Upcoming Tomb Raider

You know what I want to play? A Tomb Raider where you aren't Lara Croft. I want to play a Tomb Raider where you are the Tomb and you're trying to stop her from raiding you. At your disposal you have button activated spike traps, rolling boulders, poison darts shooting out of walls, while an AI or Human tries to navigate through whatever peril goes her way, water or lava rushes. If so inclined I also want to possess wild animal creatures to combat her, like being a swarm of bats, or a bee buzzing around her face while she's dangling from a ledge, or a wolf pack waiting to pounce. Why should she get all the fun. Make me that Tomb Raider game, I'll buy it. And if you can keep the implied rape out of the picture, k thnx bye.

So, a more adventury version of the Tecmo's Deception games or Orcs must Die, but with you trying to kill Indiana Jones/Lara Croft?

I like this idea a lot, specially if i can cackle manically as i chase someone as a giant boulder.

That game exists. Kinda. It's called Dungeon Keeper.

I would so kickstarter the shit out of that if they ever wanted to make a true follow up/successor to Dungeon Keeper.

But no, my Tomb Raider would be pretty much left 4 dead-ish in execution. One person maneuvers around in third person mode, while the defender in free roam mode places traps in her path (not instant kill/overlapping spam - there'd be an allowance and collision bubbles preventing such placement)...I love L4D but occasionally got annoyed with the maneuverability of playing infected versus humans, and worse good teams could easily mow down anything that wasn't the tank.

On a completely different tangent, that Fallen Enchantress game you're playing, a buy or no buy? I still have an interest in that Orcs and Men game too...I'll hold off until the winter steam sale assuming we're still here after December 21st.

Sorry to rain on everyone's (admittedly ancient) gnashings-of-teeth, but this new one's getting a good buzz.

Is it still all rapey? I haven't been paying attention.

All I know from the trailers is it sounds like the woman doing Croft's voice sounds like an American badly faking an English accent (she isn't).

 

I got a great pre-order deal, so I'm all over it. Fingers crossed.

I think a lot of it was warranted. It's good that the game actually does do a good job of humanizing Lara Croft and making her more than a sex symbol. The problem is--that really wasn't apparent in those initial trailers. Just a lot of agonizing pain-grunts and rape.

 

You didn't go ''Full-Collector's''...did you?

Conan plays Tomb Raider.

That's the only Lara death I've seen from this game...I know it sounds sick, but I hope there are others; you need to know 'you done fucked-up' with some gratuitous gore and a sense of loss (having to replay).

I've been playing these since it first came to PC, and religiously bought each and every iteration since...so this should soon be in my hot, sweaty hands...

 

Having never played 'Uncharted' does Nathan Drake have such death scenes?

No, not at all.

 

But this is going for something else.  Uncharted is adventure and swashbuckling and Indiana Jones.

 

The new Tomb Raider is survival and The Descent and being alive when all others die.  They probably looked at what Uncharted was, figured it would be foolish to chase that exact direction, and took it another way.

 

I'm good with that.  I think it looks good, and the reviews have been quite positive.

For those who are PC Master race, I kid, and can't launch the game because some fucktard failed to initialize Direct3d error pops up. In the options menu, uncheck the "Exclusive Fullscreen" box, then you can enjoy your game.

I'm umming and ahhing on this. On the one hand, yay, new TR. On the other, the uncomfortable vibes given by the earlier trailers and the talk of the latter half of the game being pretty much constant combat instead of exploring and adventuring really turn me off from it. I just like exploring creepy old ruins and doing death-defying acrobatic stuff, man! So sick of games with their roots in other genres cramming in as much SHOOTS MANS nonsense as they can (see also Dead Space 3, ugh).

 

That's what kept me from loving the Uncharted series. The writing, the acting, the production values were among the best I've seen in a game but the combat and shooting sections were just horrific.

Just play the damn game...

