Tomb Raider reboot

Reviving this thread rather than create a whole new one others might not even join in on.

I'm replaying this in preparation for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and it's amazing how just about everything I love about it was forgotten. The most prominent aspects I remember are the shooting segments, the quick time events, and the brutal deaths, but what made the game such a success were the collectibles.

I don't like crafting or level-up mechanics as a default, and much prefer a game where you find new gear as you progress (y'know, like Metroid or Zelda). However, Tomb Raider manages to tie its collectibles into those mechanics well enough to give mechanical context for them all. "Why should I shoot down all them dream catcher charm things?" "You get experience which can be used to increase your melee capabilities." "....yeah, works for me."

I enjoyed wandering all over the original Assassin's Creed for flags as well, but knowing the only reward was an achievement caused it to feel like a rip-off. The time invested did not result in an adequate reward.

I'll return to this later I imagine, but glad I decided to replay it.

I finished this yesterday, and hated it almost all of the way. I'm with Marlil on this one.

As others have said, what started out as an intriguing almost survival puzzle game quickly descended into an annoying 3rd person shooter featuring seemingly endless waves of bullet-sponge enemies. Exactly how many men (and they were all men) have got stuck on that island? I must have killed a 100, and I walked and swam past the bodies of several hundred more.

Unlike ccesarano, I couldn't find any pleasant distraction in the collectables and dungeons. I gave up on the tombs after the second or third one. There was a little too much trial and error involved in solving them for my liking, and the rewards didn't feel like they were worth the trouble.

I also agree with Marlil's point about this feeling like a game from two decades ago. As well as the trial and error sequences (where I often ended up seeing yet another unnecessarily gruesome death animation), I must have had half a dozen floors, walkways and bridges give way underneath me... just as my Lara was about to triumph. I soon became tired of hearing "I'll have to find another way to reach you..."

But the final straw for me was the boss battle at the end. It felt like it came form another age and another game entirely. He has only one weak spot - his back - and even after injuring him I need to follow up with a Quick Time Event?!! In 2013?

If this is what Tomb Raider is, then I'll be steering clear in future.

detroit20 wrote:

I finished this yesterday, and hated it almost all of the way.

[...] seemingly endless waves of bullet-sponge enemies. Exactly how many men (and they were all men) have got stuck on that island?

As was established fairly early on in the story, any women who were unfortunate enough to land there ended up as sacrifices to Himiko. That may have been easy to miss, though.

Unlike ccesarano, I couldn't find any pleasant distraction in the collectables and dungeons. I gave up on the tombs after the second or third one. There was a little too much trial and error involved in solving them for my liking, and the rewards didn't feel like they were worth the trouble.

This was rectified in Rise of the Tomb Raider, in which most tombs are meaningful, add to the story, are fun to explore, and provide some nice gear upgrades and/or permanent bonuses. Plus Rise just has a lot more of them. TR 2013 seems like it forgot the "Tomb" part of the title.

But the final straw for me was the boss battle at the end. It felt like it came form another age and another game entirely. He has only one weak spot - his back - and even after injuring him I need to follow up with a Quick Time Event?!! In 2013?

I completely agree with you on this point. The final boss battle in TR 2013 is lazy design and was just not fun for me in the least. It was made especially bad because the lead up to the boss battle is actually pretty damn cool.

If this is what Tomb Raider is, then I'll be steering clear in future.

TR 2013 definitely does not indicate the direction Crystal Dynamics is going with the franchise. After playing Rise of the Tomb Raider, TR 2013 almost feels like a proof of concept. They completely overdid it with the QTEs in that game. They heard the complaints loud and clear, and as a result, the second game is much, much better gameplay-wise (and graphics-wise for that matter!). As for story, well... the story in Rise is serviceable. I still think it's better than the TR 2013 story, which had a feel of perhaps too-many-cooks or perhaps too much focus on defining the character.

As for me, I am looking forward to Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which drops the day after my birthday!

Arise thread! I picked this up free on the Epic Games Store.

This is a pretty fun game but man there are some Valid Criticisms. This is speaking as someone who has next to zero history with the earlier evolutions of the series.

