adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
This one gets my vote.
Very The Phantom Pain'ish. I like it.
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[Rumor] Possible "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" Logos and Gameplay/Locations Leaked
- Thread starter NeoRaider
- Start date
Very The Phantom Pain'ish. I like it.
GhostTrick
Banned
Alpha Phoenix
Member
I personally wasn't as big a fan of RotR as I was the original reboot. I'm glad they're at least leaving behind Siberia. That wasn't a good setting at all IMO.
Not sure about VGA reveal (Crystal's community manager did say to expect some Lara news later in the year when she said that the game wouldn't be at E3 but she didn't specify whether she meant game news or film news - which, we will definitely be getting film news later in the year, too, so she could have been talking about that - or whether it would be related to the Tomb Raider or Lara Croft brand, etc. and even if she was talking about Shadow, that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be revealed at the VGAs) but it'll almost definitely be a 2018 game, yeah. Hard to tell which part of 2018, though. You'd think that they'd want to release it some time around March to capitalise on the film's release but I'm not sure if they'll make it till then.
YoRHa No.2 Type B
Banned
I can't wait for the Microsoft deal, so that PS4 players get the complete edition one year later, right away.
Hoho for breakfast
Member
Cool. To me it looks more Aztec/Mayan as opposed to Egyptian but it'd be great to have either setting and some actual tombs.
What I've really always wanted is this setting plus a castle setting with secret passages and underground tombs.
This reminds me I still have to play Rise Of The Tomb Raider. I bought it for both systems and only got through the first area.
What I've really always wanted is this setting plus a castle setting with secret passages and underground tombs.
This reminds me I still have to play Rise Of The Tomb Raider. I bought it for both systems and only got through the first area.
Strangelove77
Member
For the love of god I hope they get at least a mediocre writer for this. It would be a huge upgrade from the last two games.
I also hope it's more like the 2013 game. RoTTR was disappointing.
I also hope it's more like the 2013 game. RoTTR was disappointing.
With so many saying that Rise wasn't as good as 2013, it has made me really curious and I'm strongly considering going through that game now. I loved the snowy first chapter and the woods, but can't see myself enjoying an entire game set in a snowy environment. I'm also super curious as to how Eidos Montreal will handle a Tomb Raider game seeing that they're the third developer getting the chance to work on Tomb Raider.
Dee Dah Dave
Member
Nice, love me the last two games. They like Uncharted with boobies and moar gameplay!
Rihanna Pratchett has a really good resume, Tomb Raider didn't stand out badly for having poorly written dialogue to me
Plumpbiscuit
Member
Sucked into the abyss with modern Uncharted design. This is a Tomb Raider game so I do expect crazy acrobatics and dual pistols, but the game designers just won't have it because "it's a prologue" or a re-imagining, yet they still use the same character's name and background. One of the worst parts of the reboots is using the rope and ice picks to climb shit, what happened to being a badass with just bare hands and a strong grip? Going by those screenshots they still won't do this. :/
Necron
Member
Oh well... so much for another Deus Ex coming out
they're doing a lot now it seems.I played both Tomb Raider 2013 and Rise and they're both horrible in terms of narrative and characters. It's really quite frustrating...
It would take another reboot back to "old" Lara to make this happen and offset the tone again. Shadow of the Tomb Raider will remain this gritty, dark and serious adventure with big action-set pieces for better or worse. I guess this was the entire reason of rebooting the series, making a prologue and to get away from her iconic look, though. However, by making it "Uncharted-esque" without including at least some of its more lighthearted nature, I will probably never really like the overall direction this series is heading in.
It looks like Crystal is still very much in control of the franchise, though, so I wouldn't expect Eidos to be allowed too much freedom on this one. Chances are that they've been instructed to stick to the reboot formula and it's even possible that they got a story treatment to adhere to from Crystal. I'm hoping that they're relatively free to do fresh things and experiment on this game because then at least it might be a little interesting and there's a tiny chance that I might actually end up enjoying it but I'm not very hopeful that that's actually the case.
It's not the same character background. It hasn't been the same background since Crystal first took over the franchise and turned it into, well, whatever Legend was supposed to be. And reboot Lara's backstory isn't even the same as LAU Lara's backstory, either.
Rihanna Pratchett probably wasn't the problem as the overall plot and most of the characters were likely in place before she started work on the project (at least in 2013's case, not sure about Rise). I'm guessing the problem is either Crystal's in-house writing team or Crystal's overall approach to story-telling and writing. But yeah, many people thought that the story and especially the characters in 2013 and in Rise were pretty bad. Me included.
Garrett Hawke
Member
I'm expecting late 2018... although it hasn't been revealed yet, a Nov 2018 release would put it 3 years after ROTTR's release.
