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Reveilled posted:On that note, is there a graphic option for disabling the lens effects in this game? I didn't have them for my first playthrough, but either the game or my card got patched and now there's little red hexagons on my screen any time I gut an animal. Welcome to the future. Maximum Salvage.
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Mar 18, 2013 01:56
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DrNutt posted:
There's criticism and then there's picking apart stupid poo poo like she doesn't die from an infected wound.
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Mar 18, 2013 02:19
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User0015 posted:Uncharted 2 did that, with Nathan taking an ugly gut shot and then there's some medicine magic and he's fine after 3 days (conveniently skipped by a cutscene). The part where he's climbing up the train has the hilarious line "I'm always climbing poo poo" grunted as he's about halfway up. I had bought the 2-game GOTY pack and the sheer amount of poo poo he did indeed climb (such as around the outside of an entire loving morro fort) was fresh in my mind, not to mention all the poo poo he climbed in the second game leading up to the actual non-flash-forward train part. Physics puzzles with explosive gas and rope arrows are one thing but anyone who thinks the climbing in TR is anywhere near as intricate as the mazes of poo poo Nate's climbing through (and Sully is apparently levitating through) in any of the uncharted games is mistaken. I sort of like the change of pace because at some point the "HEY CLIMB THIS" brightly painted yet millennia old ledges and pipes and poo poo get overbearing. In TR they pretty much stuck to using white and maybe some yellow, and it fit in for the most part.
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Mar 18, 2013 03:31
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How do you get to the area between Coastal Forest and Mountain Temple where you have to dodge the dudes with the flashlights? I could have sworn I saw a collectible in there but I can't climb back down the ladder from above nor go though the sealed door you needed to upgrade the pick to open. Is there another way I'm missing?
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Mar 18, 2013 03:36
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I marathoned the game yesterday and cleared the main campaign on Normal in about fourteen hours, with 76% completion. I'm not a big fan of how much combat sneaks its way into these games, and the early hours would have a lot more impact if there weren't as many crazy cultists everywhere. That said, they managed to make Lara Croft a sympathetic character for the most part, which I would've thought to be impossible. I'm one of the guys who has a real problem with the old Tomb Raider games and with Uncharted, about how the high body count ruins a lot of the atmosphere they're trying to create, and putting it all in the context of a mad struggle for survival makes it all much more bearable than Drake's happy-go-lucky indifference. I do see the point of the people who notice a shift. It wouldn't surprise me if they deliberately changed direction on the game after a little while, to go back to the old style of Lara as a superhero rather than a mud-splattered, bandage-covered survivor. It is weird that she never has to sleep or eat after the first couple of hours, although you could handwave it as something she does while she's at the camps. I would've also liked to have seen a couple more quiet moments where there isn't some kind of imminent peril I'm on my way towards; it seemed like every time I found one of the tombs or a challenge, it was by accident on my way to rescue somebody or do something important.
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Mar 18, 2013 04:21
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Mr. Mallory posted:There's criticism and then there's picking apart stupid poo poo like she doesn't die from an infected wound. I think the financial cost is also a factor. Outside of buying season passes from iTunes or Amazon Video, games cost considerably more to consume compared to tv, movies, or music. People wind up being a lot more defensive towards criticism so as not to feel like they wasted their money.
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Mar 18, 2013 04:22
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Her falling on that spike then immediately walking through the cave/sewer water with an open wound was the only thing in the game that made me go "wait, what?"
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Mar 18, 2013 04:35
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Mr. Mallory posted:There's criticism and then there's picking apart stupid poo poo like she doesn't die from an infected wound. As games push more and more toward "realism," there are certainly valid reasons to bring stuff like this up. I personally don't think anything 'took me out of the game' the way some things did for others, but I can understand the way they felt. I think the balance between Lara being vulnerable and becoming a badass really could have been done a lot better. I think a better way (strictly from a story perspective) would be her hiding and trying to avoid conflict throughout most of the first few hours of gameplay, and only resorting to violence when it became clearly necessary. Basically more along the lines of a stealth game mixed with survival horror. But from a game design perspective, I understand why they didn't do that and I'm not sure I would have enjoyed playing that game as much as this one. It's kind of like Far Cry 3 (though Tomb Raider has a much, much better story and characters) in that the story and gameplay have a weird tonal dissonance (has been discussed ad nauseum in this thread but please don't act like it's some kind of ~*pretension*~ to discuss it), but the fun of the gameplay more than makes up for the weirdness in tone that results.
