That was very clearly on purpose, she starts panicking about the first guys she kills to survive (and there’s a very obvious rape vibe when she gets ganged up on), and near the end she’s screaming I’m gonna kill you all. That is the narrative arc. Welcome to trauma stories?
I couldn’t keep playing that game after the first few hours. It felt like some kind of Lara Croft torture simulator fetish thing and made me feel icky.
It bothers me because TR2013 didn’t have to be like that. The dogs were challenging and scary. The puzzles were good. The bow and melee combat was tense. Hunting and exploration could’ve played a bigger part, the game so rarely took you off the rails and it was good when it did.
The game could’ve been made with killing humans being rare dramatic moments, with the guns being tools of last resort.
Shadow definitely went off the deep end as it tried to up the stakes. Most of her personal motivation (frantic survival and then the mystery of her father’s death) were out the window and it was just a nebulous “I want to stop the bad guys”. And… it plays with it but it is very clear the intent is that she is unleashing the apocalypse as she steals these artifacts before the Bad Guys can. Whether the Bad Guys would have still done it without her is, of course, up to the viewer. It’s Indy and the Ark/Grail.
But I think the game overall does a good job of getting to the status quo and establishing Lara as having a Very British reason for looting everything and shooting every dinosaur she ever sees. If she doesn’t steal it, err, have it gifted to her, then somebody much worse will and they’ll be a lot meaner about it.
On the scale of “it belongs in a museum”: She is definitely much more psychotic than Indiana Jones. But she ain’t got nothing on Nathan Drake.
Personally? I loved the first of the reboot trilogy (actually strongly disliked every Tomb Raider up to that). I felt the second wore out its welcome by the end. And I actively disliked the third but it was short enough I finished it. But I think that is also why I will probably never bother to play Uncharted 4. I am just done with humping walls looking for yellow paint and waiting to see when my character reaches for something so I know to hit the jump button.
Stopped right before Uncharted 4? But that one has the “jump off a high ledge and punch a guy in the face to break your fall” move. It always felt so good.
I think the writers pretty much admitted they had no plan for Trinity, seeing how their goal completely changed from immortality to apocalypse between Rise and Shadow. They were just the reason for Lara to track them across the world and stumble on ancient stuff.
The second game of the reboot trilogy starts with Lara in therapy session about how she became a thrill addict from her survivor’s guilt from the first game and how she’s liking it.
I’m looking up the opening scene for Rise of the Tomb Raider and I can’t find the therapy session itself. Maybe it was only in the trailer and they cut it from the game, I remember people thought it was weird when they released that trailer because it was unexpected at the time that this was the direction they were taking? But the game does have you find tapes of Lara’s recorded sessions talking with the therapist, like how she’s having control issues and it turns out she has become a different person in a bad way.
Maybe. The bad guys show up with a lot of guns to take whatever they want. She shows up for archaeology first, and ends up having to stop the objectively bad guys.
The third game of the reboot trilogy starts with her tracking this evil organization that’s been screwing with her family, finding the item they’re trying to steal to trigger an appocalypse, stealing it first, and almost triggering that same apocalypse because she doesn’t know what she’s doing, thinking she’s doing good. Second game also started with her tracking the same organization to figure out what they’re doing, and from that, she stumbles into some archaeology. It’s a long character arc, she was looking for unrelated answers, but she learns that she can be good at figuring out ancient stuff, and she finds out the hard way that she can also fuck up badly when she doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s supposed to end at the point where she’s mature enough to do better. We just see all the “fucking up” parts.
oh man I think there is a video somewhere on youtube where the dev talks about Lara’s “growth” from the first game to the third like lmfao I think this was intentional.
I just looked it up now seeing as I hadn’t heard of this either
From what I can gather one of the senior members of the development team, Drew Harrison, made a (mild) joke in a tweet about the suspected shooter in Charlie Kirk’s death. Loads of right wingers, being the thin skinned, wannabe victims but apparently “free speech warriors” that they are, harassed her and contacted Sucker Punch trying to get her fired, threatening to boycott the game and so on. Sucker Punch and/or Sony predictably caved and did so
If I’m missing anything, please feel free to add to this. As I say I’m only just hearing about it and haven’t gone on a deep dive about it
Which is even more jarring when you realize they have been leaving Erika Ishii to be a lightning rod for all the chud hate basically since this was announced. No support for the face of their game but abrahamic god forbid someone make an incredibly mild “mario and luigi” joke.
