Crystal Dynamics: The Avengers is the biggest thing we've ever done

Crystal Dynamics has developed some pretty big products over its 25-year history. As the custodian of the Tomb Raider series, the firm has rebooted the franchise twice, and its last two games -- the award-winning Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider -- have sold in excess of 18 million copies worldwide.
The next game, however, is on an even grander scale. You couldn't escape Marvel's The Avengers at E3. The logo was plastered across the Los Angeles Convention Centre, and it was the grand finale to Square Enix's press conference.
"From our side, it's the biggest thing that we've ever done," head of studio Scott Amos tells GamesIndustry.biz. "We now have five studios working together to pull this off. Crystal Dynamics at Redwood Shores, we opened a new studio in Bellevue called Crystal North West. We have our partners in the Netherlands, Nixxes, which has a big team of people who we've worked with for 20 years. Eidos Montreal was our sister studio for all of Tomb Raider, so they're working on this. And even Square Enix Japan has folks from the tech group working with us.
<figure class="small">https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2019/a...x-1/quality/80Avengers was promoted heavily at E3
</figure>"We've literally had to put these five studios together and say: 'We're going this far. Tomb Raider, awesome. Rise of the Tomb Raider, even better. Shadow of the Tomb Raider... and it's like no, we're going beyond the boundaries'.
"We've had to change how we work, how we are organised as a team, the number of people we need to do this, the number of external partners... We've had to go hire experts like Shaun Escayg, who is our creative director. He told stories for Uncharted and The Last of Us [at Naughty Dog], we needed him to help tell this story. Dave Fifield was a game director who worked on Halo and Call of Duty, we needed him to help us with multiplayer. We go around and look at what we need. Who are the experts? Vince Napoli, he's our lead combat designer, he just did God of War, come help us with the combat. We cherry-picked the best of the best and said: 'Let's put this together in a new way for something bigger than we've ever done'."
There is another party involved in the creation of the new Avengers game, and that's the franchise owner: Marvel. But far from being a mere licence holder, Amos says they're more like part of the development team.

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