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Mar 18, 2013 05:28
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DrNutt posted:This is really dumb and dismissive, and I for one am glad that critical thought and discussion is at least tolerated with some civility here on SA. How the gently caress else does media improve, if not through criticism? First and foremost, the irony of calling an opposing opinion "dumb,' even as you sing the praises of "critical discussion" is wonderful. I'll disagree with you and say that I don't really think video games need to "improve" in the "you know, gas cans don't ~really~ blow up when you shoot them, and bullets would go right through a car door if you hid behind it as a shield" sense. Did you know most situations aren't resolved in 30 minutes, or in 12-24 neatly spaced sections? Did you know a killer usually isn't caught or killed in a 3 act structure? Did you know it usually takes longer than an hour to find, apprehend, and convict a criminal? I don't engage in the "academic" zero-sum game of holding fiction accountable to the way the real world works, particularly "hyperreality" fiction. Do whatever you like -- If you fancy yourself a "critic" for pointing out stuff like "a whole lot of civilian contractors probably died when Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star," more power to you. I don't buy it. My point was, a not inconsiderable number of people wanted to hate this game from the get go, and it's sort of funny to watch the reasons shift as it became clear that the game was rock solid. Hell, lump me in with that initial hate bandwagon -- not for the usual SJW reasons, but because it's a Tomb Raider game by a studio that has been doing poor-to-middling Tomb Raider games since forever. quote:As games push more and more toward "realism," there are certainly valid reasons to bring stuff like this up. A metric ton of movies and television with actual human beings -- doesn't get much "realistic" than that -- are released every single year that ask you to believe all sorts of fantastical situations that have precisely nothing to do with the way the real world works. Suspension of disbelief is key to all fiction, no matter how well written or grounded in reality. quote:But from a game design perspective, I understand why they didn't do that and I'm not sure I would have enjoyed playing that game as much as this one. This is why Nathan Drake kills 5000 people without having a PTSD fit in the middle of the game, this is why Lara Croft can survive impalement and go on to do acrobatics, this is why one soldier is able to defeat an entire army of aliens/monsters/terrorists. Much in the way that even a movie about genocide is going to benefit greatly from skilled actors, a good game -- even one with dark subject matter -- must be enjoyable to play.
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Mar 18, 2013 05:48
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Welp, just finished this game. Totally awesome. Never had a single problem with tesselation, and it looks incredible! Is there any reason to play more after a single run through?
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Mar 18, 2013 05:55
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Duck and burger posted:Welp, just finished this game. Totally awesome. Never had a single problem with tesselation, and it looks incredible! Is there any reason to play more after a single run through? There's some element of randomization to the weapon drops but that's about it.
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Mar 18, 2013 05:59
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Haha, that's too bad. I could really go for more.
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Mar 18, 2013 06:02
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bloodysabbath posted:This is why Nathan Drake kills 5000 people without having a PTSD fit in the middle of the game, this is why Lara Croft can survive impalement and go on to do acrobatics, this is why one soldier is able to defeat an entire army of aliens/monsters/terrorists. Much in the way that even a movie about genocide is going to benefit greatly from skilled actors, a good game -- even one with dark subject matter -- must be enjoyable to play. The thing is that assuming the only way to make the a game enjoyable to play is letting you kill an army of aliens/monsters/terrorists is stupid and reductive. It's a weird divide where half the room is yelling "nobody wants to play some tedious poo poo where a guy falls at the beginning and limps the whole game!!!" and that's actually exactly what the other half of the room wants (i.e. something new, different, anything but another chosen one or lone survivor power fantasy where the major action is running around killing people with a gun or a sword). I don't think these things have to be mutually exclusive. I think you can make a game where Lara gets impaled and spends the whole game dealing with the consequences that's still fun. How exactly do you do that? I don't loving know, I don't make videogames for a living and have a multi-million dollar budget with which to do so. Maybe those people should figure it out instead of just giving every game a Dark and Mature and Real story with Moral Ambiguity, and then making the gameplay 10 hours of being an action movie badass and killing faceless guys with no consequences.
