Tomb Raider reboot

Uh... not really interested. Is the single player game longer than 4 hours? I may wait to get this when it comes out to get the goodjer impressions...

I see that as a publisher demanded addition to the bullet points on the box, and a way to entice gamers not to trade the thing in when done. I will be shocked if I even glance at the multiplayer.

I fully expect the single player game to be proper length for a AAA single player title.

Do people ever play MP in not shoot em up games? It can't be worth the money invested and extra time, right?

karmajay wrote:

Do people ever play MP in not shoot em up games? It can't be worth the money invested and extra time, right?

I think the Assassin's Creed MP has a relatively strong following, but it's certainly not up to the heights of Halo or CoD.

Five times a year or more since 1991 I've said aloud, "Man, I wish this game had multiplayer!" With that in mind, I've made it a rule for myself never to write off a game's multiplayer element before trying it. If you don't want to try it, fine, but I don't understand jumping to the conclusion that a game will suffer for having a multiplayer mode. That approach baffles me.

Speaking specifically about Tomb Raider, I could imagine some cool MP designs, and I'm not a game designer or anything. A mode inspired by The Hunger Games, perhaps?

It's the same arguments as any other previously singleplayer only game that adds multi. I think it's a little early to be writing it off, as they haven't actually revealed what it is yet, and they're redesigning the whole game for this one so who knows what works. The only concern I hold as valid is that the resources to make anything have to come from somewhere, and those resources are usually finite, perhaps it was a trade-off against another aspect of the game, perhaps it made the project cost more in total.

I guess it comes down to the same thing as any other game before release - I hope they make it good.

Scratched wrote:

The only concern I hold as valid is that the resources to make anything have to come from somewhere, and those resources are usually finite, perhaps it was a trade-off against another aspect of the game, perhaps it made the project cost more in total.

The multiplayer is being handled by the Deux Ex: Human Revolution team. I think it's extremely unlikely that they would have been taken on for the whole project if there was no multiplayer, so if you're comfortable with that logic (I am, personally) it's still a moot concern. If the single player game is bad, I'd bet the issues aren't because there weren't enough guys across the continent producing more art assets.

And the more I think about this case in particular, I just don't buy the "publisher forced the developers' hands" angle. First, it's not something that Japanese publishers prioritize. Second, they give much more control to the creative types, for better or worse. Furthermore, their recent offerings have been left alone in this regard. Deux Ex could've had some kind of tacked on multiplayer, it didn't happen. Between GTA and Saints Row, multiplayer has become an industry standard for open world games - Sleeping Dogs has none. Hitman Absolution features an odd asynchronous multiplayer mode, but not traditional multiplayer. As a publisher I trust Square-Enix to allow their developers creative freedom, and they've only included multiplayer in ways that make sense so far.

Blind_Evil wrote:

Deux Ex could've had some kind of tacked on multiplayer, it didn't happen.

Yes it did, in patch 1112. It was pretty well done too.

Nice one.

Jayhawker wrote:

I will be shocked if I even glance at the multiplayer.

I fully expect the single player game to be proper length for a AAA single player title.

Scratched wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

Deux Ex could've had some kind of tacked on multiplayer, it didn't happen.

Yes it did, in patch 1112. It was pretty well done too.

It was weird. It had per match leveling up and stuff.

More details on the multiplayer.

Higgledy wrote:

More details on the multiplayer.

Asymmetrical modes could be interesting. I guess the other variable which could have some potential is how lethal the combat is, whether the majority of weapons are firearms, or do they mix it with low tech stuff like the bow/environmental.

A disturbingly blonde Chuck shows us a bit of multiplayer. It does look kinda interesting.

I'm still very cautious about the MP. While they talk about allowing players to traverse up walls and other obstacles and they talk about setting traps, most of the video they showed just looked like your standard grab a gun and shoot people. Very unimaginative. I'm going to reserve judgement about the MP until we hear more. That said... I've already pre-ordered the game for SP (so really the MP is just bonus to me.)

It does seem like a nice DM, a nice amount of variety in what you can do in there rather that a straight shooting match. Reminds me a little of Half-Life DM.

On a kind of unrelated note I kind of like that Eidos are doing their own behind-the-scenes PR-fluff rather than some external website or magazine doing it and then you've got the ugly issue of impartiality. It's promotion, and unashamedly so. From the outside looking in, I've never seen the logic in an external doing your announcing or showing off new features, if they can do it then so can the publisher/developer themselves.

This game is starting to look like the love child of Gears of War and Uncharted. Playstation and Xbox must have been really drunk that night.

heavyfeul wrote:

This game is starting to look like the love child of Gears of War and Uncharted. Playstation and Xbox must have been really drunk that night.

Love child? More like super angry, pent-up frustrated rivalry, drunk sex child.

I kinda like the looks of it though.

After Mass Effect 3, I've stopped just defaulting to glazing my eyes over multiplayer modes in games that are not traditionally known for them.

I've just seen an animated gif of one of the player deaths in this, and I can see some people having a problem with the game if it's typical. It's kind of cheesy in a 'final destination' kind of way.

Pikey26 wrote:
heavyfeul wrote:

This game is starting to look like the love child of Gears of War and Uncharted. Playstation and Xbox must have been really drunk that night.