Plumpbiscuit
Member
These 2 gifs show what's wrong with the reboots from an objective point of view. The older games were more about personal skill; well-executed timed jumps with planning ahead, and the newer dudebro ones are about delivering flashy images with dirt and explosions everywhere and all you do is hold left analogue forward. And I will bet my ass this new TR game will go with the latter, whereby, the solutions to solve environmental puzzles in the pyramids will be based around finding the trigger box to activate a pre-determined scripted event, rather than the player using their own intuition to find their way through the level.
Lord British
Member
Objective? No, I don't think so.
Plumpbiscuit
Member
Did you read what I said after that? Why not?
Because of that, I don't even get RotR on PS4... don't want to spend 50 when I saw a One version at 10 (I don't care about complete edition and DLCs)
And don't want to give money to a studio which did these kinds of deals
Garrett Hawke
Member
I mean... there's a reason why the series went that direction.
These 2 gifs show what's wrong with the reboots from an objective point of view. The older games were more about personal skill; well-executed timed jumps with planning ahead, and the newer dudebro ones are about delivering flashy images with dirt and explosions everywhere and all you do is hold left analogue forward. And I will bet my ass this new TR game will go with the latter, whereby, the solutions to solve environmental puzzles in the pyramids will be based around finding the trigger box to activate a pre-determined scripted event, rather than the player using their own intuition to find their way through the level.
A big part of why the old games played like that is because they were very very early 3D platformers.
I'm not saying the new stuff is "better", but it is more modern and more mainstream.
SenjutsuSage
Banned
Man, I got so busy with work that I never did get to finish the second game. I really need to jump back into and finish that one up.
You can see the objective differences between the two games relatively well in them but yeah, you obviously can't generally call anything objectively bad or objectively good.
Lights and Waves
Member
These 2 gifs show what's wrong with the reboots from an objective point of view. The older games were more about personal skill; well-executed timed jumps with planning ahead, and the newer dudebro ones are about delivering flashy images with dirt and explosions everywhere and all you do is hold left analogue forward. And I will bet my ass this new TR game will go with the latter, whereby, the solutions to solve environmental puzzles in the pyramids will be based around finding the trigger box to activate a pre-determined scripted event, rather than the player using their own intuition to find their way through the level.
1. I don't think you know what objective means.
2. That first gif sums up everything that made the original Tomb Raiders a pain in the ass to enjoy.
Plumpbiscuit
Member
Yeah I think we can speculate now that that hint was done on purpose, though we still don't know for sure
who the sniper is
1. Nothing objective about any of this.
2. The challenge of the original series came from it's horrible early 3D controls. "Personal skill" in this instance means adjusting to the games jank. The platforming in those games was mediocre for it's day, but it especially doesn't hold up now against modern 3D games.
I have no problem with a Tomb Raider fan wishing the series didn't move into a different, more mainstream direction. I do kind of feel the need to push back on the idea that the new direction is inherently bad or less valuable.
Lord British
Member
I did. You succinctly pointed out the differences between the approaches the games take, you described how you prefer the gameplay offered by the originals, you speculated on what the new game will be like (almost certainly correctly) but nothing "objective" by any means.
I appreciate that this is pretty shallow of me but I'd love to see the word "objectively" scrubbed from discussion of videogames entirely, since it's usually invoked to infer some sort of authority that doesn't exist, that the user's opinion is "correct" and that they are the arbiter for taste and distinction within the hobby. It's the enemy of discussion.
As for the games themselves, I enjoyed the Tomb Raide reboot but found Rise a little too overstuffed with collectables and the story absolutely awful.
For people who couldn't handle the control system or don't enjoy challenging 3D platformers perhaps but that's the thing with different kinds of games, they're meant to appeal to different kinds of people. Tomb Raider used to be a challenging 3D platformer with puzzle, exploration and combat elements. Now it's a third-person shooter with barely any puzzles, platforming that doesn't actually deserve the name and exploration that feels so pointless and boring it might as well not be there. Even if you personally like the reboot games better, I don't think it should be difficult to understand why people think it's wrong that the franchise was turned from the former into the latter. And it should also not be difficult to see that the originals' platforming had more depth and complexity and was more skill-based than the "platforming"/ledge-hopping in any of Crystal's TR games.
No, the original controls were very reliable once you got the hang of them and they were also not the only thing that made the game's platforming challenging. They do feel a bit heavy nowadays, true, but the actual challenge came from the fact that there was no or very little automation to them. Lara's jump distances were fixed meaning that if a ledge was too far away or you jumped off too early, you were going to miss it. Ledges were also not magnetic, meaning if your aim was off, you were going to miss them. The level design was based far more around jumping from platform-to-platform making for true 3D movement, more player control and more rope to hang yourself with. On the other hand, many of Crystal's TR games have relied heavily on ledge traversal and ledge-hopping which is essentially 2D on-rails movement with little room for mistakes on the part of the player. If you want to see a modern example of the kind of challenging platforming Tomb Raider used to have, look at the original Mirror's Edge. Less clunky, less heavy but still far more challenging and far less automated than any of the modern Tomb Raider games.
