It's just people being butt hurt that it isn't a poorly controlling empty level design of a game like the previous games. I'll never understand it myself, and it just makes me think that they all remember the old Tomb Raider games differently than they actually were. The new Tomb Raider has less platforming, and a bit less in the puzzle department, but it gained good controls, fantastic combat, a great leveling/upgrading system, and significantly more exploration in environments that make a whole hell of a lot more sense. The old Tomb Raider games are clunky, claustrophobic, empty games that people tend to remember being wide open exploration driven adventures.
The first reboot trilogy that Crystal D did was more like the originals, and they executed on that formula better than had ever done in the past, but it was getting really stale. If they had continued down the same path with Tomb Raider we would have gotten a new one, it would have gotten slammed in reviews for being outdated, and the series would now be dead. Instead we have a game that may be different from the past games, but it presents the sense of adventure that the older games clearly wanted to have but couldn't due to tech limitations.
I've said this in other threads, but I actually didn't play the 90's era Tomb Raider games, only the recent current-gen trilogy, and I was still really disappointed with TR 2013.
Sure the action gameplay is better, since that was the one huge flaw of the other TR games, but in exchange for that Eidos threw away almost everything about the other TR games I liked. The focus on environmental puzzle solving and actual tomb raiding was pretty much thrown by the wayside, and all you had left was just another third person shooter.
Strange that I can completely understand and appreciate this line of thinking... but am staunchly opposed to it when applied to Resident Evil pre and post RE4.
I think all the blame goes on CVX's head. I think it is a case of RE:CV(X) having too much backtracking, what I consider to be a boring story, not carrying-forward the improvements of RE3 (dodge, split-second decisions which influence your progress through the game, quick 180' turn, and a few others I've long since forgotten). I think people felt it was a step-back from RE3, and dismissed the classic control scheme/formula as a whole.
Looking at RE pre and post RE4, I always did think there was more mileage in further 'Remakes' with beefed-up graphics, small story re-writes, new content/areas to explore. And also in the online-connected experience of 'Outbreak' - Outbreak a year or two later would have been awesome.
Code Veronica took the traditional RE format to its logical conclusion I feel. But the problem wasn't the format of the game, it was the controls an UI. Relying on fixed camera angles and tank controls just felt really restrictive when other games like Ocarina of Time or Thief started pioneering how to do 3D environments and controls in action games properly.
That said, at the time of the old school RE games no one had really figured out how to do a third person action game really well. Games like RE and Metal Gear simply took 2D game design philosophies into a polygonal world. I never extensively played the classic TR games but those games were some of the ones that took flawed early steps into true 3D game design. Winback is another pretty good example from that era.
It really wasn't until the late PS2 era that we started to get legitimately playable third person 3D action games as sort of a norm. Splinter Cell is a great example, and Metal Gear Solid 3 essentially rethought that franchise's level design around the fact that the player is in a 3D environment. All this stuff didn't get codified though until you had RE4 and Gears. From there, it's easy to look back at RE in retrospect, but really, everybody was still stumbling around at the time (except Nintendo).
In my opinion the ideal RE game would be the old adventure format with today's controls, but instead RE4 (despite being possibly the best third person shooter ever) kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater. That's what TR 2013 did except it's not nearly as good an action game.
No. The Definitive Edition will feature:
-TressFX (in the PC version)
-High-Res Textures (in the PC version)
-1080p Resolution (in the PC version)
-Advanced cloth, weather and foliage physics (not in the PC version)
-higher-poly environments and characters (not in the PC version)
-better lighting/rendering (not in the PC version)
-better shaders (not in the PC version) (Not sure if they only updated the skin and cloth shaders or all the shaders, though.)
Wait, how do we know the "better lighting/rendering" and "better shaders" aren't just the lighting and shader settings from the PC version? Remember, the PC version added stuff like HBAO and tessellation. I don't think we'll know if that's actually what they added until there's a DF analysis or something. Still the fact they went back on Lara's face means they probably are dedicated to redoing some of the assets. A PC upgrade fee wouldn't be out of the question (they did this for Deus Ex).
. It'll probably still perform pretty well for an HD port.