Seriously, this game is fucking awesome. I'd say even better than Far Cry 3 mostly due to improved writing and characterization for Lara and the others. Very tense stuff here and there, and way too brutal death scenes when you fail. There is a good amount of exploration mixed in with the combat, if only to track down rare resources and experience points. The only thing that bothers me is the video gamey elements intruding on the narrative. Similar to Spec Ops the Line (which is free to Playstation Plus members starting today), the serious tone of the narrative is undone by the hud elements popping up reminding you you're in a game, breaks immersion and I wish you could turn that off.

Pretty much played all night, took a personal day, and should call it a night. Geforce 6xx series users you might want to turn off Teselation in the advanced options menu until nvidia updates their drivers or Square issues a patch, otherwise you'll be crashing every 20 minutes. Though other forum folk have found a roll back driver you can use, didn't note it in my forum browsing...sorry.

Downloading right now, can't wait.

About six hours in. Buy the fuck out of this, people. If The Descent and Indiana Jones got Brundleflied together. That's what this is. Any and all fears about tone are invalid. Review soon.

Mine should hit my hands tomorrow...possitively preapic.

Only had a couple of hours to spend with this yesterday, I'm up to the point where you have to upgrade the little axe to keep moving forward, but what an adventure. Love how the story is filling in, the character beats, and, as has been noted damn near everywhere, this thing is gorgeous. I'm such a shallow graphics goon sometimes.

Yeah, I was about at the point last year where I could confidently say graphics didn't matter, but this and DMC make a solid argument for the reverse. Because, Jesus.....

I mean there's a section involving a radio tower on a mountain that gave me fucking goosepimples right alongside a raging case of acrophobia.

 

 

...and pretty sure it was ripped from this.

 

Edited by Graham - 3/6/13 at 3:22pm

Sounds like this may be worth a rental!

ehhh....maybe on discount.

 

Just listened to Giantbomb's take on it and I'm kinda bummed out on it (despite the fact that they gave it four stars). It seems like Tomb Raider runs into that problem of dissonance where the story cultivates these characters, particularly Lara Croft's character, as being fairly complex and humanized; but the moment the game gives control to the players--mindless power fantasy.

 

Maybe when it's like $20.

 

 

Yeah.

 

 

I can certainly understand these reservations, but short of doing a Walking Dead-style pure adventure game, with no skills to learn or abilities to unlock, and feeling horror at every confrontation, what choices do they have? Lara mentions in her first broadcast to the wounded guy up by the waterfalls that she had been forced to defend herself, and was startled and ashamed at how easily it had eventually come to her. Some might say that's just paying lipservice to it, but I think they did ok. Perhaps giving Lara some time to reflect after that first brutal attack would lend gravitas to the situation, but this is an action game, after all.

The, ahem, execution of her first kill totally works.  As does the following 3-5.  She's fighting for her life, disgusted by it, but she knows that if she doesn't, she and her friends are dead.

 

It's the IMMEDIATE pop up on screen +15 Headshot! and the tool tip about stealth kills that instantly dissolves it, for me.  I think you could've still given XP bonuses and what not for that section of the game, just hide it until the camp fire.  Introduce the more advanced combat later, when she's become a bit more numb to it.

 

It's like when I got an achievement during the No Russian section on Modern Warfare 2.  It's just gross.  Just have that achievement pop up AFTER the level, where it's still gross, but about 100x less gross.

 

There's a part, some time after, where I've had to kill several more dudes and a dude tries to fuck up Lara.  After an event, he's bleeding on the ground and says, "Just finish it."  I decide to cap him in the skull.  As I pull the trigger, Lara says, "Go to hell."  At that point in the game, I'm ok with that, it's where her character is going.

 

It's just that, in every instance, they've gone from "survival" cutscene to playing the game and the smash cut is unbelievably rough.  NOTHING in the cutscenes is ever of consequence.  You never actually have to collect food because there's no hunger meter.  You never actually have to stay warm or dry.  It's tonally all over the place.

 

Which is fine, it's not the worst thing in the world, the game is fun.  I just wish they could've dealt with that better.  Like hide it more or actually make a hunger meter, so it FEELS like your surviving.  As it is, the game feels like it's telling me it wants to be Far Cry 3 or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or some indie game but instead is Uncharted.  Which is fine, because it's fun.  Maybe all I'm saying is that I'd like developers to think a little harder about those things and what they can do to make it better, otherwise we'll just keep having the same problems.