Which is even more fucked (and yet actually makes perfect sense) when you remember this is the same studio that did a game about a Native American rebelling against a fascist corporation that took over Seattle. And then you remember they had Troy Baker voice said Native American and… yeah.
Real shame. I liked Ghost of Tsushima a fair bit (even if it was very clearly written by weebs, for weebs) and was planning to grab this as a goofing around game. But I guess sucker punch just saved me probably 80 bucks or whatever this was going for.
Yeah even putting this situation aside I wasn’t that gassed for GOY. I played GOT and enjoyed it sure, but it was yet another typical open world action-adventure game with no innovation at all really, basically the same gameplay we’ve seen countless times at this point. It just had a halfway decent story, which is a low bar for video games, and looked really pretty. And what you say is very true I agree, “by weebs, for weebs”
Edit: oh my god I knew there were apparently new gameplay elements in GOY. I hadn’t looked it up but suspected it would again be nothing new. And yeah most of it is but I did see they have something…unique. The “Watanabe mode” where it plays lofi beats music over you playing. So cringe
game about a Native American rebelling against a fascist corporation that took over Seattle. And then you remember they had Troy Baker voice said Native American and… yeah.
I might be having a brain fart, but which game is this?
When it comes to Sonic racing games, I would actually prefer a Sonic footrace game, like Sonic R. I find it weird that the platformer footrace niche has been ignored by the gaming industry.
Anyhow, I look forward to trying out Palfarm. Never played Animal Crossing, so it would be good to experiencing that on my PC.
For an Animal Crossing-ish experience on PC, you can try Dinkum (indie, solo dev) or Hello Kitty Island Adventures (unironically good, but also limits some activities per real day, like AC New Horizons)
Unreal Tournament used to be my go-to… 25 years ago. I had the bots set up just right, so if I got a good look at one, I knew what I was up against. Some were harder than others. You could customise each bot, so you really had some pretty fine control over the gameplay.
As best I can tell, the modern iteration of Unreal Tournament is called “Fortnite,” which is nice because it’s free to play, and it’s fucking gorgeous, but all the paid content, the gestures and memes, it just wears me out. I just wanna shoot. It works best when one of my little nephews is online and they wanna team up, I let them do the memes and stuff and I circle around and flank their enemies. I’m in my 40s, pair me up with a grade school kid who can play decently and we win every time. It’s funny.
As much as people dump on the game, it has the gunplay I like and it’s pretty to look at, but I wish there was just regular old Unreal Tournament still. I’m sure I could get the GOG version of UT’99 running on my Mac with Whisky; it’s obviously not gonna run on my Switch or Xbox, where I can play Fortnite (Epic doesn’t make it for the Mac anymore).
Otherwise, and when it’s just me, it’s Cyberpunk. I have it on both my Xbox and my Macs. Yes, it actually runs on a computer that’s like 7.75"x7.75"x1" (and the M4 Mac is smaller, and more capable with ray tracing). No dedicated GPU
Now I just gotta find a GOG backup of UT’99. I don’t know if GOG lost the rights to that and Deus Ex, but both are gone from my library. (I still have Unreal 1, and Deus Ex 2 and Human Revolution, though.) Shouldn’t be hard to find an archived copy out there though.
I never played this game back in the day, but in a world where it has voice acting and a PC port, this is the one I’ll likely try. I have no idea when that might be, since it’s already a struggle to keep up with game releases, but someday, for sure.
I’ve got 1,000 hours in this one over the years and the PC port is the main reason I’m getting it (eventually). Hoping it’s not too locked-down for mods, FFT’s mod community has been a vibrant one.
If it’s true to the original, I see no reason not to play the new one instead. As someone who played everything just by being able to grow up in the perfect time to experience it all, I can honestly say it’s hard at my age to go back sometimes without the quality of life updates. I just don’t have the time or care anymore to be able to, sadly.
