After Vanquished, I went to some video game "comfort food" and resumed my playthrough of the Tomb Raider series, starting with Tomb Raider Legend again, and have since moved on to Tomb Raider Underworld. ...and beaten it. Progress Report, pandemic, you know. Anyway! Playing Tomb Raider after Uncharted has helped me really appreciate them, so I've been studying their systems to properly understand and express why I love these games. And well, I'd like to talk about it! So, onto me talking about game design!
After a lot of thought, if I'm going to explain why I like Tomb Raider, I need to start by explaining what Tomb Raider is. That is actually a lot more complex than you might think.
Video games, at their absolute simplest mechanically, are a sequence of challenges. Typically, a game will teach the player a set of mechanics, then challenges them on their skills with those mechanics repeatedly, then the game ends. And of course, to be able to complete the challenges, the player needs to know how it works inside and out, so games go through a LOT of effort to make sure the player knows everything before testing them on it in a challenge. Classic Super Mario Bros is a perfect example. It teaches you the mechanics of Mario right at the start, then gives you ever more difficult tests of your ability to use the mechanics of Mario.
A puzzle runs contrary to that logic. A puzzle challenges the player specifically by not telling them how: it locks the player into a space and demands the player learn and understand the systems of the space that they are presented, and reconfigure that space in such a way that they can finish it and move on. And of course, ideally with a twist, where changing one thing that you need to do blocks another thing you need to do, to make sure mindless prodding can't unravel it and the player needs to properly understand it. The fact that the player doesn't know how to do it is the core thing that makes a puzzle even BE a puzzle: if you walk into a room and go "ok this this this then this" at a glance, that's not a puzzle, that's just a sequence of little tasks (not even challenges).
However, everyone learns differently, so puzzles are hard. Asking the player to constantly learn and understand new things is a scary proposition already for a game designer, but asking them to learn while also challenging them in other ways, like placing them under constant harassment by enemies? That's REALLY scary. We've all played those bad old JRPGs where you're just trying to reach a button on the other side of the room but random enemies just. keep. stopping. you. and ARGH! No one wants that. So it is game design common knowledge to avoid combining puzzle challenge with other forms of challenge. Typically, games with mixed mechanics will remove their other mechanics to focus on puzzles, and once the puzzle is complete, they switch back. Or a game that is puzzles throughout will only be puzzles, hence "puzzle game".
So as an example of all of this combined in a typical way, let's look at take the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. When you enter the temple, you know your goal: get through it, beat a boss, and get a mcguffin to progress the game. It's Zelda. But you don't know how to achieve that right away, only through exploring and experimentation will you build a growing understanding of the space that moves you forward toward the goal. You'll figure out pretty quickly that advancement has something to do with the water level, but you won't know what to set it to clear. So you need to adjust the water level, change things, adjust the level again, change more things, on and on, which requires understanding the space and how it all works. Then you get the key item, the Longshot, which allows you to do more and go more places within the dungeon, recontextualizing the puzzle, and pushing the player to redo their understanding of the puzzle in order to finish it. It's an excellent puzzle! And in typical game fashion, the water temple has basically no other challenges but the puzzle, and it's not very mechanically involved - it's very cerebral. To finish the water dungeon of Ocarina of Time, it's lots of pushing buttons, taking on and off boots, and hook shooting around. The other main mechanic in Ocarina of Time, the combat, is more or less absent in the puzzle focused Water dungeon (excluding the boss of course). Ocarina of time focuses on puzzle challenges OR combat challenges, and the water dungeon is purely a puzzle challenge. The few enemies the water temple has are only there to add variety; Ocarina of Time pushes its combat mechanics elsewhere.
This formula works. Just look at all the Zelda games that follow it! And it goes way beyond Zelda, most games follow these conventions! Because they work, and we know how to design around it and balance it. And yet, some games directly challenge those known best practices, forging their identity specifically because they are combining two contrasting things that game design common sense says to keep apart, and they somehow make it work really well. And one of those is Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider combines platforming challenge and puzzle challenge together, mixing them rather than separating them, and it's actually really good! And this combination and the balancing thereof that is the core of Tomb Raider's identity.
