Tomb Raider and the Fall of Core Design | Hacker News Reader

Tomb Raider and the Fall of Core Design

arstechnica.com

105 pointsprajjwal21 comments

I have to say that Crystal Dynamics just killed it with the latest Tomb Raider reboot. I had written off the whole series as a cash cow churning out title after title of boring sequel.

But I tried the 2013 reboot and it hit all the right notes with me. I rarely play games to full 100% completion, but I played Tomb Raider 2013 until I had found everything (all collectables, etc). It's really a great game.

Same here, 2013 has a real sense of exploration and survival. I don't play a lot of games but I picked this up during a steam sale a while ago and am really enjoying it.

I enjoyed it, but thought it suffered from a lack of...Tomb Raiding. I missed the puzzles that defined the earlier iterations of the game (and provided the name of the franchise.) The little single room tombs they put in the new game were so easy as to barely be puzzles at all.

But the rest of the game was fun, so I'm looking forward to the next instalment. Hopefully they'll throw in some actual Tombs.

> next installment

Rise of the Tomb Raider will be a time-exclusive XBox game, and released to other platforms (months/years?) later.

GTA V (2013) is still not released on PC. Halo 1 and 2 had been released years later to PC by Microsoft and part 2 was Vista-only for marketing reasons. Age of Empires, Flight Simulator and many other Microsoft Games PC games series were destroyed/stopped years ago.

Why should one upgrade to Win10 for PC games? For their DirectX12? Don't turn Rise of the Tomb Raider in the next Halo 1/2 for PC! Everyone still remembers the Vista-only DirectX11 while all games were stuck with DirectX9c for many years and WinXP support.

Somehow Microsoft forgot why Win95 was so successful and won the operating system war - a huge part were PC games with Win95 launch games like Hoover, Pinball, SimCity 2000 for Win95, Doom 2 for Win95, Pitfall for Win95 (WinG and DirectPlay, DirectSound, DirectX2D APIs).

Look at Steam, look at GoodOldGames (GoG). SteamBox is already around the corner.

Did you play the original?

You probably liked the reboot because it is aims for the lowest common denominator( as most AAA games today do ). It is made to be really easy to play, since the obligation to keep the player playing, takes priority over gameplay.

The goal is to prevent player getting stuck by Any Means Necessary; keep them always occupied so they don't get frustrated and quit. For example:

You always now where to go thanks to the always present directions and the minimap, quick-time events replace sequences where skill mattered, there is a tutorial for everything, treasures and trinkets keep players, who have hoarder inclinations, occupied.

The original has None of Those. You were presented with a level and that was the obstacle. The satisfaction was deeper, you felt good because you actually had to suffer and persevere and choose to not quit. When you finally you solved the level you really accomplished something.

I personally enjoy games for characters & stories. I don't need to "fight the game" for a sense of accomplishment. Not sure why that's "worse" than playing games that are hard to master. I played hard games in the past. I don't feel a sense of accomplishment. I feel like a wasted an hour learning an entirely useless skill.

It's fine to like a certain kind of game. There are plenty of games that are hard and if you want to play them - good for you! But it feels kind of weird to say that the quality of a game is relative to how frustrating it is to play. Games are a form of entertainment after all.

I was kept occupied throughout the game and I didn't go out of my way to collect things (in fact it's rare for me to find a game in which I do that).

Also, quicktime events "replacing skill" is a little unfair. What skill did they replace, and how did it differ mechanically from a quicktime event?

It's fun to be challenged in skill, in interesting fights or puzzles. But getting lost or not knowing where to go all the time, that's just a time-waster. Like the whole category of "fetch" quests.

Especially when you quit a game for a week, and come back having forgotten the map and your latest goal.

If you make a dungeon crawler for the express purpose of making a dungeon crawler (Grimrock?) it can be fun to lack directions, have no minimap, take notes, draw maps by hand... but not every game means to be like that, and it isn't the only valid way to make a game.

Sometimes the "on-rails" approach is actually the most fitting. Mirror's Edge, anyone? The best part of that game was getting into a groove and feeling the flow as you dash through levels. "The grind" is antithetical to the point of the game.