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Mar 18, 2013 06:06
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I called it dumb because he dismissed all criticism of the game in one fell swoop, as though anyone who has issues with it is just some terrible whiner. That's the response to criticism in Games. And then pretty much everything Zombies' said in the post above mine. Games do absolutely need to "get better" when it comes to telling stories, we need better writing, plotting, characters. Why would you not want that? I've grown up with video games and I want them to grow up with me, not just have a higher polygon count and better gore and tits.
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Mar 18, 2013 06:15
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Yodzilla posted:How do you get to the area between Coastal Forest and Mountain Temple where you have to dodge the dudes with the flashlights? I could have sworn I saw a collectible in there but I can't climb back down the ladder from above nor go though the sealed door you needed to upgrade the pick to open. Is there another way I'm missing? You can't go back there, However your not missing any collectibles as none are placed in areas you cannot revisit.
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Mar 18, 2013 06:22
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Square Enix posted some stats: http://eu.square-enix.com/en/blog/theres-survivor-all-us
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Mar 18, 2013 06:35
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bloodysabbath posted:Hell, lump me in with that initial hate bandwagon -- not for the usual SJW reasons, but because it's a Tomb Raider game by a studio that has been doing poor-to-middling Tomb Raider games since forever.
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Mar 18, 2013 06:44
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Xenomrph posted:Wait, are you talking about Crystal Dynamics? Because I'm pretty sure every TR game they've done has been largely well-regarded. Maybe, just maybe, he was offering his own appraisal of their releases and not insinuating he'd taken a census. bloodysabbath posted:This is why Nathan Drake kills 5000 people without having a PTSD fit in the middle of the game, this is why Lara Croft can survive impalement and go on to do acrobatics, this is why one soldier is able to defeat an entire army of aliens/monsters/terrorists. Much in the way that even a movie about genocide is going to benefit greatly from skilled actors, a good game -- even one with dark subject matter -- must be enjoyable to play. It's pretty hollow and disingenous to imply that the only way to make a game fun is to have the player kill a lot of people in it. Shirkelton fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Mar 18, 2013 |
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Mar 18, 2013 06:50
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Dan Didio posted:Maybe, just maybe, he was offering his own appraisal of their releases and not insinuating he'd taken a census.
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Mar 18, 2013 07:06
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Dan Didio posted:It's pretty hollow and disingenous to imply that the only way to make a game fun is to have the player kill a lot of people in it. Sure, but when the combat is really fun why would I mind having more of the combat?
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Mar 18, 2013 07:18
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I don't doubt that a lot of people in this thread and on this forum would play the rear end off of a survival-driven game where you wash up on an island, wounded, alone, and delirious from hunger, and must slowly nurse yourself back to health by hunting, fishing, and scavenging. Instead of a progression system where you gradually accumulate better equipment and abilities, you're simply restoring yourself to some semblance of a standard range of motion. Only then, once all that's dealt with, can you turn to the issues of exploring the island and eventually escaping it. It could probably be a pretty nifty game, but the first hour or so would either be a tremendous exercise in punching oneself in the dick (your character is realistically injured to the point of being nearly helpless and your first actions necessarily involve eating bugs or sucking moisture off leaves) or barely touched (your character's injuries are mostly cosmetic unless it's a cutscene and you're hunting wild boars within ten minutes of pushing the start button). Either way, I have to figure it wouldn't have much in the way of mass-market appeal, or at least not as much as "hot brunette mows down armies of dudes" does.