The punishment/recovery factor is over the top, like Wolverine level. Lara is cartoonishly resilient and it REALLY clashes with the idea of a young, inexperienced person trying to survive. The combat is tight but there sure is a lot of it! Lara is a freaking beast. I could see this being a very different game had they embraced the survival and puzzle elements. On that note, this is called Tomb Raider, not ROOM Raider. The "Tombs" seem an afterthought at best, with a single puzzle per tomb and just an optional XP reward at the end. All in all the shadow of Uncharted looms heavily over this title, perhaps for the worse as the team appears to have been chasing a 'cinematic' action experience at the expense of some of the more slow-paced elements.

The slow-paced survival type of game has been enormously popular in the past few years. TR could have been a jungle-themed Subnautica but I guess the gaming world wasn't ready. It seems like the skill options had the seed of that there with food and animal gathering, but outside the first half hour or so there has been hardly a whiff of that.

It's been entertaining enough to spark my interest in the next two games (at the price of free) which will hopefully shift to something more... cerebral, for lack of a better word.

I'll add a bit of reflection on the early commentary in this thread. Interesting discussion about the potential fetishization vs empowerment through the suffering of the character. While I don't think the character's suffering was fetishized in any way (in fact it was quite discomfiting at times) Crystal Dynamics really missed the mark in terms of their early spiels about creating a vulnerable young person who survives a trial by fire. She goes WAY too fast from a wounded crash survivor to an indestructable badass with lightning reflexes. They could easily have compressed time in a fashion that makes some sense, with weeks going by in the jungle while she heals, learns to live off the land and perhaps becomes a bit feral until she hears a signal from a comrade and makes a move, but given the compact nature of the game she goes a literal matter of hours (the game represents what... maybe a day or two?) between picking up a makeshift bow to hunt for a bit of food and slaughtering dozens of hardened warriors with an assault rifle. These days perhaps Horizon Zero Dawn comes closest to the vision of the game as it was originally pitched to the audience, though Aloy was a trained hunter from the start.

Also, we all sure were horny 10 years ago.

Out of the trio of the games I think Rise of the Tomb Raider did the best at not making too much combat and good puzzles. The first one was very dark and violent and really so was the third for me. The second managed to balance it all much better.

The subsequent games do improve on the Tomb to Combat ratio, and in my opinion Shadow is the best in that regard. Rise had some good DLC but was overly long. However if you did enjoy the combat for its own sake, it had some of the best sandbox combat encounters of the trilogy. Shadow takes its combat system and adds a couple bells and whistles but I didn't think the level/encounter design was as strong. But since it focused more on exploration anyway, I was okay with that.

YOu are not the first person to say that about Shadow. Maybe I should give it another try. I got turned off when crawling through the massive pile of bones, flesh and other corpses. I know the games are not real, but I climbed over dozens and dozens of corpses - where the hell did they all come from? There were more dead bodies than all the living people in the game - and all in rather "fresh" states of decay. Wouldn't someone notice is that many people went missing all the time? It was so obviously artificial for gross out factor that I couldn't get past it.

Tomb Raider games have never worried too much about realism so I wouldn't think too hard about it.

beanman101283 wrote:

Tomb Raider games have never worried too much about realism so I wouldn't think too hard about it.

Yes and no. There is a level of suspension of disbelief I accept with any fiction but Shadow just pushed it so far beyond for me that I had a hard time with it.

imbiginjapan wrote:

Also, we all sure were horny 10 years ago.

Based on reaction to Hades and Resident Evil: Village, I'm pretty sure people never stopped being horny.

In regards to the pacing of the narrative, I read a number of interviews with Rhianna Pratchett on the matter as she was in charge of writing and helping with story structure with the designers. She noted that one of the most difficult things to deal with for most players is that they want a gun, and they want a gun now. So they had to try and have a horrified and threatened Lara while also trying to give players what they want.

I think most of us on this particular forum wouldn't mind spending three hours of gameplay building up to that moment, but most people buying big expensive AAA games aren't like us on this forum, so I think Rhianna has a point.

beanman101283 wrote:

The subsequent games do improve on the Tomb to Combat ratio, and in my opinion Shadow is the best in that regard.

