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%.)."

Comments

Why are they not smarter by now

[RickPartin]

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?

Re:Why are they not smarter by now

[ZephyrXero]

The current trend in most all big business you see these days looks at making quick profits rather than long term. Just look at the soda and candy industries... you see a new flavor of "Sprite Remix" come out every couple of months, or a new weird type of M&M all the time. The manufacurers believe the initial sales of this "interesting" new product will outway the long term sales of a quality one. The video game industry does this too. Most games are designed and marketed to only make money for the first couple of months they are released then fade into obscurity. The film industry used to go against this and release quality "timeless" movies that would hold up for decades and continue to sell, but they've fallen into this trap as well.

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.

Re:Why are they not smarter by now

[FriedTurkey]

The film industry used to go against this and release quality "timeless" movies that would hold up for decades and continue to sell, but they've fallen into this trap as well.

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 was exploitative and used racism to sell the product.

Re:Why are they not smarter by now

[slthytove]

In video games, though, there is the added pressure of hardware rapidly changing. It's not even an issue of "Oh, that game doesn't really look great by today's standards" any more - in the case of computer games, Windows computers released in the past 5 years simply can't even *run* games for an earlier platform than Windows 95 (and even most games designed for Windows 95 have trouble running on Windows XP). With the pace that is set by the games hardware industry, game developers almost have no choice but to come out with stuff quickly, before their development machines are obsolete.

Films are different - yes, technology has changed (VHS, DVD), but most homes have a VCR, and so they have the ability to pop in an old tape and appreciate it, even if certain parts of it (special effects, special features) are lacking. That's not even an option for many gamers to appreciate old games without skirting gray areas of legality (emulation) or having an old computer lying around. Game companies wanting to make a profit need to come out with stuff while it's hot, and sadly that results in many products being less than fully realized.

Re:Why are they not smarter by now

[darthwader]

It's really simple to explain: it's hard to do good work.

I know, once it's finished, it seems easy. So helpful people say "just do another thing like that one, only completely different". But it's not easy.

What happens is this:
1. Game company (or movie company, or car company or any other sort of company) makes a lot of things.
2. Most of the things they make are average, some are way below average. Consumers brand everything that is less than way above average as "sucks".
3. One or two turn out to be really good (way above average). The consumers like those ones.
4. The company tries to make more like the ones that turned out good (the sequels).
5. They make a lot of sequels.
6. Most of them suck. See (2).

By the way, the reasons consumers say that anything which isn't well above average "sucks" is simple: once they see the absolute best, they raise the bar, and want everything to be that good. Essentially, people want everything to be well above average, which is illogical, but nobody ever said people are logical.

As to the question about exploiting for the short term, that's not the idea. The ideas are:
1) You've got to ship something, or you go out of business. A crappy game (movie, car, etc.) released now is better than a perfect game never released.
2) You really don't know how popular it's going to be until you release it. People are fickle.

But I think that the main factor is the simple one: by simple math, most things are average or below. And most consumers are only excited by games that are well above average. So most consumers are going be disappointed a lot of the time.

Re:Why are they not smarter by now

[dbhankins]

On the ntcompatible.com website it says Star Control 3 will run with VDMSound and the appropriate settings. Details provided there. Go to http://www.ntcompatible.com/, go to the games section, go to "S", go forward a page or two, click on the "Show" link on the right side of the page across from "Star Control 3".

Not having tried this, I can't guarantee it will work. If you don't have luck with VDMSound, you might want to try DosBox 0.65 instead.

Tomb Raider used to be good?

[Rowan_u]

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.

Re:Tomb Raider used to be good?

[EvilIdler]

No, it's a console game ported to the PC:
http://www.gamespot.com/features/tombraider_hist/

It was developed on Sega Saturn (or demoed on those, at least).
The release was simultaneous on the three platforms.

The first two games were the good ones. They were good PSX games,
with amazingly large levels for its simple memory. The PC versions
did improve it graphically, and the engine looked tons better in
Tomb Raider 2 if you had 3D hardware.

Less wanton killing, more exploration

[jvmatthe]

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.

a good game would sell

[bbkingadrock]

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.

Re:I second that.

[dbhankins]

If you mean better than the VGA graphics of the original DOS and Playstation versions, then... you already can have that.

TR1 + VDMSound + DGVoodoo = high-res Tomb Raider on WinXP. The sound hiccups a bit, and I haven't figured out how to fix that yet, but otherwise it's great.

I actually liked AoD...

[fuzzybunny]

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.

Re:Oh gee I wonder why?

[MagicDude]

able to cultivate a massive fanbase like Everquest or Mario

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?

[demi]

I'm not sure the direction makes much sense. From the article:

Stilted controls have always been a favorite flogging point for the series' detractors. The original Raider was designed as a world made of boxes, and Lara's movements have always been built around that sort of orthogonal space. Making jumps has traditionally been a matter of lining Lara up against an edge, backing her up just so, then making a running leap. Very mechanical, very precise -- but not always much fun.

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.

She sprints, leaps and dives with grace; when she steps slowly off a ledge, she'll immediately twist to catch herself (meaning no more accidental plummets). Moving hand-over-hand while hanging from a narrow platform, she'll automatically move her head to focus on the nearest hand-hold, subtly nudging players to figure out where to go next.

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.

Re:Oh gee I wonder why?

[Dunbal]

Step 2: Churn out the same damn game every year for the next 5 years.

Step 3: Where's the profit?

Heck, if it works for Electronic Arts, why can't it work for Tomb Raider? Hmmm, perhaps they are paying their employees too much and not working them hard enough...I must have a word with management...

Tomb Raider 1 was great

[rsilvergun]

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.

Wait wait wait...

[Grey Ninja]

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.

It's called "evolution", you know

[Moraelin]

"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.

The article?

[mrseigen]

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.