Sad to hear about people's lay-offs
!
Well, it ultimately came about as it was really impossible to support multiple teams the way we were going. So they basically said we're not supporting the Montreal team on Deus Ex anymore -- they'll take the code and run with it however they want to -- we're not doing any more DLC or patches on TRU, we're not going to go into production on anything new... it's just 100% "TR9".
What that basically meant for the layoff is that anyone working on anything that wasn't directly for "TR9" and "TR9" alone was laid off. I also fell under that umbrella, but I've moved on.
I doubt the boat/water bug I found is widespread, I've never read about it. I'll search around and see if I can find any references to it. It was a strange bug, it seemed like my save game got stuck in that state.
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/tombraider8/show_msgs.php?topic_id=m-1-46854921&pid=936842
Hmmm... well if there is something that's changing the game state to make that boat area to misbehave in some way, it makes sense that it wouldn't be affected by dying and restarting the level. Restarting the level from the previous checkpoint after death only resets a few script-driven states, but very little else. Restarting the whole game would start fresh. That said, I don't know of any element placed within the level that is even capable of doing that in the first place.
Well, the specifics of this new direction aren't officially confirmed, so I won't say much about that, but it had technically been announced quite some time ago that it would be a full reboot of the series. Main motivation, though, is basically the realization that trying to keep some element of the past games is a losing battle. There's really no place for it in the current market and trying to combine the modern with the old makes for appeal only to a minor niche who are willing to think about games in context, and rousing ire from a yet smaller niche who think it can't be TR unless Lara wears a braid.
Most impressive thing for me when I watched through many of the demos was how quickly they'd managed to get a lot of concepts into actual implementation. Sure, there were levels that had no textures or anything on them, but that's just the nature of preproduction and getting concepts into a playable phase early and worrying about polish for a very long time. Given that with the transition to agile/scrum concepts, we'd end up automatically throwing away 2 out of every 10 work days towards meetings, and that was the big apprehension everybody had about switching to scrum... it was quite something that there was a whole lot of workable samples, some which actually had full artwork and everything within just 3 months after TRU.