I'm in major disagreement here, not necessarily because Shadow had fewer tombs, but Shadow is also the only one where you have tombs with combat in them, and it's some of the worst combat since it's basically zombie hordes but not fun. Oddly enough, it goes against Shadow of the Tomb Raider's ethos to have an equal amount of all types of content for everyone. 33% platforming, 33% tombs and puzzles, and 33% combat is what you'll see them discuss in interviews for the goal, and the super specific difficulty sliders seem to suggest that as well, but by throwing combat into the tombs you've actually skewed the game more towards combat. Note that not all tombs have combat, but enough do that it contributed to my sour impression of the game.

I myself do agree that Rise is probably the best of the three, and I think it's a shame Crystal Dynamics' next game was Avengers rather than concluding their plan for Lara Croft. It's clear they had something specific in mind with Rhianna Pratchett, but, like Rian Johnson with The Last Jedi, Eidos Montreal just took things their own direction and it's the worse for it.

But this is also yet another opinion of mine that goes against the majority, so... meh.

The challenge tombs (the optional puzzle rooms, basically) are what I remember most, and they didn't have any combat as far as I remember. I only have fuzzy memories of the main story combat encounters, though some of the DLC combat sticks out in my mind. I just seem to recall that overall it felt like the sheer amount of combat, and the length of the encounters themselves, was less than in Rise. But it's been a while since I played all three, so I may be misremembering.

Shadow ended up being my favourite by a significant margin.

Tomb Raider soured me at the beginning. I was a big fan of the more recent "classic" Tomb Raider games - despite their obvious flaws - specifically because they were so different from the hand-holding of other similar games. You enter a room, you have a set of tools, you can climb on nearly any surface, and it's your job to solve the puzzle. Some of the earlier Assassin's Creed titles did a good job of scratching this itch in certain areas, but otherwise they were the solitary examples of this setup. So when this game came out and basically felt like Uncharted in an Arkham Asylum shell it bummed me out, especially with the reliance on COD-style clown car combat levels and QTE's as others discussed. When I replayed it a while ago, it still wasn't great but I liked it much more with the time passing and with me divorcing it from those expectations.

I also do agree that the narrative was way too dark on it. I think you could have totally gotten across the idea that Lara was a rich kid with no ambition thrown into a bad situation that helps form her into the character she will become without resorting to torture porn.

Rise was much better although I still feel like it had too much gathering and collecting for my taste, to the degree that I think I needed to start it 3 times until it finally grabbed me.

I also agree that the amount of combat of Rise was a big turnoff and I'm shocked that people think it was a good mix because to me it was way too much and got tedious fast. The big issue being how every area repopulated every time you returned to it, and the way the game was designed meant there were a couple hubs you had to return to numerous times. I got pretty frustrated that almost every time I wanted to go to a new objective, I basically had to perform the same encounters in the same space I've passed by dozens of times. I also wasn't a big fan of how much collecting and gathering you had to do.

That comes off as a negative paragraph but I obviously liked it enough to finish and will probably return one day. Overall things were more fluid and of course I liked the more complex and involved tombs.

Shadow, however, felt like taking Rise and fixing everything I didn't like about it. The hubs felt more real. The combat as a whole felt more fair, stealth was way much easier to deal with, and the open world setup was more manageable. I actually felt like I was exploring and discovering secrets as I went. It also gave off more of a traditional Tomb Raider adventure, where you are moving from location to location, although you do spend a lot of time in the same area by the end. It was still a video game story, but the writing was an astronomical improvement as well. Her character turns were way more believable than in the previous games.

beanman101283 wrote:

The challenge tombs (the optional puzzle rooms, basically) are what I remember most, and they didn't have any combat as far as I remember. I only have fuzzy memories of the main story combat encounters, though some of the DLC combat sticks out in my mind. I just seem to recall that overall it felt like the sheer amount of combat, and the length of the encounters themselves, was less than in Rise. But it's been a while since I played all three, so I may be misremembering.