 

Ahh, that clarifies it quite a bit, and I agree, they could basically keep all the point-driven stuff for updates at base camps. 

But that's not an excuse since the entire marketing for Tomb Raider has revolved around the idea of Lara growing as an individual as you progress through the game. I understand that not everyone is bothered by this, and I understand that not every game has to be a "Journey" or a "The Walking Dead;" but if you're going to make a big deal about how you're going humanize this idolized character (particularly one that has spend of her gaming life depicted as a sex-object), then yes I expect you to own up to it, and yes I will hold it against you should you fail to accomplish this. Would we expect anything less from an actual film?

 

I realize that a lot of that is on me--I just expect more from gaming. At some point, simply being "fun" really isn't enough to grab my money, or at the very least, make me pay full price. I know it seems I'm talking a lot of crap about a game I've never played--I'm sure this game is actually fun to play and well-produced--but this doesn't seem like the kind of thing I'd pay $60 for.

 

It's this very reason why I'm absolutely scared for "The Last of Us," never mind the fact that I thought Naughty Dog's, Uncharted 3, was a crushing disappointment compared to its predecessor, but I fear that that game will also be tonally all over-the-place.

I've joked about it on steam with screengrabs...you figure, with all the people Lara has had to kill on her way up the mountain, shivering by the camp fire upgrading her bow and guns, and tools...why hasn't she snagged a coat off one of her assailants. First 5 minutes of Rambo escaped from Dennehey he has the sense to make a poncho before running deeper into the woods, Lara right now literally would be woozy wandering around in the snow before succumbing to hypothermia.

 

Yeah, that may have been poorly stated on my part. The further clarifications you guys have provided definitely help.

Like, Ok, I want to make clear, I'm liking the game.  These are just annoying niggles, dangling threads that I have to pull.

 

But what if they implemented a system like Metal Gear Solid 3 had, where you have to fix injuries?  Sure, that was clunky as shit, but with some streamlining, having to fix injuries, raid bandit camps for supplies, PICK UP A GODDAMN COAT, I think the game would be instant classic.

 

As it stands, it's pretty cool, but feels a bit too much like it's chasing Uncharted 2's tail.

 

Oh, and Ska.  I know I'm going on a limb here, but I reckon the reason why U3 was not near as badass as 2 was because the greats from that team were working on Last Of Us.  Something I imagine plagued Dead Space 3, as well.

OK, let's talk about something a bit more realistic...How long do you give til the 'nude-patch'?

 

I'm sure there's some sweaty, Cheeto-stained basement-dweller furiously at work on it as we speak.

 

Question: when do y'all think it's a good idea to start using fast-travel to revisit previous areas? I've had it for a while now and have yet to use it. Just curious how many skill points and treasure I might be able to get, but also concerned I don't have enough skills yet.

Whenever you want. After the rape cut scene, even though they toned that down, and I was on my own I went back to the first zone and hunted the crap out of stuff, found the collectables I glossed over. Only time I made mental note to go back was when you needed to get that hanging collectable under the waterfall. But yeah, getting sucked into the ongoing narrative as it goes on you forget you can go back and revisit the older places. I never did any of that until I got the rope arrow and torch lighter thing, which helped upgrade my skills/weapons with the accumulated points I earned through backtracking.. Though I'm more thorough in my travels in the first run, don't miss out on much unless its blocked by an upgrade I've yet to discover.

Yeah, I like to think I'm a pretty thorough explorer, and I'll happily trudge around for minutes on end to get some shiny bauble. But that hanging dealie behind the waterfall is exactly what made me worry if I had the right equipment/skillset to bother yet, as I didn't see a way in without extinguishing a flame. I've only just started the trek up to the radio tower.

I've played for thirty minutes.  The subtitle of this game should be, "Holy shit, Lara, are you okay?"

What I've played is genuinely great, though.  This is the nihilistic, angry version of UNCHARTED.