Here's how it works in Tomb Raider. You enter a space, and are unable to proceed. You know that you need to get to the exit and continue on to the mcguffin, but you don't know how to achieve it. A puzzle, similar to Zelda so far. But to solve it, you use Tomb Raider's extremely powerful, expressive, and complex suite of platforming systems. So you climb all over the space, jumping around and poking things (and likely falling to your death a few times), building up an understanding of the space to discover how to change that space to give yourself a platforming path to the exit, then climb and jump along the path you opened to the finish. You untangle the puzzle's knot by platforming. You aren't flipping switches in the right order then walking to the finish, you are jumping and climbing to manipulate the environment so you have a path to jump and climb to the exit! And it feels. so. satisfying! Like, Tomb Raider is like climbing and backflipping through the best Zelda dungeons ever. It's so, SO GOOD!
From all of my time studying game design, let me tell you, this is difficult to do well. It requires very delicate balancing of their two challenges, and that's HARD. Most games that combine contrasting challenges like this mess up the balance and fall apart. But Tomb Raider pulls it off!
...usually. It's not perfect. Tomb Raider is usually able to pull off the good balance of platforming challenge and puzzle challenge, which is excellent considering how hard that is to pull off. But when the balance is off... the game's core mechanics start to fall apart, and gets that "trying to reach the switch for the puzzle but enemies keep random attacking me" frustration of early JRPGs. Tomb Raider 1 has a lot of that. It leans WAY too far into the platforming challenge, in large part due to its gods-awful controls, but mostly because TR1 is just incredibly unforgiving in its platforming mechanics and level design. There are great levels in Tomb Raider 1, with a good balance, but for the majority of its levels it was just way too difficult and way too unforgiving, with mediocre puzzle and level design. Probably because it's way too long overall, but you know. I'm hoping that some of the later Core games do better at finding this balance, but considering what I know of the games and their fate... I am tempering my expectations. We'll see as I try more games! The Crystal Dynamic games, on the other hand, are way better at handling this balance. The balance does shift a bit from game to game, but for the most part, all of the Crystal Dynamics (and Eidos Montreal technically) games do a very good job balancing it. For example of the variation, I'd say that Tomb Raider 2013 shifted a little too far away from platforming challenge and leaned on the puzzle challenge a bit too much, though it kind of works since it leans onto its brand new combat challenge layer (which is weird since combat has never been a focus in tomb raider. though they completely overhauled it in 2013 so I get it). Tomb Raider 2013 is an oddity balance wise, but it is very good in its own way. Rise of the Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider Legend handle the balancing pretty well, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider Underworld so far share my award for best balancing between platforming challenge and puzzle challenge. Also just some great puzzles and great platforming in general in those two games, also they are great games! ...though the stories of both of those games are pretty not great, but that's another rant post.
So to wrap this up, I've talked about Tomb Raider's identity and what Tomb Raider is, but, why do I like that so much? Well, the benefit of this balancing act is mechanical depth. Just like Astra Chain and its crazy blend of systems, Tomb Raider's balancing of systems gives it options and complexity in its mechanics - depth. TONS of jumps, dozens of ways to move about the space, TONS of context sensitive actions and jumps and movements and climbs, combining that platforming with its combat in addition to combining it with puzzles, adding timing as a variable to puzzles and platforming, collectibles galore hidden behind extra platforming challenges, just, on and on and on and on. There is just SO MUCH to these games. And I ADORE mechanical depth! And it's just so so good to mess with and explore, because there is just always more. There's always a way to get through a puzzle faster or better, there's tons of mechanics that are always there but non-obvious to discover later on, there are always better ways to do combat, tons of collectibles to find, just, on and on. Plus, the puzzles and the basic structure itself is fun for me. It is incredibly satisfying to jump around a giant ancient machine, understand and manipulate it, then climb up it and out to continue. Basically, it just all hits the right notes to make something hella fun for me! And so, I really like Tomb Raider.
