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HOW I WOULD FIX TOMB RAIDER

26/9/2018

26 Comments

 
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Right. I've written about Tomb Raider quite a bit over the past week, and not all of it has been pretty. Thing is... I care. That's the reason why I've written so much on the topic. I genuinely care about the franchise, I care about the character of Lara Croft, and I feel she's been badly served by the reboot.

We've had our three games in the new origin trilogy. It's done. It's over. Time to move on. It isn't too late to fix Lara Croft, and return the character to where she belongs; as the foremost icon of the modern games industry.

Because, you see, Lara is important. Not only is the character a British creation, but she's female, and there aren't enough female games protagonists with the sort of profile Lara once had. 

It's time to put my money where my mouth is. This is how I would fix Tomb Raider. 
HAVE LARA ENJOY WHAT SHE DOES A BIT MORE
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The original Lara was an adventurer, somebody who went searching for relics because she loved the thrill of it. That was always her primary drive, and I really miss it. She lived for the danger, and because she enjoyed her adventures... we did too. She never complained about them, never moaned, never whined that it was all some great responsibility that weighed on her. She just got off on doing it.

Yeah, there's probably some deep backstory reason for why she's addicted to the adrenaline rush, but we don't need to get all heavy about that. It is what it is.

Just show her being a reckless adventurer, with an effortless cool. Modern Lara is not cool. She's a boring psychopath (the worst sort of psychopath) who in one breath is droning on about respecting the past, and in the next she's kicking over vases and stealing whatever is inside.

Once you've established Lara as a selfish thrill-seeker, THEN you can throw an obstacle in her path which threatens that.

​Such as...
GIVE HER SOMEONE TO CARE ABOUT
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It doesn't have to be a romantic relationship - so let's not get all Bechdel about this. Lara could equally have a sibling, a nephew or niece, a kid she has to keep alive... just somebody who makes her adventuring mean something more personal.

​You've probably seen Aliens; that was the role served by the character of Newt (given greater emotional context in the Special Edition where we learn that Ripley was mourning her lost daughter). Aliens did it sparingly however, so it never got annoying. There were no great monologues where Ripley spilled her guts about all her inner turmoil; saving Newt became a much more instinctive thing, but the audience understood it. It was primal and true.

​Give Lara an arc where she has to learn to be less selfish, to live for somebody else. Show her struggling with who she thinks she is, and who she really is. Give her somebody who allows her gradually to become more vulnerable and warm. 

Yes, we've got Jonah, and he's probably the best thing about the new Tomb Raiders, but he's still kept at arm's length, not really doing much other than fulfilling the roles of Johnny Exposition and somebody for Lara to monologue at. 

If this person were captured, or under threat somehow, it makes the stakes all the more personal for Lara. It humanises her to show that she cares - especially if she struggles to show that she cares. Then, in turn, we'll care more about her. She could spend much of the game trying to push them away, but through it we see that - despite herself - she's a good person.

Want a brilliant example of how this can be done in a way that's warm, funny, and real? Watch Taika Waititi's Hunt For The Wilderpeople. 
LIGHTEN HER UP A BIT
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You know who I want to both write and star as Lara? Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She's a great writer who knows how to do action, suspense, character and humour (check out her series Killing Eve on BBC iPlayer). Plus as a performer she's both posh and funny.

She could give Lara a slightly scatty element, somebody who gets by on luck as much as skill - Indiana Jones style. Or think about Die Hard; John McClane was a regular cop who found himself out of his depth, but kept going - however tough things got - because it was the right thing to do. What carried him through was his humanity, and a sense of moral obligation.

​So many great action movies keep their tongues firmly in their cheeks, and it doesn't have to water-down the sense of epic ness. 

Seeing Lara nearly failing, and brushing off the failures with a gag, makes her more relatable, rather than the semi-invincible, tedious Terminator (the worst sort of Terminator) she's become. 
MAKE IT MORE OF A ROMP
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The stakes don't always have to be world-threatening. Tomb Raider should be fun, knockabout, less of the constant, wearying, sense of portent. I'm not suggesting it becomes a comedy, but currently Tomb Raider has evolved into something that's so up-itself that it's horribly unlikeable. The series needs to stop taking itself so seriously, and stop trying to apologise for Lara's actions all the time.

Even when Indiana Jones was trying to stop Nazis the action never ceased being a roller-coaster. The action set-pieces had real wit and invention to them.

