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Tomb Raider - A Tarnished Legend
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 game makers not smarter than this by now? They create a game that people absolutely love and then instead of nurturing the franchise to make lots of money in the long run they exploit it for a few bucks short term and ultimately kill it. Big hits like Tomb Raider are the lifeblood of these companies. What are they treated so trivially? Can someone with industry knowledge please explain this to me?
I'll admit that i didn't own a playstation 1 till it was well past its prime and I played Tomb Raider long after finishing other classic shooters like Turrok and Goldeneye. However, let me be the first to say that I couldn't stand Tomb Raider 1. I never picked up on any of the sequels after that. The game carries a stigma with it now, due largely to the enormous assets on its cover shots. This stigma is well earned . . . life is too short to play bad games. Using sex appeal to sell games is fine, but when thats all you have left, something is wrong.
only one everything
The biggest problem I had with Tomb Raider after the first one was the focus on gunning down every human in sight. Yes, there were disinterested monks in TR2. Other than that, it's always kill-or-be-killed with dozens of humans running into your superior firepower. Also, whenever a tomb raiding game makes a big deal about including a grenade launcher in the game, you know it's not good.
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.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
And it wouldn't hurt to add a "Lance Croft" version for the girls...it would give cooperative network play a whole new dimension.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I believe if they made a good game of hers, it would sell. Look at the Vin Diesel game The Chronicles of Riddick. That product had almost no level of respect, but the game was good (so I've heard) and it sold decently well.
Certainly having a fanbase that already respects your series helps, but a good game would sell. There are enough review sources out there that word gets around when a game is worth buying.
That's what I liked most about TR1 was its sense of scale. Some of the places were just plain old intimidating. Tack on the musical cues (like the one in "Tomb of Tihocan" where you surface in front of the tomb -- that choir still gets me to this day).
I sure hope they bring the feeling of TR1 back to the new game. Hell, I'd buy a remake of TR1 with updated graphics. That'd be awesome, IMHO.
"Apparently so, but suppose you throw a coin enough times. Suppose one day, it lands on its edge."
What's been the Tomb Raider formula?
Step 1: Produce decent quality platformer (which incidently is helped greatly by people wanting a game that looks great on all those new hot-shit 3D accelerated cards they were buying), that features a unique character and finds a market.
Step 2: Churn out the same damn game every year for the next 5 years.
Step 3: Where's the profit?
You know, if you've got a groundbreaking game with insane depth and/or replay value like Civ or the Sims, or are able to cultivate a massive fanbase like Everquest or Mario, you can get away with this sort of thing, but come on, it's Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider 1 was nice, but nothing really more than your standard platformer. If it had been Lars Croft instead of Laura, Tomb Raider 1 would have still been successful, it might have had one sequel, and that would have been it. Laura's tits are the only thing that kept that franchise going beyond the second one, and even that wears thin eventually.
Tomb Raider's one of the few games I could get my girlfriend interested in. She didn't like playing it, but rather would sit and watch and help me figure things out--I am pretty good at the fiddly action bits, while she's more of a thinker type. Your stereotypical guy-girl breakdown, I guess.
I didn't think Angel of Darkness was so bad, aside from the random dude popping up and the weak ending. However, seeing the teasers for Legend, I'm really looking forward to a new instalment coming out, maybe one with a bit of a new take on the same old same old.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
FYI, you play one or two levels as another (male) character in AoD.
demi
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.
demi
the life out of good films. Look at Eps I-III. Is there any doubt that crap like Mitocloreans, virgin births and all that Democracy nonsense are there to appease nitwits who can't watch something without meaning? With focus groups, producers can get instant feedback on a film and tone it down to least common denominator with frightening ease, speed and consistancy. Name an American film from the 90's that you'd call 'timeless'. Something you'd stand up against Star Wars or ET or Indian Jones, let alone Citizen Kane. You can't, they've all been through the wringer. With few exceptions (The Incredibles and Lilo and Stich come to mind) they've all been compromised.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
if you liked Flashback, the 2D game that it was a 3D version of (and amazing if you liked Fade to Black). If you came to it from the N64 the (for the time) expansive environments and freedom wouldn't impress you. But if you took it for what it was (a sequence of cleverly timed jumping and key puzzles with a little action in between) it was great. It's like people who play Vagrant Story or Land Stalker and complain about the block puzzles. You either like it or you don't, and if you do those are great games.
I won't appoligize for the sequels though, they were just more of the same, and after 2 there was no excuse.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Ever since the first one came out, I always have the same complaint about the series. The fun is in the precision jumping and exploration. When I'm doing that, I love the series. However, the battles always dragged it down. Not only does it hinder exploration, but also it is extremely difficult to attack with the control that was made for exploring. ICO is Tomb Raider without the enemies, and that's why I love the game so much.
Tomb Raider's name can be tarnished? Tomb Raider won the hearts of gamers? When the fuck did this happen? God, I have to start distancing myself from gamers, if that's true.
I thought trying to tarnish Tomb Raider's name was like trying to vandalize a garbage dump.
"Essentially, people want everything to be well above average, which is illogical, but nobody ever said people are logical."
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A new video game with a new character, plot, and setting?
Just a thought...
For some reason, this article is highly negative up until the last page when (surprise) the new Tomb Raider game is unveiled.
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.
I happen to like that movie. YOU ARE FORBIDDEN FROM SPACE MECCA, 1 YEAR!
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Infidel...
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I enjoyed the sequel, too, but it wasn't as good a story.
I didn't enjoy the sequal as much either. They skipped too much time between one and two -- and I had no idea what was going on. But I still enjoyed it. The character Riddick is one of my favourites in recent years.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
You should look into the Xbox game. It's a prequel that got great reviews.
Rubbish. Games can be art. But games are primarily games, something you play for fun. I have never heard anyone call a football match art. And most software work is the artistic equivalent of logo or advertising design. Its high quantity work that most people can do with a little training. I am a programmer so don't give me that BS that many coders are doing mystical work like a great master. And please very few innovative games do well except in reviews. My favourite games got wonderful reviews and absolutely tanked in sales. The two studios that made most of those games no longer exist (Looking Glass and Troika). Making the best example of a game, and adding a few new things is the way to success. Thats what made Halo great. It had pretty much nothing that hadn't been done before, but it did it perfectly and with no bugs. This is the strategy that Blizzard use. Tiny amouts of innovation with tons of polish.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion