Earlier today, Square Enix Europe announced Camilla Luddington as the  new voice and motion capture actress for the upcoming Tomb Raider game. Camilla is the fifth voice actress (for the pillar release), succeeding Keeley Hawes who voiced the adventuress for Crystal's previous Tomb Raider titles.

Born in the UK, Camilla was educated at an all-girls’ school in Ascot, Berkshire. Later attending The American School In England in Surrey. She completed her education at Oxford. After education, she focused on becoming an actress and since then have worked in LA. Since 2007, she has starred in numerous programs including Californication, William & Kate, and True Blood.

My sister recently travelled to E3 as a Tomb Raider UK Ambassador. During her time at the event, she had the opportunity to interview Karl Stewart (Global Brand Director). The questions were a combination of some my personal ones, a selection sent in by the owners of Music of Tomb Raider and Lara's Society (G&G E3 partner sites) and a handful sent in via this site's social media pages. The transcript of the interview is  below with a video to follow shortly:

When I was younger, I wanted to be Lara Croft. She was someone who was dedicated towards her goal and never strayed no matter how many mercenaries were after her. She was beautiful yet she focused on the beauty of artifacts. Brave yet cautious of her surroundings. As a child, she encapsulated everything that I wanted a personal hero to be. Like many fans, I'm protective over the series as I've grown up with it.

The character  is an icon. A heroine of the nineties. Yet games have moved on since then, companies are focusing more on the storyline and character arcs. The type of games changed leading to more variety in terms of gameplay mechanics and newer platforms allowed technology to be constantly improved upon. These changes shaped the games' reception, our expectations of them, and developer's targets. And of course this meant that Lara had to change too, after all there's only so much nostalgia can do to persuade gamers to constantly support the series.

Meagan Marie is the Tomb Raider Community Manager.  She joined the Crystal Dynamics team in Summer 2011, moving to San Francisco from her previous job at GameInformer.  Since starting her new role she has created the official Tomb Raider Fansite Group, led a series of community days demoing the latest game across Europe and North America and created the Official TR Blog, as well as arranging various podcasts and newsletters to keep fans updated.

Now before you begin reading the article and shower me with glass bottles, I want to stress one this - I don't have a favourite company. That is the absolute truth! I love Tomb Raider and I'm glad that there are more games, movies and news on the horizon to enjoy. I know that there has been a few Core vs Crystal debates out there, but hopefully this article will be something new. It isn't about a straight battle of Core Design against Crystal Dynamics with score boards and points, it's about how the companies reacted to each other, how the fans reacted and how Crystal is trying to return to the Golden Age of Tomb Raider with the new reboot.

(Sections in red refer to the extended edition shown AFTER the Microsoft Press Conference)

At the start of the conference Microsoft had promised us great things; the announcement of new games for the Kinect, new exciting titles due to be released and new features for XBOXLIVE. Directly after the introduction they handed it over to Crystal Dynamics to talk about their upcoming game and give the audience a quick preview at the start.

The presentation started with Daniel Neuburger (game director) Darrell Gallagher (studio head) introducing the project and explaining the storyline and how it transforms Lara in the game into the Tomb Raider. However they quickly started with the gameplay preview which was played live by Daniel as both of them commented on the features of the game.

"A famous explorer once said that the extraordinary is in what we do, not who we are."

Those were the words introducing us to the first ever trailer for the upcoming Tomb Raider game. We were promised big things from Crystal Dynamics and the team at Visual Works and we were not disappointed. A short version trailer was first aired on GTTV (on the channel Spike) at 6am (GMT), with the longer version going on YouTube and the official TR site straight afterwards. Inspired by the Bright Falls breakdown (Alan Wake's promotional series looked at frame by frame) by Machinima; I decided to approach the trailer with a similar technique...Also if you haven't seen Bright Falls, go do so, it's pretty freaky.