By making Lara more human and relatable in these moments, we get to see her in over her head, saving the world because she's found herself in a situation that she's mostly ill-equipped to deal with. 
MORE TOMB-RAIDING, LESS KILLING
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These games are called Tomb Raider for a reason; raiding the tombs is the best bit of them. The combat is fine, the stealth is okay, but one of the criticisms levelled at the reboot series is the huge bodycount (and - particularly - the grisly way in which Lara tends to dispatch her enemies). The series really comes alive when it's Lara alone and isolated in some huge, ancient, space - with not even an Elon Musk miniature submarine as back-up.

Death is never fun, but we don't need our attention drawn to the grim reality of what Lara does. If you make the deaths so wince-inducingly realistic, it cheapens them when, five minutes later, Lara is cheerily shooting the breeze with the locals. 

Plus - frankly - a lot of Lara's enemies in the original games were mutants, or monsters, or dinosaurs (and, yes, animals admittedly), rather than soft-bodied goons. 

Some of the grief I got for my original article mocked me for comparing Tomb Raider to Uncharted. "Oh, so a massive bodycount is fine so long as you quip about it" scoffed several big idiots.

Well, sort of... yeah. It's a video game, and the reason why the killing in - say - the old black and white arcade game Boot Hill was more palatable was because you didn't have a photorealistic close-up of your opponent's bulging eyes and death rattle. It's fine. It's a video game. We don't need to be reminded that death isn't fun, because then it becomes a form of murder porn.

Again, stop feeling bad about Lara's actions... We never stopped to question the number of bad people killed by the good guys in, say, Star Wars. But if you are going to get all conflicted about it, then I dunno... put a bit less of it in. 
NO MORE JUNGLES OR MOUNTAINS
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To be fair, this is an issue I have with pretty much any open-world game series of the past five years. I'm done with jungles, forests and mountains. Totally over them. Please can we have some more imaginative locations? Or, if you are going to do jungles and forests and mountains, at least make them look a bit different?

The original Tomb Raider series really mixed up its locations - Venice, Atlantis, London, an oil rig, Area 51, The Great Wall of China, Egypt, New Mexico - so that Lara really felt like a globe-hopping adventurer. This kept it feeling fresh. The current games dump her somewhere, and more or less leave her there for the duration. And the locations - lush and beautiful as they are - just look like locations in any number of modern games. 

Also, given the accusations of white colonialism that have arisen since the release of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it might be worth seeing her defiling something other than ancient civilisations.  
GIVE HER A DECENT ANTAGONIST
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Any hero is defined by their enemies, and Lara really needs an iconic antagonist, somebody who's the flipside of who she is. Make them charming, funny, likeable... and utterly evil and selfish. Somebody we love to hate. Give them a motivation that - from their point of view - is selfless (think of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War). Then you see Lara having to wrestle with a moral dilemma.

By comparison, Lara's actions will seem all the more heroic when she does the right thing. 
GIVE HER AN ICONIC LOOK
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I know, I know. The tight, breast-enhancing, top and hot pants isn't going to cut the mustard these days. Like it or not, there was something undeniably misogynistic about the design of Lara's original look. However, it was - and there's no getting away from it - iconic.

The new games strive so hard to be grounded that we've lost one of the reasons why Lara became huge in the first place. All those earth tones, the dull cargo pants... changing outfits from one scene to the next... Nothing about how Lara dresses or looks is particularly unique or specific to her.

It doesn't have to mean a return to that original outfit. You can do a lot with colours. Even giving her a teal-y/green-y vest would be a step in the right direction. And bring back the double holsters. And for that matter, why does everything have to be photo-realistic? A huge element of Lara's iconic status was that she was - admittedly due to the limitations of the technology - slightly more cartoony. It could be worth exploring.

Or at the very least... let's not have her face look different from one cut-scene to the next, like she does in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. 

You can tell a great, iconic, character by their silhouette alone. Darth Vader. Indiana Jones. Bart Simpson. Mario. Sonic. A backlit modern Lara is wholly unremarkable. 
CUT BACK ON THE CUT-SCENES
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All of the above is predicated on Tomb Raider on the developers being committed to Tomb Raider having a big story element. With that in mind, it's how I'd make the storytelling and character more engaging...

Thing is, how much story do we actually need? In Shadow of the Tomb Raider there are way, way, waaaaay too many static cut-scenes (though it might be that it feels that way because they're so boring). It's a game with pretensions of being a film, without understanding the nature and structure of cinematic storytelling. 