See, those optional challenge tombs are specifically what I'm talking about. At least two or three of them require you to deal with the annoying horde of zombie-like foes before you can do proper puzzle solving. It was the weirdest design choice to me since these were optional locations for players seeking puzzles and completionism rather than combat.

Most of them were still fine, but by the end of the game especially it just felt worse to me.

kuddles wrote:

I also agree that the amount of combat of Rise was a big turnoff and I'm shocked that people think it was a good mix because to me it was way too much and got tedious fast. The big issue being how every area repopulated every time you returned to it, and the way the game was designed meant there were a couple hubs you had to return to numerous times. I got pretty frustrated that almost every time I wanted to go to a new objective, I basically had to perform the same encounters in the same space I've passed by dozens of times. I also wasn't a big fan of how much collecting and gathering you had to do.

Perhaps this is based on a difference of preference, because Rise came off as a lesser Metroidvania to me and therefore some of these aspects were of no surprise or were fine. Fast travel also alleviated some of the issues as well. However, I can see where you'd prefer many of Shadow's hubs since they're organized more like "towns" in an RPG, so to speak, filled with quest givers. It allows for a break from the hectic combat whereas exploration in Rise can be punctuated by combat at any time.

It was still a video game story, but the writing was an astronomical improvement as well. Her character turns were way more believable than in the previous games.

Now this I really don't agree with as I felt it was both heavy-handed and contradictory. For a story whose primary premise was "rich white girl gets in the middle of things and causes it all to go belly up", there are plenty of side quests that result in her breaking the Prime Directive from Star Trek in a pretty major way, and all culminates in an ending where:

Spoiler:

the rich white girl saves everyone anyway.

All three games are varying degrees of absolute nonsense, but Shadow is the only one that feels like it's head is so far up its own butt it can't see its own contradictions. I don't feel like we really lost anything by not seeing the planned conclusion of the Crystal Dynamics creators and Rhianna Pratchett, but we certainly didn't gain anything, either.

I think the only thing I really liked in Shadow of the Tomb Raider were the improved stealth mechanics, and I feel like the game barely leaned on them enough.

I also want to stress that I like these games a lot, but I hardly return to them over and over. I find the positive reception of Shadow baffling since it's mostly weaker from my perspective, but as noted above, I can see where you'd prefer stuff like the hubs better since they allow for a better break from the action to just relax a bit as opposed to being a relentless sprint through torture porn and clown car combat.

Yeah, I probably came off as more hyperbolic regarding the story differences than I meant. At the end of the day, they all were in one ear and out the other. I just feel like Rise felt one note to me at the time where Shadow convinced me of the emotional turn which almost made her getting the crap beaten out of her worth it.

Of course, I also feel like I've become significantly more lenient on AAA game storytelling in general as time goes on. I just shrug at the stories in these games now, partially because so many people seem to overanalyze this stuff in place of engaging with actual material worth that effort, and partially because AAA game mechanics haven't moved on that much so it's hard to overly criticize writers who have to work around a main protagonist who will inevitably murder hundreds of people in the story and any scene possibly being removed due to level cuts at any moment. If I played the trilogy in a row next month, my opinion might change.

My take on the series is that Tomb Raider (2013) is the best narrative out of a very bad bunch, Rise of the Tomb Raider is the game that's best at what it's trying to be, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the game that's most like what I want a Tomb Raider game to be.

Well I just started and finished the first game over the last couple weeks. Mostly enjoyed it, aside from way too much QTE. About 17 hours, 95% of collectibles. Think I got everything that was on the map but missed some of those "burn 5 things" types.

With the most recent one free on Epic, I looked and saw I had the other 2 free on Epic or PS+ and decided to play them in order. This was fun enough that I will keep the other 2 on the list to play this year.

Skimmed through several pages of this thread. Interesting some graphics and technical issues at release. But it played very smoothly and still looked good now. I may stick with PC for the others as well. I did agree with some of the video game logic stuff... She really kills way too many people in this game. For her experience level, for the amount of people that could realistically be marooned on this island, etc. Just silly the amount of guys that kept pouring out of everywhere.

Anyway, on to the next...