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And with this, I can say exactly why Uncharted is nothing like Tomb Raider. Uncharted isn't about puzzles and platforming at all, it's about a series of highly varied (or not varied at all for Uncharted 1, but you know) but mechanically shallow challenges, with a fun adventurey story and characters to tie it all together. Uncharted doesn't really -do- platforming, per se, sure climbing and jumping about is one of its many many mechanics, but it is extremely shallow and it does everything for you. Which is fine - uncharted isn't about platforming, it's only there as a means of getting the player from Shooting Point A to Shooting Point B in a way that isn't just walking. But in Tomb Raider, platforming is what you do for 95% of the game, like, it IS the game, so it is highly complex, expressive, and challenging, even in the latest ones. It doesn't help the player much at all, as that would rob the the core mechanic of its depth. As for combat, the primary mechanic of Uncharted games, is kind of just -there- in Tomb Raider. Pre-2013 has very basic lock on and dodge system, which isn't bad, it's just simple, which is fine since there is little of it. Plus it has its own backflipping charm! Tomb Raider 2013 came the closest to having combat be a core part of the game, thanks to the devs wanting to get good use out of its brand new and quite excellent combat system, but even then shooting wasn't what the player does most of the game, and Rise and especially Shadow have increasingly deemphasized that very good combat to bring the focus back toward platforming and puzzles.
The pacing and structure is very different too. Tomb Raider drops you into a space and you have platform about and solve the space so you can platform out, before moving onto the next space and repeating until it ends. It's fairly homogenous, gameplay wise, and gets its novelty from the ever changing environments and puzzles, and increasing platforming complexity that it presents to the player (though it does mix things up with some the random vehicle section or QTE now and again, plus it's sprinkling of combat). But Uncharted (3 specifically) is more like Half Life 2: it has a selection of VERY different mechanics that it flows between constantly, getting its novelty from never letting the player really settle on any one thing at once. These are sadly very shallow mechanically, which I did not enjoy at all, but you know my feelings on that already! Anyway, here's a good way to put it: Tomb Raider is a series of dungeons, and Uncharted is an action movie. Very very different.
Basically the only thing Tomb Raider and Uncharted have in common... is tombs. That's it. They really are nothing alike!
Nothing personally, but to me, the rebooted Tomb Raider series kinda suck. But so does the overwhelming majority of games out there.
I never played the older Tomb Raider games. Since the series was getting some hype since the reboot I tried those out when I got the chance during the sales. And well uhh... They played exactly like I expected. Default and standard. It left ultimately left me with a feeling of indifference and apathy, nothing that I did before.
I don't know exactly where Tomb Raider failed me. Perhaps it was the endless fetch quests, the extreme linearity of both the gameplay and story, the nonsensical story that wants to desperately make you care about the events, the artificial gating and grinding of skill points, upgrades and weapons. I dunno, it could be anything.
You already know it's a though sell when Lara Croft is supposed not being able to kill a deer out of pure drama, followed by another drama when killing her first person, just to carry on like nothing happened a few minutes later and killing baddies by the dozens, leaving her unfazed suddenly. At least in the sequels they already established the fact she's a veteran in killing baddies...
The best part of the games were obviously the optional tombs, but even so... I don't really know. There's something that doesn't quite connect with the gameplay and me. It almost feels like I am trying to watch an interactive movie rather than playing an actual game. And I for one am absolutely not a fan of interactive movies... It's an extremely bad habit in the game industry... At least to me. Yeah yeah, I get that the younger generations love the explosions and constant action, detailed and long animations, great graphics and a nonsensical approach to the story just to keep the former mentioned explosions and action rolling. Don't forget about the absolute full coverage of voice acting as well. It's almost like games that demand more than a few minutes of your think to work through a puzzle or fight are considered illegal. What's wrong with dying every so often and re-attempting it again? Yeah yeah, I can increase the difficulty, but the problem is that it's only artificial, turning baddies into sponges and yourself into a porcelain vase. And if you get hit... You hang back a while... Wait it out... And you're back in action. And we all know how fun waiting is... Or walking around to find those stupid artifacts just to grind the XP so you can unlock skills and get your 100% progression. I literately spent more than half the time of the games backtracking for collectibles... Wow... Real fun... And it kept getting worse with each sequel.