It'd help hugely to get some of that story happening during the gameplay instead of having to stop repeatedly to dump a bunch of information onto our laps. In movies, story and character doesn't stop when the action starts. A great action sequence should be filled with emotion and stakes; look at the climactic battle in The Empire Strikes Back.

Why does that work when  the fight with Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace is just hollow acrobatics? Because Luke is fighting to save his friends, avenge the death of his mentor and father figure, and prove himself as a warrior (and that's before you get the reveal that Darth Vader is his father). Luke is horribly outmatched, whereas in The Phantom Menace the bad guy is ganged up on by two highly skilled Jedi. He gets lucky and kills one of them, but then he's cut in half and kicked down a drain.

Cut-scenes have become one of biggest things wrong with modern gaming, a way for game producers to live out their film-making fantasies, rather than something most players want. There has to be a better balance between interactivity and passive storytelling.
26 Comments
Jim Leighton (Future World Darts Champion) x
26/9/2018 10:50:15 am

What about fannying around in the mansion and shooting the butler for a laugh? That would help fix it too.

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Steve Perrin link
26/9/2018 11:02:26 am

So basically what you are saying is, you what modern Tomb Raider to be like old Tomb Raider...

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Spiney O’Sullivan
26/9/2018 03:00:30 pm

More specifically, just make it like the Legend trilogy again.

That series was great, finally fulfilling the promise of Lara as the unstoppable action hero that late-90s pop culture had made her out to be; finally really living up to her own “Legend”. Maybe the more action-packed tone wasn’t fully true to the tense and isolating original game (which I do like, but is very hard to play nowadays, at least on console), but even by the second title -and especially the third- Core clearly wanted to make her more like her pop culture portrayal but were hampered by the clunky controls necessitated by the technology back then.

That said, I understand why writers action want to “reclaim” or “justify” Lara as she is hugely important to gamers and female gamers specifically as gaming’s most identifiable and important woman (let’s not even pretend that eternal “top ten gaming women” runner-up Samus Aran even comes close...). But there is a question of whether the Lara that was is even capable of being made into someone totally acceptable for today’s more socially conscious gamers since every single facet of her character from her macho violence to her sexualisation, cultural insensitivity and social class is arguably problematic in a way that requires rewriting her to the point of being a different character or a complete contradiction (as we’ve seen) to fit the new ideal mould. But if she’s still to be even remotely true to the Lara that became a star and arguably changed gaming, Lara Croft simply can’t be Max Caulfield, no matter how much tragic moping and self-loathing they make her do. And that’s before we even consider the gameplay changes that need to be made to accommodate that character (though toning down the number of humans killed definitely needs to happen anyway).

In short: I don’t think Lara can be “fixed” in a way that will make everyone happy. It’s clear that the Biffo and Pratchett demographics (not to draw divisions, but I think we can take a reasonable guess at the demographics of most posters here) see totally different means of “redeeming” her, and there will probably always be a tension there unless we finally figure out a whole bunch of complex stuff to do with gender roles that probably can’t be sorted out on gaming forums or twitter. Still, as long as the next incarnation of Lara doesn’t spent half her adventure cycling around Hackney with tedious hipsters, I can probably live with her. Jeez, that movie. Suddenly Cradle of Life didn’t look so bad...

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Geebs
27/9/2018 03:12:11 am

To be fair, the tedious hipsters were the best part of that movie.

combat_honey
26/9/2018 11:06:35 am

I strongly agree with most of this.

I remember the moment I started disliking / borderline hating the reboot trilogy. I'd really enjoyed the first game and thought it was exactly what they'd needed to do with the franchise at the time, but then a small part of the way into Rise one of the villains gouges out the eyes of one of his henchmen in a cut scene, and when play resumes you're standing in front of this guy writing in pain and crying about his ruined eyes. And it just struck me as so incredibly gratuitous and unnecessary, and so far removed from anything the franchise used to represent. It made me reflect on how, while I'd enjoyed Tomb Raider (2013), doubling down on everything that game had introduced to the series - especially in terms of the tone - was a huge mistake.

Oh, and the whole protracted 'BECOME THE TOMB RAIDER' thing was ridiculous and grating. Lara's 'origin story' was a decent premise for the first game, but then with Rise they decided that 'oh, she isn't the Tomb Raider YET! That happens in *this* game!' because they couldn't think of anything else to do with the character. And then they did it again with the new game! Lara barely needed one game for her 'origin story', let alone a trilogy.

