editor called Horizon, which showed text and graphics in a form close to the finished product. They also adopted a kit-bashing technique, in which a level is assembled quickly from modules and rebuilt until it satisfies the team. For graphical fidelity, they partnered with Nixxes Software, which ported the Xbox 360 version.

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• 6. The Exclusivity Storm

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  In August 2013, Square Enix Europe executive Phil Rogers revealed that a new Tomb Raider was in development for the eighth generation of consoles. Microsoft announced the game at an E3 2014 press conference with a late-2015 release. At Gamescom that year, the company said the game would be exclusive to its Xbox platforms, including Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Microsoft Studios executive Phil Spencer described it as a timed exclusive, similar to the deals for Dead Rising 3 and Ryse: Son of Rome. Both of those games later reached Windows. Players reacted with outrage and blamed franchise owner Square Enix. Microsoft's wording, "exclusive on Xbox for holiday 2015", confused both the press and players.

  In 2015, Rogers explained that the exclusivity came mainly from Microsoft's strong support for the 2013 reboot. He called the arrangement a "natural" evolution and a "tough" decision. Spencer said he is a fan of Uncharted and that Microsoft needed something similar in its strategy. Crystal Dynamics head Darrell Gallagher said the partnership helped the team deliver the best game it could.

  The game came out on the 10th of November 2015, with Microsoft Studios as publisher on Xbox 360 and Xbox One. The Windows version followed on the 28th of January 2016. An 18-issue comic series from Dark Horse Comics, also called Tomb Raider, had begun in early 2014. Pratchett and Gail Simone wrote it, and it bridged the gap between the reboot and the sequel. It also explained why some secondary characters are missing from the sequel.

  Microsoft sold an Xbox One bundle with a console, the game and a code for Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition. A collector's edition contained a 12-inch statue of Lara, a steelbook, a jade necklace and a replica of Lara's journal. A season pass covered the base game, extra outfits, weapons and expedition cards, and access to downloadable packs. GameStop preorders received the Holy Fire Card Pack for expeditions.

  Microsoft also live-streamed a Survival Billboard event on Twitch. Eight contestants stood in front of a billboard on Southwark Street while viewers voted for harsh weather to be thrown at them. Whoever lasted longest won a Tomb Raider-themed trip. Viewers who took part in the Twitch streams could also earn in-game rewards in expedition mode.

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• 7. Side Stories

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  The first post-launch update arrived on the 4th of December, a month after release. It added an endurance mode with survival elements. Lara hunts, crafts and faces hidden dangers and environmental hazards.

  The first story add-on, Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch, reached Xbox One on the 26th of January 2016. Lara investigates a disturbance in a Soviet mine and finds a young girl named Nadia hiding in a sawmill. Nadia is looking for her grandfather, Ivan, who vanished while trying to enter the Wicked Vale. The valley is said to be haunted by Baba Yaga, a witch from Slavic folklore. Lara doubts the witch exists, but agrees to search because Nadia is injured. In the Vale, a rare pollen with hallucinogenic properties tortures Lara with visions of her father's suicide. She meets Baba Yaga and a pack of demonic wolves, then escapes to a Soviet-era outpost. There she finds evidence of a secret biological-weapons project that tried to harness the pollen and ended when its researchers succumbed to hallucinations. One of them was Serafima, a biochemist imprisoned in a nearby gulag. Lara deduces that Serafima weaponized the pollen, developed an antidote and hid her research from the military. With Nadia's help, Lara makes the antidote from Serafima's recipe and returns to the Vale. She finds Ivan at the entrance to the witch's lair and defeats Baba Yaga, who turns out to be Serafima. Serafima had been led to believe that her husband Ivan and her daughter were dead, and she used the pollen to torment her captors.

  Cold Darkness Awakened, the third add-on, came out on the 29th of March 2016 and introduced a horde mode. Lara enters a decommissioned Soviet weapons bunker that a Trinity patrol has breached. Trinity has accidentally released an unstable pathogen that pushes the infected back to a zombie-like state. Men are especially vulnerable because the virus stimulates testosterone and adrenalin. A Soviet researcher created it to build unstoppable super-soldiers, but all his experiments failed. With Sofia and Nadia supporting from a helicopter, Lara shuts down three towers to channel the pathogen into a central tower, then detonates it. She jumps to the helicopter as the tower explodes. Documents in the facility show that the release was no accident. Trinity had reactivated the bunker to obtain a sample, and an agent escaped with it.

