60°

Crystal Dynamics Talks About Lara Croft's Transition From Survivor To Killer

WolfsGamingBlog writes: "Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider reboot has been met with plenty of praise and love, yet one of the things most often cited in the various reviews by gamers is Lara's first kill, and how quickly she transforms from a blubbering wreck to a steely eyed killer who nearly wiped out the entire population of Yamatai by time the game's end rolls around."

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wolfsgamingblog.com
joab7774055d ago

Mayne she was trained earlier in life but not against real people. Then she has an encounter in which one of her friends has a gun to their head and she realizes that she must kill to protect everyone and get them off the island. Then the assualt scene.

Thatguy-3104055d ago

Think they could have handled it a lot better. If I compare it to how Far Cry 3 did it I would say that it just doesn't stack up. In Far Cry 3 I actually felt how Jason got stronger emotionally/physically as the game progressed. Plus the whole skill system was kind of pointless too. I only wasted 6 skill points throughout the whole game.

himdeel4054d ago

Can I troll this thread with a request for a new Willy Beamish game?!

-MD-4055d ago

She was a born killer. 7 hours after picking up her first gun and she killed 300+ people.

nofallouthero4055d ago

i felt it was a bit quick maybe if they staggered the killing a bit more it would be more believable.

gamer78044054d ago

Lara was and shouldn't be so focused on killing, she was an adventurer first, this new game is a shadow of its former self. Very disappointed.

rocky0475864054d ago

Uh what? Some of the opening scenes of Tomb Raider 1 is of her killing. She's always been a killer, and it got progressively worse as time went on and more and more games showed up each year up until 2003.

gamer78044052d ago

There is a difference between being a killer and "so focused on killing" i.e. experience for killing to give you rewards to make you a better killer. When the Tomb raiding and puzzles takes a backseat to those, the formula has been reversed, it's a shame.

rocky0475864052d ago

Dude, the focus on puzzles and exploration stopped after TR1. Yes there is a focus on more action in this game but that doesn't mean that in the past games she did more exploration/puzzles than killing, it was an equal amount of killing in there as well. Maybe you don't remember? There was hardly any "Tomb Raiding" in the games after the first one, not to the extent of how people are trying to be all dramatic about anyway.

The puzzles became jokes after a while too; they weren't even puzzles anymore they were just rube goldberg machines that you'd have to find and flip a few levers for and just watch everything take place and were totally unrealistic. At least the puzzles that were present in this game actually made sense and were environmental based.

All they have to do is make the puzzles bigger for the next game and make sure to give us time to explore for ancient artifacts like they did in this game, you can take HOURS exploring extra stuff in this game if you really wanted to and you didn't always have to get into firefights with people as you could avoid them on most occasions.

gamer78044050d ago

I've played every single tombraider. Did you play TR Underworld? The latest game had far more adventuring and tombraiding than killing. TR anniversary remake had the oppossite ratio than the latest also. TR legend even had a this ratio although not quite to the extent of underworld an anniversary.

The puzzles are optional in the newest one. Formula has been reversed.

rocky0475864050d ago

I have played every single TR as well. I loved Underworld but please, it wasn't the greatest TR game ever made that's for sure. The formula may very well have been reversed, who denied that? But formulas HAVE to be fucked with otherwise it becomes stale and no one wants to really play the exact same game over and over and over and over again.

Maybe you do, and that's fine because you can always go back and play those older games again, but that doesn't mean that everyone wants to. I love the exploration aspect of Tomb Raider and guess what? That's still there. The pacing of the killing and whatnot is GREAT throughout 90% of the game, it's only the last 10% of the game where the killing gets intense. But guess what else does?

The platforming and the natural environmental puzzles as well. The more you get into the game the more these things stand out, at least to me anyway. Back to exploring a bit; There's times where you spend much more time exploring in this game than going on some linear killing spree. There's times where you want to collect things just to hear Lara's expertise on everything that she finds.

Going back to puzzles. The more you get in depth with the game the more you realize that the puzzles are there in the environment. Especially towards the ending. Yes I want the puzzles to be bigger and better than this game just as much as you do, but they were giving us what Lara Croft was all about before all of that. So I can understand why they didn't focus on that all that much.

The massive killing doesn't make this any less of a Tomb Raider game; people act like she rarely killed. This is just a lot more killing than she usually does in one game but, in all 9 games before this one, she's probably killed more people in the last 17 years than she did in this one game that's for sure.

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30°

Tomb Raider’s Risky 2013 Reboot Revived a '90s Gaming Icon

Crystal Dynamics' daring reboot of Tomb Raider brought Lara Croft back into the spotlight.

Godmars290405d ago

An attempt at a reboot with no momentum for continuance. Just a torture-porn trilogy about a poor rich girl with daddy issues reluctantly being pulling into a world of violence, versus say the adventures of a quipping Brit treasure hunter who solves ancient puzzles while gunning down rare and extinct animals that it originally was?

