Lara"s back, but for the next game in the all-new trilogy she"ll be going further back than anyone expected... bring on the dinosaurs!
While Eidos"s near-comical indecisiveness means European fans still have no clear idea when Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness will actually hit store shelves (current money is on July 4, with Eidos extending its financial year to accommodate, but, frankly, God only knows) you can at least marvel at pretty pictures of Ms. Croft on the side of buses in the interim. One thing that is known, however, is that Angel of Darkness is the first title of a brand new Lara trilogy for next-gen, with the final two chapters releasing on PS2 and PC over the next couple of years.
Speaking about plans for the remainder of the trilogy, Heath-Smith stated: "We don"t think we went traditional enough with this game. For the next one, we want to bring the dinosaurs back."
Explaining this ostensibly massive u-turn from Core"s position at the time AOD was announced - where Lara was said to be moving in a darker, edgier, more adult direction - Heath-Smith explained: "Lara"s pretty good in Paris, but in hindsight, we were scared of taking her straight back to tombs. We thought people had had enough of tombs, but the reality is, I don"t think people can get enough of tombs and all that stuff. So we"re gonna go pretty big on that.
"Our plan for the trilogy is very much to have one out every 12 months, because we"ve got them planned out and we"re not going to touch the technology, so we"re going to play with the storyline - and our plan is to spin the next one in a year. Our plan is to have it, I"m hoping, before June next year. Worst case would be in a year, but hopefully before that." Tempting as it was, we didn"t dare ask Eidos if it had a solid date for the sequel...