No game is perfect of course, and it's unavoidable that games end up wasting your time, a lot. But the problem is that there's hardly any interesting content to look forward too.
Now I could complain a lot more about the Tomb Raider reboots... But honestly, the game is pretty OK... Huh wait? I just burned it down, so why is it OK then? That's mostly because it's still a better game on average you usually find out there from the last decade. As I said, the overwhelming majority of games either suck or end up being pretty OK.
I don't know what's the real issue at hand here. I used to love a lot of games back in my earlier days... But that kinda changed. Perhaps I ended up prioritizing my time more? Perhaps I ended up playing games that made me realize that games could so much be more than just OK? I kinda yearn for the games that can completely absorb and enthrall me. More so than before. Ohh, don't worry, there are still enough games that manages to captivate me and more are still being made. But it's not from the AAA-devs nor the indie-devs. Indie devs don't really captivate me either. While the vision is admirable, their scope and scale is just too limited most of the time.
Back then, you had games like Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie or Trails in the Sky which would really captivate me. Mostly due their simplicity. There's no need to expressively waste my time with long animations just to open and close a cupboard and grab a tin can. There's no need to kill of that one person in the first five minutes you won't care about since you only met them for five minutes just to get a revenge story rolling so you can watch a ton of explosions. In the end, it's the gameplay that matters.
Don't get me wrong through, I absolutely love stories in games. Some of my most beloved games have the most complex and amazing stories. But those stories have to be in service of the gameplay, and not the other way around. Do I really want to babysit a child that walks constantly with you for the occasional commentary and story developments? How does it benefit me from engaging in the gameplay? If nothing else then it mostly serves to limit in how I can approach the game. It feels like a forced element in the game to forcefully cause an emotional reaction... And that's what ultimately leaves me with disinterest. I would like for my reactions to be genuine. A boss should not be hard because it's dictated by the story, but because both the gameplay and the story make the boss extremely though.
Some of the best final bosses in games are the very best since they leave you dealing with them for quite a while with several re-attempts yet introducing new mechanics both in your and the bosses favor while the story has been building up the encounter through multiple entries of a game series. At that point it should go completely nuts and let the game throw anything it has left for you to show. Nothing is more boring than a final encounter that's over in a few minutes within your first try. How can you expect to resonate with the struggles of the cast if you yourself don't struggle winning the boss encounter? If anything, Tomb Raider hadn't really much going for that, and like so many other games it leaves you with a finale that doesn't really bother. Just some more quick scenes to watch and the credits... Hurray... Now I can de-install it immediately and go on with the next one. At some point during the end of Rise of the Tomb Raider I just decided to ignore all optional collectibles. Damn 100%. I just want it to get over with. That's definitely not a good indication of a great game.
Well... For better or for worse Tomb Raider sticks to what's true and tested before. The game could be a lot, and I mean a lot worse, that much is true, but it also feels like the whole series got rebooted to fit in with these so-called "modern" gameplay design elements. Were they so approved and successful then? Likely they did... Series such as Call of Duty sell manage to sell millions each year, without innovation. It's clear more often that not that the goal is to earn profits. Games just happen to have good design in order to promote selling them. What happened with actually creating a really good game, and then trying to sell it? Each time I see the word lootbox or microtransactions pop up I am filled with a sense of dread...
Luckily they can't take away our beloved retro games. We should be considered lucky that we have emulation available to us! I rather replay any old game again I played a dozen times and to struggle to yet another game filled to the brim with micro-transactions purposely designed to slow you down and not have as much fun otherwise unless you pay up.
Don't take it the other direction either, like with Dragon Quest XI... That game ends up wasting your time with so many textboxes and forced cliches and it leaves with filled with apathy as well. Just because it's old-school doesn't mean it should not get along with the times. If Dragon Quest XI didn't have that stellar presentation then I would have almost thought the game was all the way from the NES era.
Well... That's my input on the matter. That's the end of my monthly rant for now.