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Mar 18, 2013 07:36
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Wanderer posted:I don't doubt that a lot of people in this thread and on this forum would play the rear end off of a survival-driven game where you wash up on an island, wounded, alone, and delirious from hunger, and must slowly nurse yourself back to health by hunting, fishing, and scavenging. Instead of a progression system where you gradually accumulate better equipment and abilities, you're simply restoring yourself to some semblance of a standard range of motion. Only then, once all that's dealt with, can you turn to the issues of exploring the island and eventually escaping it. 
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Mar 18, 2013 07:37
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Winks posted:Sure, but when the combat is really fun why would I mind having more of the combat? I don't know, I didn't say anything like that, luckily.
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Mar 18, 2013 07:38
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Edit: I am stupid and found it, nevermind. Instead a different question. I noticed that Lara's watch is always on 5:43, which is fair enough, I don't really expect them to keep updating her watch throughout the entire game. I was just curious if 5:43 was any kind of reference to a previous Tomb Raider game in some way or anything like that? I just ask since it's a very specific number, and her watch actually has huge numbers like they want people to notice it. LibbyM fucked around with this message at 08:49 on Mar 18, 2013 |
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Mar 18, 2013 08:05
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Zombies' Downfall posted:I don't think these things have to be mutually exclusive. I think you can make a game where Lara gets impaled and spends the whole game dealing with the consequences that's still fun. How exactly do you do that? I don't loving know, I don't make videogames for a living and have a multi-million dollar budget with which to do so. Maybe those people should figure it out instead of just giving every game a Dark and Mature and Real story with Moral Ambiguity, and then making the gameplay 10 hours of being an action movie badass and killing faceless guys with no consequences. Also you've made quite a logical leap there - in this thread I saw people criticizing the disconnect between the storytelling and the gameplay (that I personally have no problem with) and not people who didn't have fun with this game. Looking critically at certain aspects of a product doesn't mean dismissing it as a whole. I don't see fanboys/haters division that you're suggesting but rather people who had much fun with the game but want to discuss certain points that they had/didn't have problems with. Palpek fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Mar 18, 2013 |
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Mar 18, 2013 10:11
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Duck and burger posted:Haha, that's too bad. I could really go for more. I wouldn't mind a harder top-end difficulty to be honest. I'm playing on Hard Combat now and a quarter of the way through the game the only time I've died is in QTEs or jumping off a cliff trying to reach something. So Icey Seifuku posted:You can't go back there, However your not missing any collectibles as none are placed in areas you cannot revisit. Gotcha. Yeah I thought I saw one of those shiny metal boxes as I walked up a hill but maybe it was just a generic crate. ZeeBoi posted:Square Enix posted some stats: http://eu.square-enix.com/en/blog/theres-survivor-all-us Didn't know there were crabs, gotta find them crabs.
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Mar 18, 2013 14:10
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Yodzilla posted:Didn't know there were crabs, gotta find them crabs. You'll get to a beach area soon enough.
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Mar 18, 2013 14:15
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Yodzilla posted:I wouldn't mind a harder top-end difficulty to be honest. I'm playing on Hard Combat now and a quarter of the way through the game the only time I've died is in QTEs or jumping off a cliff trying to reach something. Yeah, I really think combat could have used a super-hard difficulty. As it stands there's not a lot of reason to use the game's gimmicks. I could use a fire arrow to burn an enemy's cover away... or I could just shoot them in the head, that works too.
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Mar 18, 2013 14:26
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DrNutt posted:I've grown up with video games and I want them to grow up with me, not just have a higher polygon count and better gore and tits. Weeeeellllllllll
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Mar 18, 2013 14:30
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I am really happy for day one downloads on PSN. I picked this up over the weekend and have been enjoying the hell out of it. The controls are really good too. I just have to stop myself from walking around with my bow drawn, since holding L1 all the time is a tough habit to break. I really like how the enemy's reactions change over the course of the game as they realize Lara's a bit of a murder machine. The "that was bad-rear end Lara!" scene seemed weird at first, but then I remembered that those guys hadn't really been around Lara during the game. Imagine if one of your coworkers snuck into a cave and headshotted some guards with a bow and arrow, covered in blood and dirt while you're trapped in a cage.
