OFFICIAL Tomb Raider (Discussion)

[Frag_Maniac]

Well honestly, I've not played the original 3, and I know many TR fans disagree on what were the better titles, but I think MOST avid TR fans agree that cerebral, challenging puzzles were a core part of it that kept it interesting.

As far as combat goes, originally it had creatures both natural and supernatural. That has changed to a more Uncharted type scenario where you're just up against human factions, but it doesn't HAVE to be bland repetitive combat.

Throw some environmental objects in there that can be used strategically in combat, make us actually have to hunt, skin and eat animals to survive vs auto XP, and for God's sake make the nav platforming actually involve some challenge vs this repeat paint by numbers rope and climbing crap where everything is brightly highlighted for you.

I also want more and bigger tombs and relic chambers brought back. That actually made them feel like sacred pieces that were guarded, vs just laying in jewelry boxes in easy to get to places. I want death defying hazards with timed apparatuses you have to get through to get these pieces.

IMO they (artifacts and relics) should have some use too, whether it be part of figuring a bigger puzzle or just an interesting part of the story. When all they are is a small piece of trivia themselves, they have no real meaning tying them to the story.

There's been some debate on what the best nav tools were as far as ledge grabs, removeable poles, grapple, etc, but if you combine all of what we've seen in TR games, and not overdo any one, I think they could come up with something brilliant that would appease most fans.

I just saw that Tomb Raider got a higher metacritic score than Sleeping Dogs and Hitman: Absolution...that's bullshit! Both games I have beat twice and wouldn't complain about beating it again. Tomb Raider doesn't deserve a second play through, never mind three.

Yeah even Infinite struggled to topple TR 2013, it just replaced it in the top sales spot on the UK charts. I worry with all the praise of TR 2013, we'll never see another good TR. I agree that both SD and HA had more replay value. I forced myself to play TR on each difficulty mode, getting 100% completion on one of them, but by then I was thoroughly bored.

 

[KainXS]

Edit: I just saw that Tomb Raider got a higher metacritic score than Sleeping Dogs and Hitman: Absolution...that's bullshit! Both games I have beat twice and wouldn't complain about beating it again. Tomb Raider doesn't deserve a second play through, never mind three.

metacritic only really aggregates the reviews from a bunch of review sites and those biased review sites like ign who gave sleeping dogs a 8.5 and tomb raider a 9.1, or even worst the scum at game informer that gave sleeping a 7.75 and tomb raider a 9.2, now thats bullshit. Then you need to remember the nostalgia factor, which probably factored into the reviews. I would give TR a 8.1 and sleeping dogs a 8.7 myself though.

metacritic does get bad though when they start cherry picking the reviews to bump up scores though, I would say they are a lesser evil than the review sites. but with TR it didn't matter, its hyped up and was so over marketed by square its just plain insane.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

I only pay attention to user ratings anymore, and Meta user scores usually are pretty accurate.

 

[Widjaja]

Tomb Raider is a franchise and the concern is that the franchise will turn out like the rest of them.

It would take something really bad to make it turn out like the Need for Speed franchise though.

My concern is the writers and designers being made to cater for the mindless masses.

Right now it appears to be the whole jungle ancient lost tribes thing.
Zombies, vampires and zombie Nazis.

Did I forget to mention zombies?

I mean why zombies?
To make the player feel like they are smarter than the enemy?
Does it take a zombie which has no cognitive abilities to feel superior?

Rant end.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

Tomb Raider 2013 Benchmark - Nvidia Surround - GTX 480 SLI:

For comparison:

Tomb Raider 2013 Benchmark - Single Screen (1920 x 1200) - GTX 480 SLI:

Why do you keep spamming our forums with your videos?

 

[Frag_Maniac]

People just have a fascination with zombies. I mean look at The Walking Dead. Too much of a ghoul thing can be bad, such as TWD Survival Instincts.

I wasn't implying TR might become like NFS btw, just using their tiered style of casual and hardcore versions as an example of trying to appeal to a broader audience without pissing off both sides.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I don't have a fascination with zombies. Except Zombies vs. Plants, all zombie games I've played can rot in hell.


I finished Tomb Raider. Worth playing once but never again. It reminded me WAY too much of Prince of Persia titles and I don't care for those either.


