Tomb Raider - A Tarnished Legend 72
An anonymous reader writes "1UP.com has posted a fantastic piece on the Tomb Raider series that examines how the franchise has been tarnished over the past few years -- and questions whether Lara can still win back the hearts of gamers. What's especially amusing is the inclusion of GameRankings scores, demonstrating the series' consistent drop in quality (Tomb Raider 1 averaged an 89%, while the latest installment, Angel of Darkness, came in at 54%.)."
Why are they not smarter by now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why are they not smarter by now (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically what it boils down to is greedy men (and women) wanting to make a quick buck and not worried about the future nor consequence.
Less wanton killing, more exploration (Score:5, Insightful)
In the first game, you had encounters against a tiny number of humans. The rest were animals who were a hazard, and understandably dangerous most of the time. That made the human battles more important.
Not only that, it had exploration galore. The levels in the first one are still some of the best, with decent puzzles and great visuals. I'll always remember Palace Midas and The Great Pyramid and St. Francis' Folly and the Colosseum. Good stuff.
And starting with the second game they tried to cram her into urban environments, a fit that just never worked well. The whole Opera House in TR2 was just too contrived. Keep Lara in the tombs where at least I can suspend some disbelief over how things are arranged in a crazy way.
Finally, the problem with the last game, Angel of Darkness, was clearly just not enough time to finish it. They planned three full games, apparently had a full script for each one, and were trying to get things done as best they could. They might still have been incompetent programmers and designers, but what they had could have been decent. I enjoyed Angel of Darkness quite a bit more than TR3 and would have liked to have seen the next two games to see where the story was going.
Re:Why are they not smarter by now (Score:5, Insightful)
When was that? Perhaps it seems like Hollywood used to release quality "timeless" movies because all the bad ones have been forgotten. You can name any time period and I could list movies that really sucked. There has always been "B" movies and there always will be. Even the first full length movie The Birth of a Nation [imdb.com] was exploitative and used racism to sell the product.
Re:Oh gee I wonder why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mario has been successful because it has evolved and maintained/expanded its fanbase, not because its fans carried "the same damn game" for the past 15 years. Super Mario Bros was revolutionary in the platform style and gameplay. Mario 2 had a different style (I think its a fine game, despite some varying opinions on the subject). Mario 3 was arguably the flagship product of the NES, and was yet another evolution with racoon tails, and non-linear level progression and all the other things that made Mario 3 awesome. Mario World was Mario 3 in Super Sayen mode. Then there was Mario RPG, Mario 64, Paper Mario, Mario Sunshine, and of course all the mario sports games. Every game has not only been a differnt version of mario, but practically every game has been as good as or better than its predecesor. Nintendo has delivered to its fans, and that's why its popular, not because the Fanboys (including me) have been blindly loyal to it.
Ditch the old? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure the direction makes much sense. From the article:
I think this has a lot to do with whether you like Tomb Raider or not. A great deal of the game has to do with precision jumping--being familiar with the standing jump arc and distance, how to catch handholds, etc. Frankly, I think if you don't like that (lining up and executing a difficult, precision jump) you probably don't like Tomb Raider. I'd hate to move from that to something like Devil May Cry where you can never tell where you're going to land and you just kind of jump any old way.
Well, I hardly think it's much fun to run around on catwalks and so forth if there's no chance of falling; and you've already had the option to automatically catch yourself. And when you step slowly you can't fall of the ledge, so I don't understand how this is a good thing. And Lara's gaze has always been attracted to the next place she has to get to.
Wait wait wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought trying to tarnish Tomb Raider's name was like trying to vandalize a garbage dump.
It's called "evolution", you know (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's actually completely logical to expect an evolution. I.e., to expect people to learn from mistake, and from what worked.
It happened every single market or industry. After cars with, say, windshields have been produced, you wouldn't want one without a windshield any more, would you? After 16, 12 and now 8ms TFTs are available, you wouldn't want an 120ms TFT from the 90's, do you? After color TVs and remotes have been invented, would you willingly buy a black-and-white one without a remote?
Or in the game industry, once such elements as full mouse-look (pioneered by Bethesda) have been invented, would you actually buy a FPS that doesn't have it? Once unit grouping in a RTS has been invented, would you like an "old school" Dune-2-style "hardcore" RTS where it's missing?
Is that illogical? Not at all. We expect an evolution, not regression.
And it does appliy to games and gameplay. It's a young industry and it has yet to discover what works and what doesn't work well. But we do expect it to learn and evolve.
They did a dud or two, ok, they thought something would work and it didn't, ok. But they already got freakin' told by all reviews what didn't work, and why. I'd expect someone to actually learn from that, not see yet anoter company (or worse: the same company) repeat the same mistakes, or even go downhill.
But what happens instead is that it's an industry dominated by inflated egos, artistic types who get insulted by the mere mention of a scientiffic approach (e.g., to usability or to class balancing), people who don't even understand what they're doing (see the hundreds of clones where they missed every single element that made it sell well, because they don't even understand what they're cloning or actually play that genre), and basing whole designs or business models on ideas pulled out of the ass instead of any attempt to understand reality.
E.g., here's a factor every publisher seems to pretend doesn't even exist: if you look back at what sold well within the same genre, quality seems to sell. Games which were well balanced, had a good interface, and shipped with very very few bugs, actually outsold others by a wide margin.
See Blizzard's whole lineup of titles for an example. Diablo appeared out of nowhere, and didn't need some franchise name or other existing brand awareness to succeed big time. What was really different? Quality, that's what. It was thoroughly tested and debugged, and by "debugged" I also mean the design and balance, which are as important as (or more important than) the implementation in a game.
Yet PC game publishers insist on a business model which pretends that games and gamers exist in a vaccuum, never talk to each other, and, eh, you can shove any crap out the door and the idiots will buy it just the same. And by "crap" I don't even mean just the implementation bugs, but also that stuff like balance is given less thought than the screenshots to flood sites with.
May I suggest (Score:1, Insightful)
Just a thought...
The article? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't combine a negative timeline article with a positive puff-piece article (written with no hands-on knowledge and probably a video and press release). 1UP seems to do this a lot.