Edited by The Dark Shape - 3/8/13 at 5:50pm

On the level of violence: someone told me that Indy kills 9 people in Raiders. Now, Tomb Raider is about 20 hours long, so multiply Indy's tally by 10, and you have a death toll of -90-. That would be a lot of blood on Indy's hands.

 

The greatest compliment I can give this game is that when Lara dies because I failed, I feel bad. In all my years of playing games, I can't recall feeling like I let the hero down before.

Is anyone playing this for PC?  The TressFX on Lara's hair is incredible.

Yeah, the TressFX stuff is a nice addition.

I get a small amount of amusement from all of the straight guys on the internet who are writing articles or making comments about how lovely Lara Croft's hair is on the PC.

Just rented this game for my XBOX, now I'm ticked I'm not going to be playing it on the PC.

So PC Gamer ran an article about the disparity between nvidia and amd performance of the game. I found it kind of hilarious by the tone the writer used in his post. One poorly optimized game = my nvidia cards are now $400+ paperweights. A video card does not make a game experience on its own, I can't run Crysis with just my 680 GTX and a pentium 1 chip from old. There are way too many factors that make the pc platform more than just a coke/pepsi situation. Intel is still churning out new processors, ram continues to get cheaper and faster, hard drives are moving to ssd's, and who's to say unreleased tech will come out to compensate for questionable pc ports.

There is some truth to the article though. The next gen seems very AMD biased with ps4 being the base spec going forward. That comfy lead Nvidia has had will take a hit. But Nvidia has the researchers and engineers ready to meet the changes easily. In this case, industrious end users already posted workarounds hours after the games launch solving most of Tomb Raiders issues, ie the Hitman Absolution workaround.

I'd switch to AMD hardware if the hardware was worth a damn in the first place. Always, always, always had driver issues playing games with AMD cards, even native ones, in the past 3 years. Never mind the fact all the major Radeon suppliers cannot build a card cooling solution worth anything. XFX/Saphire, lol. HIS, always sold out. Asus and Gigabyte are okay, but are inconsistent in build quality and warranty support. Now if EVGA ever decided to go Radeon, that would be the game changer...maybe I'd go full Radeon if I had to.

As it stands my GTX still runs really fast, and if I needed to I'd get a second for SLI. My i7 oc'd is plenty fast, and I have all the ram I could ever need. So yeah, pc gaming master race ftw...the one thing the article forgets is games are built on engines. Currently Unreal Engine is still king, though old in the tooth. I've yet to see Cryengine be adopted by other devs. Tomb Raider was a pc port that featured one boutique feature, that augmented by a zippy cpu still made the game playable. Then there are devs who don't even bother with console titles as the native platform -> Arma, Crytek, Creative Assembly. And that's not to say anything that games don't always have to be fucking Crysis to be enjoyable in the first place - Minecraft, Crusader Kings 2, any of the kickstartered RPG's coming down the line. The only takeaway is that you can choose to spend thousands on a top spec pc going forward or you can settle for a $400+ next gen console, but this is 'Murica you can buy whatever the fuck you want.

The real crime is the sad lazy writing the has being coming out of PC Gamer of late. You have this article where the guy didn't even bother to check user forums so he could get the game to launch, though you should never have to in the first place, but steam/gaf were already on top of it. Then there's that linux piece in response to Steam's official launch last month, where the article was seemingly written by a 12 year old from gamefaqs...uh, fuck this I'm too lazy to google stuff, lolwut.

Complete interactive map here:

 

http://www.ign.com/maps/tomb-raider/island

 

Handy for you completists out there. I've only used it once so far, to find a couple of pesky little items, but I'm sure I'll be using again soon.

I am near the end of the game and I've not raided a single optional tomb so far. Going by my experience this game could be more accurately titled 'Laura Croft: Trauma Survivor".

Are any of the extra tombs really cool? The underground tombs in Assassins Creed were always really cool, so I felt like they were for the most part worth exploring.

It's funny you mention the Assassins Creed...they are more fleshed out than the ones I've been to in this game. At most, the three I've done feel more like two room closets with timing based puzzles. The loot is okay from them, but yeah I was hoping for Tomb Raiding too.