Edit: User score matches critic score at Metacritic. Unbelievable! Judging by how much I would be willing to pay for a game, using Far Cry 3 as being 10, Tomb Raider comes in at a dismal 2.5...that's extremely poor. I really have nothing good to say about it.


Edit:

nvidia this, amd that ... In the meanwhile

Lara Croft was supposed to be gay, writer reveals



Thoughts?

Only Toby Gard can make her gay. Toby Gard likely thinks politics should stay out of games so her sexual preferences are null/never stated/suggested. This political correctness...

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Well, yeah, not ALL user scores at Meta make sense, but overall they're more accurate than most other site user scores I've seen.

You'd have to have at least some fascination with zombies to enjoy them, but some of the games with zombies I've liked are Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom 3, Half Life series, RE4, Dead Island, TWD, and the Dead Space series.

Surprisingly Wiki's zombie game list doesn't even have any of the Doom titles on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_zombie_video_games

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I'm saying 80%+ of the user scores are BS/premature/fanatical/not enough exposure to competing titles/etc. I never use reviews to make a purchasing decision for a reason--they're usually wrong.


Dead Island was about the only one of that list that was okay and mostly because it was open world (far more open than Tomb Raider...) and quest-driven. The zombies were just there to slow you down.

In Doom, they're technically "former humans." Until Doom 3, they didn't have much/anything in common with voodoo zombies.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Well I didn't base my assessment of Meta user scores on TR or specifically competing titles with it. You can find flaw in almost anything if you narrow it down to your own personal parameters.

On zombies I'm lumping together anything that involves undead humans. Yeah there's been several variants on the undead theme, but any reanimated human corpses are all zombies to me.

From a technical standpoint, zombie basically means "the body of a dead person given the semblance of life". If all zombies had to be tied to voodoo, most works that involve zombies would be mislabeling them.

 

[BiggieShady]

On zombies I'm lumping together anything that involves undead humans. Yeah there's been several variants on the undead theme, but any reanimated human corpses are all zombies to me.

People just have a fascination with zombies.

Did I forget to mention zombies?

I mean why zombies?
To make the player feel like they are smarter than the enemy?
Does it take a zombie which has no cognitive abilities to feel superior?

There are several reason why zombies:

1. Zombie AI is easiest to program
2. They have very mixable and matcheable animations
3. You don't need motion capturing to animate believable zombies
4. Visual uniformity and simple AI makes crowd rendering easier

 

[AsRock]

nvidia this, amd that ... In the meanwhile

Lara Croft was supposed to be gay, writer reveals



Thoughts?

Missed this like OMG here we go again, UK and USA are bad as each other when the gay thing pops up as they start it in a program and next thing to you know the rest follow and just get hammered with the crap..

Lara gay WOOT i don't care although the female race might ( the part that's not gay that is ). But what goes around comes around as a lot of females like gay men a lot just for the simple fact how they act and are not threat to them..

Now if Lara was a guy (HA!) ooh that be a total different story however ublike to TV you were not force on unexpected love scenes or any thing so.

Chances are if the guy who made the story said LARA was gay he might of sold more copys in fact i think they should of twisted the story more and gave you the option of LARA (female ) and a guy ( Maybe all so named LARA HAHAHA) then they might of made even more money of the game and might of been able to put it in the story..

This is were Dragon Age 1 was right as it left it up to you sure it's a totally different game but if done right they could of made LARA swing either way to players preference.

 

[KainXS]

I look back at what happened with the original tomb raider. If I remember correctly when tony created he wanted to make her a heroine, but core wanted to make her sexier in game and voiced her as such and he went along with it and core even wanted her naked in game and he rejected it, he just wanted her to be similar to a superhero is but a woman instead like wonder woman back in the day.

It was never the intention to create some kind of 'page 3' girl to star in Tomb Raider. The idea was to create a female character who was a heroine, you know, cool, collected, in control, that sort of thing. The problem with those other games is that the female characters are actually there for purely exploitative purposes. I know you could argue that Lara with her comic book style over-the top figure is exploitative, but I don't agree. I think it's ridiculous to say that portraying stylised people is degrading. You can represent an over the top hero figure by augmenting characteristics like a jutting jaw, wide shoulders, thin waist etc. and that is not degrading to men. It may well be a stereotype, but it seems to me that people are overanalysing this whole thing. It's pretty simple, if women in a game are only there to be the equivalent of quiz show floozies then they are being portrayed in a sexist way.