(Oh, and what's with this 'become the Tomb Raider' thing anyway? She was never known as 'The Tomb Raider', was she? That was just the name of the games. Why are they pretending like it's her superhero name or something?)

Of all the things you mentioned, I think 'less killing' is the thing I most want to see in any future Tomb Raider games. And just fewer human characters in general. The thing that most appealed to me about the early games was the feeling of exploring these huge, lonely, ancient environments that had been untouched for centuries. It allowed for a genuine feeling of exploration, and a subtly creepy feeling that's far more memorable and striking than the more obviously horror-driven scares of, say, Resident Evil. The reboot trilogy might have phenomenally beautiful and striking environments, but they're utterly robbed of atmosphere because wherever you look there are temporary barracks and mercenaries wandering around chatting on radios.

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Paddy Hill
26/9/2018 11:31:21 am

I was one of those that mentioned Uncharted being better cos of the quips - but I was being serious. Uncharted's humour really did/does help with the blood spilling - gives it that Saturday cinema adventure feeling.

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Natla
26/9/2018 03:18:39 pm

^^This a thousand times over.

The original depiction of Lara in the CGI cutscenes was very much "comic book" and would with some humorous writing would be perfect.

I always viewed her as being closer to James Bond than Indiana Jones.

Actually I'd like to see her being similar to Arnie's character in True Lies.

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Jeremy Clarksons ego
26/9/2018 11:46:18 am

Your getting too involved in it it too, i haven't played any of the reboots they look dumb infact I've been shying away from anything not on a Nintendo system for rather a long time now.

Because its all dull, its all brown its all wannabe gritty movie makers and your falling into the same trap there.

Lara doesn't need anything to care about past getting the artifacts into the "right" hands she is a archeologist or whatever its called thats the passion thats the focus, she loved her job and history so much she's willing to risk her life for it, she wants to be in tne history books herself with the great discoveries and enjoy the adventure because she can afford it lets face it shes filthy stinking rich she can do whatever she wants and even get away with locking her butl in a freezer.

Thats all you need, no siblings in peril or any of that guff, she's Indiana Jones and he really didn't care about anything but keeping artifacts out of naxi hands, everyone else was just to push a narrative that had to happen because it was a film.

Lara is in games we don't really need a narrative we don't need ten min cut scenes and all that guff, we needto be pointed in the right direction and have the leash taken off to run free within the context.

Too heavy a story blunts the fun, too much hanging on the lead makes it a slog.

The best games are the simplest this is right stop bad happening do this wonderful thing the end pat yourself on the back well done.

There is a lack of praise in modern society and its spread to all media, we need to escape to a better world and feel proud of ourselves, we pass that wonderment and contented feeling back into reality, but as media tries to be more miserable then reality which is miserable enough we get into a downward spiral of creating self fullfilling prophecies of darkness, the world around us and the media we indulge in gets darker and darker.

A bit of a heavy topic for a Wednesday morning I know but true and we need to fight against it by buying more animal crossing and less psychos murdering people in muddy forrests

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MENTALIST
26/9/2018 12:00:50 pm

I always though comedy was where the Angelina Jolie films fell down a bit. Despite hiring Chris Barrie and Julian Rhind-Tutt, and despite aping both Indiana Jones, and James Bond who have a reputation for a touch of fair physical comedy and banter in their adventures, everything was taken oddly seriously, which meant the whole enterprise felt a bit cold and flat.

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Col. Asdasd
26/9/2018 12:14:55 pm

Liked this article Mr. B! Didn't agree with absolutely all of it but I thought you did a fine job presenting and backing up your arguments. Strongly agreed with the conclusion about developers seemingly wanting to make movies first and games second these days.

It's not that we don't want stories in games; they can be the most powerful means of providing meaning and motivation to the player experience. But for goodness sake stop pretending the medium is a passive one and embrace the opportunities unique to its canvas!

Here's a challenge for you: how would you fix Duke Nukem? 'I wouldn't' is a cop-out.

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MENTALIST
26/9/2018 01:16:45 pm

For some time I've though of Johnny Bravo as something like a "fixed" Duke Nukem. Essentially, nobody buys his absurd macho schtick, and he ends up coming a cropper continually, but never learns.