The problem is not everyone agreed that this is what the original Tomb Raider games were.
Between it's tankish controls and horrible camera angles, that series had fallen well out of favor critically and commercially long before the reboot.
Cave Johnson
Member
WIth Eidos constantly pressuring them to release the sequels year after year after their first success. I can imagine the stress they had to go through to push the game out - with surprising quality despite of. But angel of darkness proved that Core was getting burnt out. One can imagine, had they been given more leeway to cultivate their designs.
And millions of sales from the first tomb raider shows, there is an interest to its design. The current gen tomb raider is barely scratching for support,
TheOnlyOneHeEverFeared
Member
I hope its not one console exclusive for a year again.
Fredrik
Member
Same here. 100 percented it on XB1, replaying it on PC for the 60fps awesomeness. Fantastic game that got bad mouthed mostly because of the exclusivity deal. I hope they go full on multiplat this time. Exclusivity deals is the cancer of this hobby, the only ones who gain from it are the hardware companies and fanboys, for everyone else it's awful.
I honestly don't remember the camera being problematic in any of the early games. I mean, the control system was character-dependent, not camera-dependent and even so the camera stayed behind Lara's back for the majority of the time. The main reason critics started getting tired of the series was that there wasn't enough innovation and the graphics started looking outdated by the third or fourth entry and that was no fault of Core's but of Eidos forcing them to release annual sequels like Cave Johnson said.
And even some of AoD's problems can be traced back to that as Eidos wanted Core to develop Chronicles, forcing the experienced TR veterans to work on that (because they were the ones who knew the old PS1 tools and how to push an entire TR game out in a year's time) while inexperienced newbies started development on AoD and made some crucial early mistakes that would come back to bite everyone in the arse later on (like not using a streaming engine). (Though Core definitely deserves some of the blame when it comes to AoD turning out the way it did.) Even in its unfinished state, though, you can see so much potential in that game and there are some things it did really, really right and others where the concepts and ideas were awesome but simply weren't executed well due to a lack of time.
Like I said: I have no problem with fans of the classic series wishing the series didn't move in the direction it has. I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong to miss the platforming and puzzle-solving.
I'm definitely gonna remind you that those games were not particularly critically or commercially successful, and the direction they went to is definitely not inherently inferior. You said it yourself: Different games and different tastes.
digoutyoursoul
Member
Loved the previous two
Daffy Duck
Member
Having played the originals at launch it didn't feel like jank at all, it was very specific how the game and traversal worked to the blocks and what you had to do. It was simply fantastic to play and I'd argue no platformer to this day has had such a satisfying control method for traversal through the level.
I really enjoy these new games but they are a world apart from what I think of an actual TR game though sadly.
What the hell? They were incredibly commercially successful. More commercially successful than any other entries in the series relatively speaking (possibly not in absolute numbers but that's because the video game market as a whole has grown quite a bit since the late 90s). Tomb Raider was the CoD or Assassin's Creed of its time, both in terms of commercial success and the curse of the annual release schedule.
And I never said that they were inherently better, I specifically said that there's no such thing as objectively good or objectively bad. What I did say was that the platforming had more depth and complexity and was more challenging and those things are objectively true. It's also objectively true that they were challenging for more reasons than having "bad controls". And I wouldn't have as much of a problem with the newer games if they weren't Tomb Raider games. I mean, they'd still be incredibly unimaginative, unoriginal design-by-comittee type affairs with terrible stories (IMO, obviously) but I wouldn't care about that. The fact that they took the Tomb Raider franchise and turned it into sth that is so completely different from what it used to be, though... I mean, that was my point when I said that. There are plenty of games and franchises out there for people who like third-person shooters. There are next to no games out there for people who like classic TR-style platforming and exploration.
EvilChameleon
Member
I would bet that her pregnancy was the reason this wasn't at E3, and will instead be revealed later in the year, or even next year. They kept her spot open for her.
Unless she recorded all the mocap and lines months in advance.
Who knows. *taps nose*
JinjoUnchained
Member
Really liked Tomb Raider 2013 and Rise. But there's room for improvement IMO. The first one was too long and bloated. The second one didn't have enough unique areas, although what was there was incredible. Here's hoping Shadow strikes the perfect balance.
ByWatterson
Member
That's because it wasn't a shooting game. Combat was supposed to be difficult, which increased your likelihood of a stealthy approach using the bow.
I'm fairly certain about 95% of the enemies I killed in ROTTR were slain by arrow.
Pancake Mix
Copied someone else's pancake recipe
Shooting (and I include using the bow in this because it's the same thing) is incredible in both reboot titles. It's one area where the games blow Uncharted out of the water, and perhaps the only area. The weight is there and the weapons make a satisfying sound.
If you used the bow more often for your shooting you would probably like it more as you would die less. Stealth is big in Tomb Raider.
QuantumSquid
Member
Can't wait to see this game in all of the GPU benchmark videos I watch.