Everyone who still manages to like the majority of modern games should consider themselves lucky. I wish I could. I shouldn't complain to much. There are some pretty decent games this year. 2020 shouldn't really be as bad as 2018 or 2019... Except for that looming virus over us... Yeah... 2020 is kinda bad. 2021 shouldn't be that bad either?
Yep, thanks to the quarantine, other people have the time to write out multi-paragraph posts on their opinions of games, too. Your power is diminished.
I only played the 2013 Tomb Raider game, but can't reliably comment on it as I did so via some janky game streaming software that worked surprisingly well, but also didn't work well enough to not completely change the game. It was impossible with a keyboard and mouse, but the aim assist on a controller kind of approximately compensated for some of the latency, for example. I couldn't actually finish the game like that, and ended up using non-janky streaming software for the last level.
Onto something actually relevant - I wouldn't necessarily count a lack of desire to collect all the collectables as a reason why I thought less of a game. For a smaller game or one where it was the primary focus, it would matter, but plenty have collectables that just exist so you don't get bored if you wander off into the open world that they bothered making pretty or so you have something less stressful to do if you want to take a break from the main story for a bit or mess around with the game mechanics. For something like the Tomb Raider reboots, I'd expect anyone even considering collecting everything to say it was one of their favourite games.
I have never really played a Tomb Raider game. I dabbled with the first game on the PS1 (one of the games that we got when we first bought the console in the 90s) but the game was too scary for me as a small kid. The wolves jumping out of nowhere (and that one bear) freaked me out on the first level, and I hated underwater segments for that subconscious fear of drowning. So I noped out and never touched it again.
On the subject of "I used to love games... But these days..." I can't say that I don't enjoy modern games. I think fondly of many recent titles as much as I do more classic or "retro" experiences. Xenoblade Chronicles 1, MGS5, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Breath of the Wild are some of the best games I've played this past decade. I think I'm actually pretty good at discerning whether or not something is up my alley, so I don't tend to play games that won't sit well with me. You could say I'm picky, but I've been able to play quite a few mediocre to average games and still have a fun time.
@Admentus - It's safe to say your taste in videogames is perhaps more "classical", right? By that, I mean your preference is in older games you've played as opposed to modern games (not necessarily "retro" because no one agrees on what that even means). Do you ever try to discover games from that era that you haven't played before? Just curious about your thoughts on the matter.
If I ever get disillusioned with current games, there's like thousands of older games I'd have at my disposal that I've never played. Even just dipping into one might make me feel alive again. I bring this up because there was a community poll on Reddit for JRPGs, and a lot of the top answers were older stuff I'd never played (Chrono Trigger was #1 so you'll be pleased to hear that). Kind of blew my mind when I realized how much I'd hadn't even touched yet.
(04-11-2020, 12:12 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]@Admentus - It's safe to say your taste in videogames is perhaps more "classical", right? By that, I mean your preference is in older games you've played as opposed to modern games (not necessarily "retro" because no one agrees on what that even means). Do you ever try to discover games from that era that you haven't played before? Just curious about your thoughts on the matter.
If I ever get disillusioned with current games, there's like thousands of older games I'd have at my disposal that I've never played. Even just dipping into one might make me feel alive again. I bring this up because there was a community poll on Reddit for JRPGs, and a lot of the top answers were older stuff I'd never played (Chrono Trigger was #1 so you'll be pleased to hear that). Kind of blew my mind when I realized how much I'd hadn't even touched yet.
Yeah, I would say classical. But does not necessary need to be retro or old. In fact I would encourage games to modernize themselves while staying true to the philosophy of making great game design above anything else.
Honestly said, I am just as eager to move with the time as everyone else. It's a bit of a problem for me. The retro games certainly prioritize the gameplay, but as of 2020 it's extremely outdated. Chrono Trigger is and remains one of the best JRPG's there is... But it has been released in 1995. I like to think by now that the game industry can easily surpass the quality of Chrono Trigger... Yet it has proved to be fairly difficult.