  A 20 Year Celebration edition, developed by Nixxes Software and Crystal Dynamics, reached PlayStation 4 on the 11th of October 2016. It added a classic outfit inspired by Tomb Raider III and cooperative play for endurance mode. It also added two modes set in Croft Manor, free for season-pass holders. In Blood Ties, a note from Lara's maternal uncle claims he is the rightful owner of the manor. Lara hunts through the crumbling house for her father's will. The safe holds no proof of ownership. It leads her to her mother's tomb under the main staircase, and with both parents proven dead, the property passes to her. Lara's Nightmare is a combat mode in which she fights zombies and skulls, finds a master key and kills a large skull in the main hallway.

  To promote the edition, the marketing team hung a jeep from the side of a building in Times Square. Blood Ties supported PlayStation VR at launch, and Oculus Rift and HTC Vive support came on the 6th of December 2017. Feral Interactive released the game for macOS and Linux in April 2018.

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• 8. Verdicts and Numbers

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  Critics gave the game a warm welcome, and the review aggregator Metacritic recorded "generally favorable reviews". Kimberly Wallace of Game Informer called the graphics "stunning", though she noted frame rate issues. Spencer Campbell of Electronic Gaming Monthly called the areas "gorgeous" and said every location looked unique. Steven Hansen of Destructoid named it one of the best-looking games on the market, but thought some lighting was unrealistic.

  Opinion on the story was split. Wallace found it predictable apart from its final scene. Campbell said it "took too many cues" from Raiders of the Lost Ark and left its characters forgettable. Mike Mahardy of GameSpot found the story emotional and the characters believable, and said its mysticism "makes sense within the world they occupy". Justin Towell of GamesRadar enjoyed the surprises but was disappointed by how closely it echoed the reboot. Peter Paras of Game Revolution praised Luddington's performance. Lucy O'Brien of IGN described Lara as "endearing" and driven by "complex ambitions".

  Reviewers also disagreed about the gameplay. Mahardy called the combat "superb". Towell compared the combat and stealth to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and said Lara often felt like a "cold-blooded killer". O'Brien named the challenge tombs the highlight. Hansen dismissed much of the side activity as "open world busywork" and compared it to the Assassin's Creed series. Paras called expedition mode a "real treat", while Oli Welsh of Eurogamer said it existed only to please YouTubers and earn microtransaction revenue. Wallace judged the game "better in every way" than the reboot. Towell called it a "safe sequel" with a formula that worked. Paras argued that after 20 years the franchise had surpassed classics such as Resident Evil 4 and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

  The game launched on the same day as Fallout 4, a highly anticipated release from Bethesda Game Studios, which also had Microsoft as its marketing partner. Some journalists worried about sales, but Microsoft believed the two games would not compete. In the United Kingdom, Rise of the Tomb Raider was the fourth best-selling game in its week of release, behind Fallout 4, Call of Duty: Black Ops III and FIFA 16. It did not sell well enough in the following month to appear on the NPD Group chart. Square Enix called the early performance "solid". In the first month, the Windows version sold three times better digitally than the Xbox One version. Sales passed one million by the end of 2015 and reached nearly seven million by November 2017. By November 2021 the total stood at 11.8 million.

  Awards followed. The Telegraph Video Game Awards nominated it for Game of the Year and named it runner-up for Best Level Design. IGN's Best of 2015 Awards gave it Best Xbox One Game of the Year and Best Action-Adventure Game. GameSpot placed it eighth in its Game of the Year list, and GamesRadar placed it fifth. The game also appeared in category lists at the 33rd Golden Joystick Awards, The Game Awards, the 19th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards and the 68th Writers Guild of America Awards.

  Some plot elements were later used in the 2018 film adaptation of Tomb Raider. A sequel to that film, delayed by COVID-19, was considered as an adaptation of Rise. It was cancelled in July 2022, after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lost the film rights to the franchise. The game's direct successor, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, came out on the 14th of September 2018 for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One. Eidos-Montréal, which had supported Crystal Dynamics on Rise, replaced it as lead developer.

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