Tomb Raider designer Toby Gard has told Gamesindustry.biz that his departure from Crystal Dynamics came at the right time -- and after realizing that no single man could control Lara Croft. "I think it's just something you have to learn to realise that there's no one person really in charge of what goes on with a character and they have a life of their own in the hands of the team," he said, noting that his passion for "rather expansive" games had not been extinguished quite yet.

While Gard scouts for a team to assemble his next planned project, he hopes to make it big in the consultancy business, something he feels will only grow more crucial in a big games industry. "The way I see it is there's a lot of companies scaling up and down so much, letting everybody go at the end of projects, and then having their core teams do pre-production and all this kind of stuff and it's not really working out the way it should be," he explained. "It seems like the industry wants to move to a more Hollywood model by bringing in experts for shorter periods of time and then leveraging their outsourcing, but also building small teams for projects."

His desire to provide a guiding hand (or a stern word) in a less embedded position likely comes from experience on his last title, Tomb Raider Underworld, which prompted several high-profile layoffs after release.