Trivia / Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

• Approval of God: J.R. Milward’s novelisation received praise from the game’s writer, Murti Schofield, who has expressed hope it gets officially published one day.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: The game has a tendency to be forgotten compared to others in the franchise, but the promo song "Angel of Darkness" has become popular. It helps that the song isn't actually played in the game itself, distancing itself more from the source.
• Christmas Rushed: The game was originally planned to release in late November of 2003, specifically for the Christmas season (and in keeping with the tradition of releasing a new TR game in that period). Instead, it was rushed to be released in the second quarter of that year - ultimately reaching stores by June 20th in an unfinished and buggy state.
• Creator Killer: In addition to the game's development troubles and general reception, Paramount blamed the poor performance of their second Tomb Raider movie on this game - ultimately leading Eidos to fire Core and relenquishing the IP from them, to pass development duties to American-based developer Crystal Dynamics. This spelled the end of Jeremy Heath-Smith's career at Core, and their eventual bankruptcy in 2010 as a tiny branch of Rebellion Developments.
• Dummied Out:
  • The opening tutorial level was originally intended to be a little longer, or at least contain an alternate route, which can be accessed using cheats in the PC version.
  • At least two characters were left on the cutting room floor, and a large amount of dialogue — both recorded and in text form — was left unused, often referencing features that didn't make the final cut.
  • The dual pistols (both Dual Vectors and Scorpion-X). They can be put into the inventory via action replay/cheat disc on PS2, downloading a save game with them or with the all weapons cheat via the SCU or picking them up in the Invent test level accessible via SCU.
  • The test level Invent, accessible on the PC version via SCU, has a bunch of removed items. They're all nonfunctional and can crash your game (such as the laser sight or harpoon gun), with the only two exceptions being the Dual Scorpion-x and Dual Vector R-35 weapons.
  • The game was intended to have a "Combine" feature (a concept originally introduced in The Last Revelation). It would've allowed the player to create the iconic dual pistols from finding a pair of them across the game, as well as a "Separate" feature that would've been used for certain plot items. Presumably, technical issues that Core didn't have time to fix meant the entire feature had to be scrapped. The only remnant of this in the final game is the hammer item, which is specifically referred to as "Combined Claw Hammer" in the inventory.
• Executive Meddling: Due to the dire state of Eidos Interactive's finances around the game's release period, the execs moved the release date of the game back almost a half year earlier, fully aware it was impossible to finish it in such a time-frame. However, for Eidos this was a "do or die" decision - as the company was so much in debt that they wouldn't survive until the game's planned premiere in November 2003. Even with the influx of returned sales of the game and players' dissatisfaction - the combination of the money made on release (which was actually considered satisfactory) from sales that weren't returned and a short windfall of stock prices allowed Eidos to keep out of bankruptcy and stay afloat as a company.
• Franchise Killer: The box office failure of The Cradle of Life had less much to do with the movie being bad as it did with the video games becoming awful. Angel of Darkness ruined Tomb Raider for a long time.
• Not What It Looks Like: During the location hunt in the Louvre, people from the design team were ultimately surrounded by guards and had to deliver an official explanation to the curators that they were game developers and definitely not planning a robbery. It is doubly ironic, given Lara does perform a robbery in the museum.
• Saved from Development Hell: Despite starting development around the time of the third game the game suffered greatly from this, and led to Core Design being fired by Eidos. Location hunt in Paris went so out of control there was no money nor time left to perform one in Prague. And most of it was left on the cutting floor anyway due to the change in release date.
• The "The" Title Confusion: Even on this very wiki, you'll often see the subtitle for this game written as "Angel of Darkness" rather than "The Angel of Darkness".