Honestly, don't have all that killing. If the devs had been truly clever, not focused on mangling a message about the senselessness of killing which was seemingly and quickly forgotten, they could have worked, if not bloodlessly then not directly by Laura's hand, dealing with enemies as part of the puzzle solving - they didn't have in the game in the first place...

badz149404d ago

"Revived a '90s Gaming Icon"

LOL

the only thing similar between the 2 is the name of the protagonist. if they would have given the game a different name, NONE would even think that it was somehow a resurrected Tomb Raider IP. the last game with the real Tomb Raider DNA was TR Underworld.

250°

The Tomb Raider Survivor Trilogy's Take on Lara Croft Deserved More Recognition

The Survivor Trilogy was a drastic reimagining of Lara Croft and Tomb Raider, and it provokes changes for the character that are truly fantastic.

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gamerant.com
isarai469d ago (Edited 469d ago )

Deserves less IMO, i think the 1st in the new trilogy was a perfect 1st step for the new direction. The next 2 games were half steps at best. Not only that, every character in the series including Lara is just annoying and doesn't make sense in terms of motive, like yes they have a motive, but none of it seems proportional to the lengths they are willing to go through for it. The most annoying thing is every one of the games say "become the Tomb Raider" yet 3 games later and we're still not there? No thanks. Then there's the mess of the 3rd game, massive skill tree that serves almost no purpose as there's literally only like 3-4 short encounters in the whole game, and they took till the 3rd game to finally manage some decent puzzles even remotely close to previous games in the series. Nah, the trilogy infuriated me to no end as a long time fan of the series, i hope we get better going forward cause that crap sucked.

Army_of_Darkness467d ago

The first in the trilogy was my favorite. I thought they were going into the right direction with that one until the second one came out and seemed like a graphical downgrade but the gameplay was okay. As for the Third, Graphics were really nice but it was kinda boring me to death with its non-stop platforming and exploring with not enough action! Well, for me anyway...

DeathTouch467d ago

Graphics on the 3rd one were abysmal. It’s more colorful and has more variety, but everything else was a noticeable downgrade.

The more open world with NPC quests was also handled very poorly, to the point I missed Angel of Darkness.

thesoftware730467d ago

I know it is your opinion, but she did progress as a character in each game, she even got more muscular and seasoned.

That is the thing, people first complained that there was not enough platforming and actual tomb raiding in the first and second games. Shadow remedied that and kept the combat elements.

3-4 encounters? huh? did we play the same game? there was plenty of combat and, the skill tree did matter, like being able to hang enemies from trees, set explosives traps on bodies, being able to counter, and that are just a few of the combat skills. The skill tree also had things like being able to hold your breath underwater longer, crafting upgrades, zipline upgrade, and climbing upgrades that all changed how you can approach situations.

Not knocking your opinion, but we definitely had different experiences. I had 98% completion on the shadow.

SoulWarrior467d ago (Edited 467d ago )

Sorry but i'm with him about the low number of encounters, the game throws loads of weapons and skills you're way with a comparatively low amount of places to actually use them, so they felt under utilised.

-Foxtrot468d ago

Yeah...no

It was awful, for THREE GAMES it was "become the Tomb Raider" where she went back to square one after each game. Not to mention after a huge reaction of killing someone for the first time she then becomes Rambo straight after and goes on a slaughter spree without a single other reaction. Her development was all over the place.

She was whiney, weak and in later game a little arrogant and selfish

Oh and the voice actress compared to the previous ones was not as good

Lara Croft deserved better and while they are decent games as they are, we deserved actual Tomb Raider games, we could have had better survival games if they just stuck with the original Lara Crofts origin about her plane going down. Surviving 2 weeks in the Himalayas...I'd have liked to seen that, who knows what mystical threat she could have faced in the mountains or underground some secret concealed cave.

Tacoboto467d ago

I thought Shadow of the Tomb Raider had better gameplay than Rise, but it annoyed me the most of the trilogy when I stopped to think about the story.

It's like they deliberately decided to make her unlikeable and did nothing to make the character you're playing as likeable or have even one sign of humility.

SoulWarrior468d ago

2013 I thought was a fine entry, but Rise and especially Shadow were painfully mediocre follow ups imo, I really didn't like how selfish and angry her character was in those two.

Terry_B467d ago

No. Please forget the crap completely.

northpaws467d ago

First one was decent, played through it twice.
Second one was okay, played through it once.
Third one was really bad, tried twice a year apart, still can't get through the first two hours, it is just really bad.

thesoftware730467d ago

Honest question, what did you find bad about it? the opening 2 hrs of Shadow were fantastic imo.

The opening was very similar to the first 2, what did you find really bad?

Not looking for an argument, just an honest question.

Starman69467d ago

3rd one just didn't feel like a tomb raider game. Possibly because the development was passed to another development team. Big mistake! Microsoft killed tomb raider making the first game a timed exclusive. Never recovered after that.

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70°

The Gamification of Games

Adam Hurd of GameGrin writes: "Gaming is an interactive medium. For decades now we’ve had people criticise the structure of narrative heavy games, for relying on cutscenes to tell the story. In films there’s a phrase: show, don’t tell, the idea that it’s better for the scene to show you what’s going on rather than the characters or text to tell you. In gaming I feel like there should be another rule: do, don't show, the idea that the story should be told through mechanics if possible, instead of in cutscenes."

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gamegrin.com
1398d ago