Tomb Raider’s ‘Guide to Survival 2’ features fast travel and gear gating

As expected, in the new Tomb Raider due out March 5th, there is going to be a fair bit of exploration and well… raiding. In the newest video put out by Crystal Dynamics, 'Guide to Survival  2,' the developers focus on exploration in their game. The two featured aspects in the video are fast travel and gear gating.

Most likely if you’ve ever played an open world or sandbox game, you’ve heard the term ‘fast travel’ before. This system commonly allows players to quickly go somewhere else on the map after that location has been explored / cleared / settled. Tomb Raider won’t be all that different from this system you know and love. Lara will be able to fast travel from base camp to base camp after a camp has been discovered. This will reward players for exploring as well as give you the option to travel long distances after being somewhere once.

Alongside with fast travel, is something Tomb Raider calls ‘gear gating.’ I’ve personally always referred to this term as the ‘Zelda Effect.’ Basically what this means is that when you’re given a liner main story line in an open world game, the game forces you to do main story quests to unlock new tools to gain access to new areas or new content. For example, you’ll need the shotgun to shoot down barricades in Tomb Raider. Before you have the shotgun you can’t gain access to these areas. Another example is in Zelda when you need the raft to travel to a certain dungeon to get access to another item that allows Link to reach the next dungeon. This game function forces players to follow a specific path even in an open world setting.

Watch the video below as it is the second part in this Tomb Raider series. The game is less than a month away now and I’m excited as hell. Soon Tomb Raider, soon.