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Mr Biffo
26/9/2018 01:18:48 pm

Oooh, good one, Asdasd. I'm going to do that as an article!

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Nocturne
26/9/2018 01:52:13 pm

Ash in Ash vs Evil Dead as a template. Still an effective fighter and feared/hated by his old enemies but over the hill and a bit of a joke to almost everyone else though almost oblivious to it.

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Spiney O’Sullivan
26/9/2018 01:59:23 pm

The makers of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard sort of tried to make a more ironic take on Duke, but failed to implement it in a game that wasn’t absolutely horrible to play at almost all times.

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Nocturne
26/9/2018 12:53:53 pm

It's been a week of lots of Tomb Raider including reading the Wikipeia article on the plot of Rise of the Tomb Raider to remind me what it was and I *still* can barely remember any of Rise of the Tomb Raider..... I think there was a snowy mountain bit with zip lines that became a bit of a hub.... or was that the first.
Either way, I found it completely forgettable. I couldn't give you basic descriptions of any of the supporting characters, let alone their names. I can remember all the grisly deaths though.
That's all I can remember of an entire game. It likes to show you Lara dying horribly..... I've skipped Shadow, Spider-Man was out.
Speaking of, Spider-Man has a couple of very brief moments of mostly obscured disturbing violence and I found those far more impactful because it wasn't a constant barrage throughout. I'm done with Tomb Raider. It'd need a lot of time and another overhaul before I look at the series again.

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Zack Snyder
26/9/2018 12:57:35 pm

Get me to make the next one, I'll stick it in the DC EXTENDED UNIVERSE. That'll solve everyone's problems! Especially mine!

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Dantendo64
26/9/2018 01:03:41 pm

You know what would be ace?

A cross between Tomb Raider and Ridge Racer.

We could call it "Womb Chaser".

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colincidence link
26/9/2018 02:05:23 pm

Did you play the "Lara Croft and" games? It's far more my genre, a kind of isometric Gauntlet, knowingly, but not indulgently, retro.
The tone of those games felt more like what Lara should be, and maybe the once-removed verisimilitude of the genre allowed it. Hokey, silly stuff.

Maybe the third-person "camera behind 'em" adventure genre's 2-decade approach to realistic realism is the downfall of its more joyous spirit. It's kinda inevitable that, the more a game about killing animals and strangers and destroying old cultures becomes realistic, the morals come to light. It's like how the physical portrayal of Lara has become less objectifying as graphics improved and Sex Barbie became less justifiable-via-camp, but it's the baaaaaaaaad flipside to that progress. Maybe GTA/Saints' Row could keep their funner spirit due to their more exploitable urban setting. A campy version of world-exploring could fast approach racism.

The fresh-but-kitschy genre/setting of Lara Croft And made for a good diversion from this. something something

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Jeremy Clarksons left foot
26/9/2018 02:49:49 pm

I lost interest in Glasgow when it went to Ps2, without the cartoon top down look it just wasn't any fun anymore.

It's a nasty game getting more nasty as time goes on it seems, having a nut case on a killing spare thinking he's seeing aliens, just isn't funny I'm, Congo lines of Elvis impersonators is funny

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Spiney O’Sullivan
26/9/2018 08:10:12 pm

This might be the best autocorrect typo I’ve ever seen. Though ironically, Glasgow has become a more pleasant place to live over the same time period as GTA has become... well, more like Glasgow was.

colincidence link
28/9/2018 01:02:46 pm

Agreed! But have you played Chinatown Wars? That was a nice sequel to the topdown ones. It played into the Gritty Patriarchy Thing a bit but was still a bit cute. And I just find 2D gaming setups so much more navigable. If God wanted 3D games he would've given us an analogue stick that somehow... moves... in 3 dimensions.... I'll get back to you on that.

Natla
26/9/2018 03:13:43 pm

I've always been in the Tomb Raider camp versus Uncharted.

It's ironic then that I prefer Chloe and Nadine (less so Nadine) to the modern version of Lara.

I also think Evie Frye would have made a far better template personality for the new Lara than the one they gave us.

Chloe and Evie are great but Evie in particular is a very under-rated character who I loved to bits.

I'm not sure how such a crappy characterisation came about from 2013 onwards but suspect that it occurred because the developers were trying to do the exact opposite of the original character for political purposes. They should have just made a few adjustments to the appearance but retained and fleshed out the original personality which from the limited amount we saw, would have been great.