• Troubled Production: After the game's initial planning period in 2000, Core Design faced several issues with the game's development which caused it to be in Development Hell for quite a while. Some of the biggest factors were attempting too broad of a scope and feature set for the time they had, management issues back and forth with executive producer Jeremy Heath-Smith and publisher Eidos Interactive, and internal strife between the members at Core. When the veterans at Core finished up Tomb Raider Chronicles, they found that none of what they'd created up to that point was usable and had to scrap all of it and start again. Eidos abruptly moved up the game's release date to June 2003, despite being well aware that the game was nowhere near complete. This set Core on a downward spiral to get the game as ready for release as possible, which caused an innumerable amount of bugs with the game from not having enough time to play-test it properly, as well as cutting gameplay and content if it either wasn't working properly or if they didn't have time to integrate it into the game. After the game bombed with both critics and players, Eidos allowed Core to take the brunt of the blame for the game's negative reception - themselves washing their hands from their own part of mismanaging the project in its final phase. As well as remaining silent about the state of their own finances - which didn't surface until a few years later, when the company again faced bankruptcy and was ultimately bought by Square Enix.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game was meant to take place in four separate locations at the beginning of development - Paris, Prague, Germany, and finally Cappadocia. With this structure, The Angel of Darkness was also originally conceived as a single game rather than a trilogy. The strict deadlines imposed by upper management meant this original concept was unfeasible with the time allotted for development. Murti Schofield, the lead writer of AOD, ended up having to condense the story as much as possible to fit inside of Paris and Prague, since there wasn't nearly enough time to flesh out the other two locations in a single game. The idea for a trilogy to expand the concepts not explored in Angel of Darkness came about because of this, though obviously the game's negative reception meant this never came to be.
  • Jean-Yves was originally intended in the game's planning stages to be the one killed at the start of the game, but due to the controversy surrounding his inclusion in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation alongside Core having to hastily remove the character in Tomb Raider Chronicles to avoid Jean-Yves Empereur, whom he was based on, from suing - Werner Von Croy was used instead.
  • After Tomb Raider Chronicles wrapped up production, Core had intended to begin focusing the games on Lara herself and leaving the "Tomb Raider" persona behind, since Chronicles was intended to be the last game in the "classic" format (which is also why they released the Level Editor for that game.) One such indication of this was that they had planned for The Angel of Darkness in particular to just be titled Lara Croft: The Angel of Darkness. The decision was two-fold - to highlight that it was a more personal narrative than they'd ever done before, and also to tie into events like the murder mystery surrounding Von Croy in the game itself. When they relayed this decision to Eidos, they refused on the grounds that the series had been established long enough at that point that no one would buy the games unless they recognized the distinct brand carried by "Tomb Raider" itself and the style of gameplay it had. Because of this, Core was ultimately forced to re-add Tomb Raider back to the title, even though they knew that much of the game was not created in the classic Tomb Raider format. This ended up backfiring heavily. In addition to the game's other problems, many a player ended up being confused as to why the game was distinctly urban in nature for a large part of the game, and why so little of the game's levels were spent in anything resembling a tomb.
  • Kurtis' inclusion in the game was intended by Core to be the start of branching out from Tomb Raider into other potential IPs. The idea was that if he was well-received in The Angel of Darkness, he would continue to appear and possibly have a larger role in any sequels to the game as well as receive his own game series - tentatively titled Demon Hunter. If he wasn't liked, then his implied death near the end of the game would be final and the character would be retired. Due to the game's negative reception, Core were forced to cancel any potential sequels and spinoffs - which put a firm end to any of this. However, ex-Core members have mentioned in the years since that they were satisfied at the time with how he was received in general.
  • The random strength upgrades applied to Lara after completing seemingly menial tasks was intended to be part of a much larger upgrade system for the game. The idea was that after the events surrounding The Last Revelation and Lara escaping death, she'd become "rusty" with her abilities - to supplement the idea of "starting over". The upgrade system itself was intended to add more depth by adding RPG-like features such as determining what the upgrades could be used towards in regards to her abilities. It was described by Operations Director at Core, Adrian Smith, as "build your own Lara." The strength upgrades themselves were meant to relay the idea that Lara was having to rebuild her actual physical strength after so long. The system was reportedly complete and functional and would've most likely shipped with the game, but the shift to having the game released by June 2003 meant that the level designers and programmers most likely had no time to integrate the system across the game. Instead, an extremely basic implementation was used instead to give Lara upgrades when she needed them. This ended up being extensively criticized by fans, who found the system in the released game to be pointless and silly.

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