Love child? More like super angry, pent-up frustrated rivalry, drunk sex child.

I kinda like the looks of it though.

After Mass Effect 3, I've stopped just defaulting to glazing my eyes over multiplayer modes in games that are not traditionally known for them.

Why would you do that? The multiplayer in ME3 was horrible. If only because the gunplay mechanics in Mass Effect 2 & 3 were equally horrible. Putting them into a multiplayer game mode doesn't make them better, IMHO.

ME3's MP was really good.

I may or may not give the MP a try. I never got around to trying Uncharted 2 or 3's, but I heard good things about it. I'm ok with developers putting MP in a game as long as it's a strong effort and not just trying to tick a feature box off. Assassin's Creed's MP got good marks, so I'm all for devs pushing what MP can be beyond just attempting to be a CoD clone.

beanman101283 wrote:

ME3's MP was really good. :(

No worries. That's just, like, my opinion, man!

My thing with multiplayer "tacked on" tends to be that I'm buying the game for the single player experience, so I have little or no desire to try the MP. Part of my beef with the MP in Mass Effect 3 was more that they seemed to force you to play the multiplayer portions to get a better result in the single player campaign, which is a cheap-ass, low-brow way to get your fan base to check out the result of your latest efforts.

as far as Tomb Raider's MP? I'd be willing to check it out, but that's really not what I'm looking to get out of a Tomb Raider game in the first place.

The PC port is done by Nixxes, the people who did DE:HR and a bunch of others

PC features wrote:

Very high resolution textures with up to 16x the amount of data
Detail Tessellation to enhance the detail on many surfaces in the game
Higher quality shadows
High quality bokeh depth of field with near-blur
Tessellation algorithms used to smooth out geometry
Improved cloth, SSAO, quality wetness effects, and post-filter effects.
LOD quality is adjustable for better quality on higher-end machines.

Minimum specs wrote:

Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Vista,7,8 (32bit/64bit)
DirectX 9 graphics card with 512Mb Video RAM:
-AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT
-nVidia 8600

Dual core CPU:
-AMD Athlon64 X2 2.1 Ghz (4050+)
-Intel Core2 Duo 1.86 Ghz (E6300)

1GB Memory (2GB on Vista)

Recommended specs wrote:

Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8
DirectX 11 graphics card with 1GB Video RAM:
-AMD Radeon HD 4870
-nVidia GTX 480

Quad core CPU:
-AMD Phenom II X2 565
-Intel Core i5-750

4GB Memory

Drat, I'll be in between as my 560 Ti is actually not quite as performant as the 480 (except in one benchmark it seems 560 did better in gpgpu tasks).
Also I pre-ordered the PS3 version since PC version never gets that stuff, but hey, if I like it, mods!

RolandofGilead wrote:

Drat, I'll be in between as my 560 Ti is actually not quite as performant as the 480 (except in one benchmark it seems 560 did better in gpgpu tasks).
Also I pre-ordered the PS3 version since PC version never gets that stuff, but hey, if I like it, mods!

Crap, I'm in the same boat. A bog-standard 560 in my case. My CPU is fine though... However, I'm a bit confused because the recommended specs say "Quad core CPU" but the AMD CPU is a dual core... - Nowhere near to the performance of the listed intel chip - at least for games listed on the Anandtech comparison chart.

Don't blame me, I just copypasta'ed from shacknews.

If you guys need a new video card I would recommend picking up a new AMD 7870. They are running a promotion to get Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite for free with purchase. Since I was planning to pick up both games anyways it meant that the 230 dollar card was only a 100ish dollar new video card.

AMD video cards are so confusing these days. I was comparing my HD 5870 to the 7000s and it looks from reviews that only the 7900 models are better. There's probably more to it, but I was eyeing the 7000s and now I don't even know.

There was a rock paper shotgun article that said these 7000 models are basically what we have for the next year or so which seems to indicate to me that graphics cards haven't really changed in the past 3 years or so.

Am I totally insane?

Also, I kind of want this even though I no longer have an xbox,

IMAGE(http://gamingbolt.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/tomb-raider-controller.jpg)

PandaEskimo wrote:

AMD video cards are so confusing these days. I was comparing my HD 5870 to the 7000s and it looks from reviews that only the 7900 models are better. There's probably more to it, but I was eyeing the 7000s and now I don't even know.

There was a rock paper shotgun article that said these 7000 models are basically what we have for the next year or so which seems to indicate to me that graphics cards haven't really changed in the past 3 years or so.

Well, the AMD 7000s came out last August. Unless you're doing ultra high resolutions, it has plateaued a bit, but there are still games that demanding, you just have to look beyond the general console ports. There's been quite a bit of stability. Within limits, you can pretty much choose how much you want to pay and you'll get something that's good for gaming. Until the next-gen consoles raise the min specification floor, but given the PS4 I'd say it's not going to need a supercomputer for minimum, which is good.

In the last few years, we have seen the odd studio doing PC oriented stuff, I'd guess partially as research for the next-gen consoles, of which you could say TR is an example. Next-gen is already here on the generation-less platform.

PandaEskimo wrote:

Also, I kind of want this even though I no longer have an xbox

It's a good PC controller too.