Tomb Raider - Pratchett and Crystal Dynamics wanted to "get away from Teflon coated Lara"

Tomb Raider will have a more relatable Lara Croft who is a step back from the "aristocratic ice queen" she has been portrayed as over the years, according to the game's writer.

In order to accomplish such a task, Rhianna Pratchett and the team at Crystal Dynamics did its best to "get away from Teflon coated Lara."

"I'd grown up with Lara, but I'd also had a bit of a love/hate relationship with her over the years," she told GI International. "I'd even written things in the press being slightly grumpy about the way Lara had become. Big boobs and etcetera etcetera.

"So this was a chance to kind of put up or shut up I guess, and having experience with writing Nariko [Heavenly Sword] and Faith [Mirror's Edge] as well it was really like going back to the genesis of action game heroines."

Pratchett said one of the ways she built Lara's character through writing, was looking at the actual mechanics of the gameplay and going from there.

"With someone like Faith, it's asking questions like 'in the gameplay mechanic there's lots of running away, why would someone live a life where there's a lot of that, and what are they running away from? Do they want to stop running, what would they do if did stop running, what would it take to stop them?'" she said.

"So actually looking at how those gameplay mechanics feedback into character, because I think that helps to embed the character in the world more, rather than making them seem slightly outside the game playing world. And that was something we definitely wanted to do with Lara.

"I really wanted to talk more about bringing the humanity and warmth back to Lara as a character."

Tomb Raider is out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in early 2013.