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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.