I am not sure how you came to conclude that the original Lara was somehow "misogynistic". (Suggest you check the dictionary definition there).

A lot of people talk s**t about the original Lara but their memory betrays them.



I think you must separate what happened in the original games versus what happened in some of the marketing and magazines around the time. The first game was absolutely fine. Some of the latter games got a bit more ridiculous but I think that was a feedback loop from the marketing and desperate attempts to boost flagging sales. I was in my 20's at the time and I found that marketing quite insulting as I wasn't a breast-obsessed teenager so it was dated and that's the main reason for not coming back as it simply won't shift copies to the late 20's to early 40 year old males who make up the majority of the purchasers.


I only really have an issue with the trademark shorts that were unrealistic attire (and trousers appeared in later games). The original breasts in the PS1 game weren't ridiculous and much a product of the limited hardware. When rounded off by modern hardware they would be no bigger than a number of my friends breasts!


The physical appearance of the new Lara is fine. She has the physique of the top female climbers you would see at your local climbing academy (didn't stop the loons in some games publications accusing it of fat shaming though) and appeals to men whilst not alienating potential female purchasers.

The problem is entirely one of personality. Find the person who wrote Evie and recruit them as well as reverting to a chapter system as per Uncharted rather than a single open world environment that gets samey. Yeah costs a bit more in terms of designing assets for different environments but should be offset by greater sales. There, I fixed it. Now give me my consultancy fee.

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Spiney O’Sullivan
26/9/2018 04:01:21 pm

Evie Frye was quite unfortunate. Definitely my favourite Frye sibling, but utterly underserved by the utterly forgettable game that she was stuck in (though I haven’t played the Ripper DLC, which I hear is great).

Same for Aveline de Grandpre in the miserable AC: Liberation, which was funnily enough written (though -disclaimer- obviously not created as a sole effort) by Jill Murray, in which the horrible costume-based gameplay (again, the fault of many people) completely ruined the experience of playing as one of the franchise’s more potentially interesting characters by making it an oppressive slog that forced you to choose between constant harassment or being unable to do parkour. I have actually started and given up on that miserable game two separate times. It was definitely a brave experiment with toying with race and class in a meaningful way to impact gameplay, but it was not a fun experience at all. At least it sounded like Freedom Cry managed to deal with the slave trade theme while still letting you have some actual fun.

Thus far Origins’ Aya is AC’s best playable female lead, and we only got to spend 10 minutes as her...

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Natla
26/9/2018 04:32:20 pm

Yeah Ripper DLC was decent and nice to play an older depiction for once - very rare - not that she was "old" in all honestly. If you like Evie then it's worth checking out. I didn't think the main game was "bad" or even "mediocre". It was just the perfect example of a 7/10 game.

I actually thought the costume game play in Liberation was a fantastic idea.

The problem was the poor implementation.

E.g. the lady outfit allowing you access to places based on your elevated social status and by exploiting chivalry of higher status men and suckering lower status men was a great idea in theory.

The problem was that it didn't really explore that as much as it should have and it certainly didn't place as much of a restriction on your mobility as it needed to. I mean you could get into a fight with a dozen guys and kick their butts just as easily as you could in the assassin outfit.

The gameplay needed to change more dramatically based on your outfit. In the lady outfit you should have been almost incapable of fighting, limited to stealth kills and I'd have like to see it play more like a high charisma build in an RPG.

That's the problem with Ubisoft. Games look great but it's all a facade. There is no depth underneath. This is why I am sceptical of this "power of choice" bollocks they are pushing now.

On the subject of outfits, I always thought it was s**t in Rise of the Tomb Raider that they played this "survival" card in the marketing but in the main game at least (I never tried the true survival mode) it didn't matter if you were in a sub zero zone wearing a thermal coat or if I wore the outfit from the opening desert section....

Kelvin Green link
26/9/2018 04:47:00 pm

The fanboys would hate it, but I wouldn't mind seeing a Tomb Raider done in something like the Wind Waker art style, just to try something a bit different with the series.

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Spiney O’Sullivan
26/9/2018 06:47:17 pm

You might like this cartoon from the Tomb Raider Revisioned series from a few years back, which actually offered a few alternative takes on Lara that seem relevant in light of the last week’s discussions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxb60NYJTc&app=desktop

(Coincidentally, Guru Larry has the top comment on that video)

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