Interview with Executive Tomb Raider Producer Ron Rosenborg

During E3 2012 I met Ron Rosenborg, an Executive Producer working on Tomb Raider .  I managed to get an interview with Ron and learnt a lot of new interesting things about Tomb Raider.  Check out the video above for the interview. For those who wish to read the interview as well, a text version of the interview is also included.

 

Dan: Hi this is Daniel from Push-Start and I’m with

Ron: Hi my names Ron Rosenborg and I’m the executive producer for Tomb Raider.

Dan: What we saw in the demo we’ve just seen is that Lara Croft is very vulnerable, she used to be such a strong woman, how does she develop throughout the game?

Ron: well that’s certainly one of the big things we’re featuring in this chapter and in this game is the reinvention of Lara Croft. And in our game she literally goes from zero to hero and I think that’s one of the special things about our game; you get to see her character progression from literally just being a shipwrecked twenty-one year old woman with just the clothes on her back to a hardened survivor.

Dan: with the environment with the wolves and deer, how will the animals interact with Lara? How dangerous are they, and how dangerous is the environment itself?

Ron: Lara definitely faces many challenges on the island and we have a couple of themes that we really focused on for the game. One of them is women versus wilderness, and you’ll see that, she has to face environmental challenges, and it’s also a very living world, as you mentioned there are animals that will attack her as well as natives of the island, scavengers that are quite threatening

Dan: As the story progresses why are the natives attacking her at all? And also what was the choice of setting? What made yiu come up with the idea to choose this location

Ron: Well I certainly don’t want to give away the whole story but there are these natives on this island, we call them the scavengers and they are other people that have shipwrecked on this island. The story takes place in a real world location, it’s called the dragons triangle and it’s located near Japan, its much like the Bermuda triangle, it’s well known as a place where ships and other things have just disappeared.

Dan: As voice acting goes, who’s doing the voice acting?

Ron: I don’t know if we’ve released that yet so I’m not sure if I can talk about it, I can tell you I think she’s very good and I think with our reinvention of the character and featuring Lara at 21 years old she has that sort of, she’s more modern, and has that more vulnerable feeling.

Dan: as developing for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, what has been one of the most difficult things developing for all three platforms? Have you encountered anything that’s been a struggle in designing things, how things look, and how long have you been working on the game to make it look as good as it does today?

Ron: Well it depends upon how you measure things but certainly we’ve been working on the game since the release of Tomb Raider Underworld, which was about three years ago. As far as platform challenges we’re pretty lucky in that we have some great tech and game engine, and there are some small tech challenges, but largely for us its less about the tech challenges and we focus more on creating an experience, that really emotional, personal experience in our game.

Dan: As for weapons, Lara uses the bow and that’s her signature weapon, what other weapons will players be able to use in the game?

Ron: We’re going to speak more about combat at a later date but you’re right. The bow is Lara’s new signature weapon, it’s a big part of the reinvention and it’s a piece of gear that’s not only great for combat, but also at getting her out of other situations as well.