Very messy business – Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

**Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness** (Core Design/Eidos, PlayStation 2, 2003)

The CRPG Addict, a blog in which one person attempts to play every computer-based RPG ever, takes its starting point in 1975. The Dungeon, like the non-computer-based Dungeons & Dragons the previous year, had a growth mechanic whereby your character gained experience points from their battles, and when they reached a certain number of points, moved up a level, gaining power. The mechanical formalisation of the idea of learning from experience has been in video games for a very long time.

The idea has had some quite different implementations along the way. Final Fantasy II tied its experience gains more specifically to the actions your characters took in battles, making attacking yourself a strong strategy for improving multiple stats at once. But the basic idea has grown and grown. One story across the decades-long sweep of the history of the most popular games is of a slow trend away from high scores, a meter of the player’s progress, and towards EXP, levels, and other counters tracking the character’s progress. The basic pleasure of watching numbers go up remains, but redirected to something less straightforwardly reliant on the player’s own skills.

It’s a common-sense kind of concept, the idea of getting better at something as you do it more. It’s also not always true. Take, for example, Core Design in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Making lots of Tomb Raider games did not, by subjective but important measures, make them better at making Tomb Raider games. Putting actual people on a treadmill tied to a yearly release schedule of creative works had adverse effects, not to mention its effects on the public’s enthusiasm regarding playing yet another Tomb Raider game. The way that experience and growth is portrayed in games is a massive over-simplification, but the systems are often satisfying enough narratively and mechanically to overlook that.

The growth system in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness is not satisfying. It is in a way even simpler than that in The Dungeon. When the game points out that Lara Croft is not able to make a jump, or to hang from something for long enough to make it to solid ground again, the solution isn’t to battle some enemies to raise a visible number. It’s to go elsewhere in the level and find a door to burst open or a box to push, at which point she says something like “I feel stronger now” and you can now go and do the thing. Magical instant growth guaranteed. Of all of the ways for games to make you complete a task before progressing, this system is almost awe-inspiring in the extent to which it is the worst of all worlds. It has all the inflexibility of having to go and pull a switch to open a door, without any of the clarity or logic, replacing it with the pain of level grinding. As a replacement for the simple elegance of early Tomb Raider’s constant abilities and fixed grid structure, it’s a humongous misstep.

Time would tell that including more RPG elements in action games could be a popular success, but there was no chance for it to be so in this form. More broadly, The Angel of Darkness’s has plenty of changes to Tomb Raider formula which could have been good ideas in some form but aren’t executed well. Going for bigger, more adventure-game-like spaces and open-ended tasks is a decent way of expanding possibilities, but everything is weirdly empty, and the painful frequency and length of loading screens turns it into a chore and already looked behind the times. Similarly, a greater story focus was an almost inevitable move and the dark tone isn’t badly judged, but the mechanical story-telling looks feeble next to, say, TOCA Race Driver, never mind Metal Gear Solid 2. It’s not just the awful French accents. Almost every line of Lara Croft’s dialogue is emphasised like she’s impatiently cutting someone off, but the timing doesn’t match up at all. Rather than the determined, thrusting force that was presumably intended, it makes her come off like she’s belligerently drunk.

Developers Core Design can’t have been unaware of these problems with The Angel of Darkness, and it’s not hard to see the pressures they were under. In 2002, publishers Eidos had changed their financial year-end from the end of March to the end of June, and they were intent on The Angel of Darkness making it out during their 2002-2003 financial year, whatever state it was in. As Core’s then managing director Jeremy Heath-Smith later told Eurogamer: “The game wasn’t finished. I told Eidos the game wasn’t finished. They didn’t want to know. […] It needed another six to eight weeks to have finished it properly, but we didn’t have that because we were chasing the share price.”

Mere months after the fiasco of Championship Manager 4’s premature release marked the end of Eidos’s relationship with Sports Interactive, the creators of one of Britain’s most successful series of games, The Angel of Darkness ultimately did the same with another. Core Design were removed from Tomb Raider and eventually exited altogether.

In the end, The Angel of Darkness made it out a week before the deadline in the US, but didn’t make it through the more difficult processes for approval in Europe in time. Looking at Eidos’s accounts filed with Companies House, it made £8 million profit in 2002-03, helped by increased turnover in the US, and then effectively zero profit in the 2003-04 year that the European release of The Angel of Darkness (as well as most of its US sales) fell into. Maybe missing the year-end wasn’t such a bad thing except in the most short-sighted of terms. But short-sighted and broken mechanics predicated on growth were hard to shake off.

It’s notable when looking at Eidos’s ‘00s accounts that each year’s contains an almost identical line under the heading ‘Future prospects’: “Based on the positive outlook for the entertainment software industry, the directors look to report a strong operating performance for the year”. In the world of video games, it suggests, you just keep doing things and they will go better. In reality, growth doesn’t work like that. Eidos never had another year as profitable as 2002-03 again. By the end of the decade, Eidos had first merged with SCi (the publishers of Conflict: Desert Storm) and then, following successive years in which it posted losses of £121 million and £66 million, had been bought out by Square Enix.