It’s been about 20 years since the last time I picked it up, so I hope to play this one someday soon as well.
If I didn’t have all day to myself yesterday I definitely would have spread it over multiple days lol. Very much it was a stars aligning situation.
It’s nice seeing the genre get a revitalization too. For a while there it felt kind of stagnant. Like the only major player we had was Resident Evil I feel like and then all the smaller ones
What’s crazy is lots of good games don’t take that long. You don’t need an epic sound track, textures, physics, etc to make a good game. There are so many amazing low budget games that are not that technically challenging or that demanding of musicians/graphic artists.
That’s the one thing where I would raise an objection. An epic soundtrack is that one thing that adds to the experience more than fancy graphics or overly complicated game mechanics. Epic doesn’t necessarily mean expensive. Monkey Island had phantastic soundtracks, as well as other older games like The Settlers 2, early Anno games etc. They just set a mood. They supported their narratives. That was good stuff - and I guess you might now be able to extrapolate how old I am.
I’m not saying I don’t like an epic sound track. I have a lot that I’ve even purchased. But think of some games that do not and still sell well.
What I mean is, you can have a good sounding soundtrack that isn’t expensive. Some games record orchestras, for example, and others just make a good tune in FL studio. One is much more expensive than the other.
Bioware used to be able to make good AAA games quickly :
Mass Effect : 2007
Dragon Age : 2009
ME2 : 2010
DA2 : 2011
ME3 : 2012
With epic soundtrack, voice acting, cinematography, …
Even an independant (back then) studio like CD Projekt “only” needed 4 years between each Witcher game (2007, 2011, 2015), while making their own engine for the 2nd and 3rd
I don’t know where the years get lost in game development nowadays, except pre-production (lack of direction/managment) and… “open world”
“Quickly” - the “Bioware magic” used to be years of lack of direction followed by one year of “HOLY SHIT WE NEED TO DELIVER!” crunch
But the former executive producer of Dragon Age, Mark Darrah (…) posted a YouTube video about how the so-called “BioWare magic” really worked. According to Darrah, it referred to a hockey stick graph where most of the progress is nearly unnoticeable. It’s nearly flat, and “if you draw that line out, then your game is shipping in like 30 years.” At a certain point, the developers hit a “pivotal point” when the game would finally shape up and a lot of progress would be made in a short amount of time. According to the developer, that tipping point is what is known as“BioWare magic.”
Half a decade for a subpar product that’s barely out of beta.
Back in the day we’ve got subpar products barely out of beta that we had to patch from magazine cds far faster. Oh - and they were more fun because developers had to make something out of nothing. I feel today, where everything is possible as the engine used delivers a toolset for anything, games easily are so overly stuffed with “mechanics” that they just feel like work. I don’t like that.
I feel like given the amount of work required to make the kind of games that triple a represents, and the amount of money in and out, every game becomes a mess of different ideas and motivations with no unifying force. Every game must be everything to justify the price tag, but there’s no unifying passion or vision behind it. Of course the more you stuff in there, the more you can market it as well.
I haven’t seen the trailer either, but look at what the sniper is saying. You’ll have to zoom in a bit. I’m not sure what the direction bit is about, but it explains the numbers
Totally is. FFVII was a watershed moment for JRPGs on PSX. Same is true for Trails on PC.
It’s just that recognition in the West for FFVII was instant. Meanwhile, due to localization, it took more than a decade for Trails to get recognition.
Maybe this is a better comparison: if FFVII is The Beatles, then Trails is the Velvet Underground. Beatles sold massive copies immediately. VU took awhile, but now everyone knows they’re just as impactful as the Beatles.
That’s a bad analogy. I just asked 4 of my friends (25-65) if they knew who the Beatles were. Everyone said yes. Then I asked if they knew VU, everyone (including myself) had no clue who that was.
Oh boy I’m glad you said that because I didn’t want to sound like an idiot. I’m 40yo and I have no idea who the VU are, nor does comparing them to the Beatles make me excited to look them up.
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Aktywne