A Real Point of Contention, It Seems
A couple members of the Shadow of the Tomb Raider development team recently talked about the development process with Gamasutra. The resulting interview revealed a couple of interesting points, namely three of the hardest parts of designing and developing the game. One source of their suffering was… white ledges?
Creating adjustable difficulty settings for the newest Tomb Raider game meant making subtle changes to the environment that could be undone with the selection of a single setting. If you’re not familiar with the games and the challenge they provide, you can set it on easy. This causes white ledges and white paint to pop up, marking the path you need to follow to progress through the game.
It seems obvious in retrospect, but being able to turn off and on those ledges was a major breakthrough. According to narrative director Jason Dozois, there was even a group called G.R.O.W.L., or “Get Rid Of White Ledges.” For experienced players, these path markers took all of the challenge out of the game. But getting rid of them only confused and threw off the new players. So the decision was made to link them to the difficulty settings. Brilliant! You can check out the rest of the interview here. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.