Alot of what he wanted did not even get into the actual game and this is why he quit after the first game and did not come back until Legend was released when Crystal Dynamics was making tomb raider. Fast forward to now, Rhianna wanted to make lara gay but she was too afraid to even bring it to crystal dynamics for fear she would be shut down. Do you see where I'm going now?

The way its set up now in the game they can go either way really, not gonna say much more than that as not to spoil anything but with the gameplay they have now, they have to improve and Its a real problem, you can cater to the niche audience that want those harder optional dungeons and a harder game or you can cater to the 12 year olds and casuals who want to play a somewhat easy game thats like a movie, its obvious which one will sell better.

 

[mafia97]

Tomb Raider is the best game i have played in a while , it takes some positive traits out of uncharted which i like

 

[Frag_Maniac]

There are several reason why zombies:

1. Zombie AI is easiest to program
2. They have very mixable and matcheable animations
3. You don't need motion capturing to animate believable zombies
4. Visual uniformity and simple AI makes crowd rendering easier

That only accounts for the programming end of it, and not all zombies are alike. You have the traditional slow, dumb zombies, but now we have fast moving zombies like in L4D and the Infected in Dead Island. Then there's the gun toting zombies in the STALKER series.

Aside from that, I would think the ease of programming would be one of the last factors, not the first. Now a days it's not nearly as hard as it used to be to implement complex AI. Even back when the first FEAR launched there was pretty complex AI being used.

Now it's about picking popular subjects and characters and making it happen in a graphically modern way with sophisticated AI. The zombie genre is a pretty popular one still, which is the foremost reason we're still seeing it a lot, esp with the massive popularity of The Walking Dead TV show, and even more so after TWD game made GoTY.

 

[GSquadron]

Its boring to know that so many years of work, completed in a single day though

 

[bulma]

TR is awesome! It has great gameplay, graphics (with all details). I didn't expected it will be that good. The only minus I've seen was multiplayer - it's just bad.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Its boring to know that so many years of work, completed in a single day though

Single day? Surely you don't mean making the game. Playing it maybe, doesn't have much replay value.

 

[GreiverBlade]

at last i could give a shot at TR2013 ... lovely indeed ... ultra setting give me that

in ultimate setting i get a weird error : i cant start the game due to direct3D initialisation impossible, but once im ingame i can select ultimate settings, i lose 11fps min 6fps max and im at 48fps average... rather rewarding considering how my rigs is (except its a X6 1035T instead of a X4 955 BE, i didnt recieved the BE in time xD)

Ultra setting is quite smooth

 

[Drone]

So it happened @ E3!!!!

 

[MxPhenom 216]

So it happened @ E3!!!!

 

[BumbleBee]

http://www.joystiq.com/2014/06/09/lara-croft-and-the-temple-of-osiris-announced-sequel-to-guardia/

Guardian of Light is one of my favourite co-op games. I think it's metascore is higher than most Tomb Raider games.. not bad for a $15 downloadable game.

 

[GreiverBlade]

http://www.joystiq.com/2014/06/09/lara-croft-and-the-temple-of-osiris-announced-sequel-to-guardia/

Guardian of Light is one of my favourite co-op games. I think it's metascore is higher than most Tomb Raider games.. not bad for a $15 downloadable game.

while i agree on that game... we all know what metascore means ... Watch Dogs proved it ... xD high meta deplorable (and totaly deserved) player review, let see what review that one has.

 

[Solaris17]

THIS

 

[AsRock]

while i agree on that game... we all know what metascore means ... Watch Dogs proved it ... xD high meta deplorable (and totaly deserved) player review, let see what review that one has.

Although we all so know what players\gamers are like too, in the end it's down to you.. Do i wish they kept it back for more polishing and bug fixing sure but in the end the games been pretty good for me how ever what does piss me off is the DLC(s) already.

I read the review's some of is crap some people just complain by defaut.

Which even if the game is great, if i expect there be dlc's for it there is a good chance i will not buy it until a year later.

As for this TR dunno that video yet again says they spent a load of time on the video and not the video game..