Remember, it's just bits- games are for enjoyment. Suffering isn't the point (unless that's what you enjoy)

"Suffering isn't the point (unless that's what you enjoy)"

I don't think it was about suffering, as it was about how challenging it is. Think about other (non-gaming) experiences. The best are the challenging ones, that require your full attention. Games work the same way, and on the other end are those that hold your hand and make you sleep or quit before a tough game will.

I did play the original. It was not without its flaws. The controls were very fiddly. It was easy to die or fall down and lose 5 minutes of intricate jumping progress. You might call that skill, I call that mindless busywork. I did not find the satisfaction deeper.

The reboot did indeed have quicktime events, which are generally lame, but it used them sparingly—I never felt like I was playing Dragon's Lair. The thing it did better than the original was present a cohesive world. The island felt like every location had a real sense of place.

Everyone has a their own sense of what "lowest common denominator" means, but if yout think it means "reasonable controls, no horrific and misplaced difficulty spikes, good visuals, and an engaging story", then I agree.

seeing old tombraiders with rose colored spectacles are we? The game gave us fresh memorable and fairly satisfying and reliable movement mechanics and trying to traverse a complex landscape could be fun, music was amazing and some areas were for the time quite striking, but finding the hidden switch is often just a pain and to me cheapens the game with arbitrary challenges. Everyone raves about revelations but it was really bad for getting lost and requiring lengthy runs to find what the heck is around. I get to the point where I didn't even trust the level design to be fun anymore.

I like the first TR because it doesnt hand hold, but its still fluid and fun. I like the latest TR because graphics are good, its fluid and fun. The hand-holding and cut scenes were still annoying, but bearable for once. Obviously didnt follow tutorials or gathered trinkets, i just ignored it, as in every single game these days.

Its quite hard to be stuck in the games these days even without the hoarding. The games are rather easy most of the time.

I remember there's a part of tomb raider chronicles where if you don't pick up a single piece of ammo at one point you end up getting stuck and it's not recoverable.

I don't know if I particularly enjoy this

You were downvoted but I agree. The new Tomb Raider reboot is a good Uncharted clone but it's not a good Tomb Raider game IMO. They simplified out all the things that made the original games interesting to me. They got rid of puzzles and exploration and automated the platforming. The only thing I found an improvement in terms of gameplay is the combat.

In the first Tomb Raider series 1-5 (&6) by CORE the gameplay was about exploration in tombs, ruins and other popular spectacular places, solving puzzles, precisely timing jumps with instant death, and a few enemies like wild animals and a handful human enemies.

With the first Tomb Tomb Raider reboot, the gameplay got easier, the jumps were a lot easier and one got a second chance to unrealistically grab the edge to prevent a fall, there were still a lot of puzzles, more combat and some fantasy elements like a second Lara as enemy.

Tomb Raider 2013 reboot was a superb game. Though its new survivor theme was very different from the older game series. It was more action oriented (one had to kill about 800 enemies in the whole game, most of them human style zombies), had only 6 optional hidden rooms each with a single puzzle to reach the other end. The first two chapters were a tutorial and slow paced, but then within one hour Lara turned from a naive girl to a warrior - a bit too fast. Tomb Raider 2013 reboot changed a lot during the development phase, as one can see in an early development video "Tomb Raider Ascension", that one of the devs posted on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbJjcBC2rnc

The upcoming Rise of the Tomb Raider has a story about supernatural(?) and is more about hunting, sneaking and scavenging materials. Hopefully they can integrate more tombs with (non optional) puzzles and less enemies.

Man, I totally agree. Just from the beginning, watching someone get hurt actually made me feel something, compared to the paper-thin characters in other games.

My wife and I planned out each evening to be our "movie night" for this game, and found the pace and story well crafted.

Good thing - due to kickstarter and steam we are slowly returning to the golden days - all the best games of the last few years (not the most polished, just the best) are not AAA blockbusters. Outside of AAA we see a lot of new properties, no sequels, innovation and risk taking.

Also what are doing on HN instead of plowing trough Pillars of Eternity ...

For anyone else struggling to work out what "AAA" stands for, apparently it's just "triple A" (like batteries): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_%28game_industry%29

I would say, more like credit rating than like batteries :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_credit_rating

Ohh, I suppose that makes more sense than what I always think of, which is minor league baseball. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-A_%28baseball%29

"Don't fuck up the culture" rings true here.

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