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Mar 18, 2013 14:48
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DrNutt posted:I called it dumb because he dismissed all criticism of the game in one fell swoop, as though anyone who has issues with it is just some terrible whiner. That's the response to criticism in Games. You sure did grow up, yes sir indeed.
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Mar 18, 2013 14:57
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teagone posted:You sure did grow up, yes sir indeed. Yes? What is your point exactly?
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Mar 18, 2013 16:51
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Palpek posted:Also you've made quite a logical leap there - in this thread I saw people criticizing the disconnect between the storytelling and the gameplay (that I personally have no problem with) and not people who didn't have fun with this game. Looking critically at certain aspects of a product doesn't mean dismissing it as a whole. I don't see fanboys/haters division that you're suggesting but rather people who had much fun with the game but want to discuss certain points that they had/didn't have problems with. Oh, no, I didn't mean that. I think it's a decent game actually, don't get me wrong. As an example of what I was saying, Brad and Patrick were talking about this stuff on the Giant Bombcast and Jeff seemed to sort of cut in and dismiss it with "the thing is nobody wants to play a game where you're crippled" or whatever. I see that sentiment expressed all the time, in both games journalism and informally on places like SA, and I think 1) there absolutely are people who want to play that game and just assuming it would be bad is a weird foregone conclusion and 2) there are a couple of other options besides "having the theme and mechanics clash for the sake of telling the story we want to tell". It always feels like developers are unwilling to concede on either front, which is where that weird disconnect comes from. GTA4 is a good example; they clearly weren't going to compromise that series' core gameplay of jacking cars and making sweet jumps and landing on grandmas, because that's why most people love GTA, so why not tell a different kind of story other than one about an immigrant's tragic disillusionment with the American dream? Surely that isn't the only thing left, or the only thing Rockstar could come up with.
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Mar 18, 2013 17:16
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Zombies' Downfall posted:As an example of what I was saying, Brad and Patrick were talking about this stuff on the Giant Bombcast and Jeff seemed to sort of cut in and dismiss it with "the thing is nobody wants to play a game where you're crippled" or whatever. Miasmata is probably the closest thing I've ever played to this.
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Mar 18, 2013 17:24
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There were some old PC games that went in that territory. I remember at least one where you could end up blind and basically completely hosed because of it.
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Mar 18, 2013 17:25
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Konami's made a long running series of games where you do exactly this stuff called Survival Kids. The first one in the US on the GBC and is pretty cool. Several of the DS (and I think the Wii installment) were released in the US as well under that Lost in Blue title someone posted earlier. The DS ones are honestly pretty poor games though, I'd stick with Miasmata or even Neo Scavenger. I never played the Wii installment though.DrNutt posted:Yes? What is your point exactly? Only a child would use the words "tits" or "gore" in any context. GAME OVER. 
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Mar 18, 2013 17:53
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ImpAtom posted:There were some old PC games that went in that territory. I remember at least one where you could end up blind and basically completely hosed because of it. That would be Robinson's Requiem. The same game where you could amputate your own legs.
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Mar 18, 2013 17:56
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Anyone know when the last time the Tomb Raider games were on sale on Steam? I wanna pick up Legend & Anniversary, but if there's a chance they'll go on sale soon I'll wait. (If there's a separate thread for the PC version, I couldn't find it, sorry)
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Mar 18, 2013 18:18
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Orgophlax posted:Anyone know when the last time the Tomb Raider games were on sale on Steam? I wanna pick up Legend & Anniversary, but if there's a chance they'll go on sale soon I'll wait. Pretty recently actually. They did a sale on them to promote the new game during the S-E sale where they did a different franchise each day.
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Mar 18, 2013 18:33
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Orgophlax posted:Anyone know when the last time the Tomb Raider games were on sale on Steam? I wanna pick up Legend & Anniversary, but if there's a chance they'll go on sale soon I'll wait. Hopefully they'll go on sale again soon; I ended up getting the entire franchise for like 15 bucks during the Winter Sale.
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Mar 18, 2013 18:43
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