Chrono Trigger used to be my favorite JRPG of all time for quite some time. And I didn't play it back in 1995 but much later, and I was still blown away by it. I have a played of different game series over the years including Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Super Mario, Zelda, Age of Empires, Atelier, Tales of, Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi, Fire Emblem, Smash, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Batman: Arkham series, Final Fantasy, Borderlands, Wolfenstein and I have just started naming them. Most of them turned out to be pretty OK or just meh. I don't want to even start about Final Fantasy... Atelier was nice and all for a while, it sadly it seems to have a bit of a hard time keeping up. It certainly doesn't help the porting quality to PC leaves much to desire. And Tales of? Well Tales of is mostly just food for comfort...
At this point I mostly settled my hopes on Nintendo, since they proved most of the time to make the games I could love, after all these years Mario and Zelda still stand strong. In fact Super Mario Odyssey has to be one of the most brilliant games of recent years I had the pleasure of experiencing. So yeah, I would really like game series to keep innovating themselves. Just as much as the next guy beside me I would prefer great 3D graphics as well. Somehow as graphics tended to be more immersive and realistic, developers lost sight of what makes their games really tick.
Sure I could go back and seek out more of the older games. Chances are indeed they could be better than what I can find today. But as I mentioned, I do really want to immersive myself in a game, and that's where technical advances really strife. I don't have a 4K monitor for nothing. It's one of the reasons why I prefer emulation such as Dolphin above using my actual Wii. At least I can try and modernize my games with hires textures and some modding. Going around in Hyrule managed to amaze me again like it did back in 1998.
Indie games are great and all, and their heart definitely lies in the right place, but their scope and budget for what they can manage is often just too little to make me care about them. There are a few incredibly excellent indie games in recent years no one should miss, namely CrossCode, A Hat in Time (sans DLC) and the Ori and the Blind Forest series.
Up until 2015 if was confident Chrono Trigger had to be the best JRPG there was, since no other game managed to make me relive that experience... That was until 2015 when a little JRPG was ported to PC... Apparently there was some interesting in porting the series and other franchises from a small developer to PC. A few games were already ported, and the prequel to that little JPRG had been ported to PC a bit earlier. So I mostly wanted to check out the commotion on why the JRPG received such massive praise from a fairly small fanbase. The graphics were sort of 2D... Of course... So I was hesitant at first to try it out. Turns out... I quickly became obsessed by the series, especially when in 2017 the first fully 3D entry of the series reached PC. Turns out that little JPRG wasn't so little and was part of a larger interconnected series. Ohh yeah... The name was The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC from developer Nihon Falcom. Obviously I can start with the sequel right away... So I decided I went and try out the first entry instead. And man, I blown away by it. I never had been so wrong about a game before in my life.
For me, the perfect series is Trails, which is an JRPG's series which is still ongoing. In fact, the latest entry Trails of Cold Steel III didn't release that long ago. The series has the perfect blend of story and gameplay. Yet for a series stay sticks to traditional conventions it was never afraid to break away from them. Already from the very first Trails entry it was clear those annoying game design elements such as random encounters shouldn't exist. Ever since Final Fantasy I was afraid to equip my party members with expensive and unique gear. You never knew when a party member might leave the party immediately after a boss and take along all the gear you gave them. In core design, Trails never was unforgiving in letting you advance unprepared. Sure, the bosses and encounter can be though, but the game never works against you. It is extremely linear like most JPRG's, yet again it provides you with enough freedom to walk around in cities to talk with NPC's. Unlike most games, talking to NPC's is actually quite interesting... I think about 70% of my time spent my average Trails game is uncovering every nook and cranny for dialogue, and it never gets boring. It truly makes the world feel alive. And that's actually the key component of what makes the series so incredibly outstanding.
Through to be honest, for a long time before Trails I was torn between Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Chrono Trigger for the contender of best JRPG. Uhh? Maybe Paper Mario doesn't classify as a JRPG... But ok... It's the simplicity that made Paper Mario so great. Simplicity made a lot of games extremely great, such as Banjo-Kazooie. Just running around through the worlds, collecting notes, and humming along, and before you know you have been playing for hours. You simply start to forget time around you.
Nothing is more annoying than getting bored by a game. It absolutely pulls you right out of your flow and it makes you wonder why you ever bother to continue playing it.
Well... That mostly sums up my thoughts. It took a bit longer than I expected.
