I’m working through the previous game. What y’all are saying is stop there?
Naw, man. The story may not be anything to write home about but that’s just one of many aspects of the game which is overall quite good.
So, I was realoh enjoying the first one, up until the Big Oni fight. I can’t get past it. My reflexes are just bad and having to hit a small target sucked the fun out of me. I’ll try again some other time, but it’s like the developers decided 99% into the game they needed to put a typical video game boss fight in.
I know all the tricks.I know what I’m supposed to do. I just can’t actually do it.
Have the kids do that part?
I don’t have kids. But there should be a service where you can rent a kid for that sort of thing.
Apparently bitching about it is how you get through it. I finished the game.
I hate QTE’s, and I really hate boss fights with them.
x1000 for me, and especially in this game. No…no I don’t want to play Dragons Lair.
There were far fewer QTEs and annoying boss fights in Rise. On the other hand, the story and characterization were worse. I finished it up this weekend and enjoyed it well enough, but I don’t think I would have gotten through it if I hadn’t built up some interest in the protagonist from the last game.
If you were unimpressed with the story in Rise of the Tomb Raider, I guess you can look forward to someone else penning the script on the next game.
Agreed, there’s no way this can end badly.
There’s some…weird stuff going in with writers in big budget games right now. Maybe weeding out the older generation or something?
When Amy Henning left Naughty Dog they rewrote the script and… everyone seems to think it’s the best game of the series. I sometimes have this vague and ill formed impression that these 80s-90s writers that still remain have this pulpy, stereotyped view of scripts and characters that feels like they all participated in a Broken Sword adventure or some knock licensed game throwback screenwriting session. People throw blame around (sexism! stupidity!) but maybe they’re just not a good fit for modern sensibilities?
In Rhianna Pratchett’s case, I think it was her choice to move on to something else.
She’s definitely not part of the 80’s-90’s era of writing. She started with Beyond Divinity in 2004 and wrote a ton of stuff like each of the Overlord games, Mirror’s Edge, the two modern Tomb Raiders, and Viking: Battle for Asgard, as well as co-writing on BioShock Infinite, the 2008 Prince of Persia, and Heavenly Sword.
Hmm, I thought she had been doing this longer.
Rhianna Pratchett spoke to Eurogamer about the Croft experience.
On Lara’s first kill:
[quote]
Crystal Dynamics had talked much about how this crucial moment in the young Lara’s development would go down, but for Pratchett it was a battle between gameplay and narrative - a battle narrative eventually lost.
“Narrative wanted a slower ramp-up,” Pratchett says. "The playtesters, we’d given the player a gun and they wanted to use the gun. The gameplay just wanted to put fun, interesting gameplay in there and support what the player wanted.
“That was something we got dinged for, and we knew we would. But that was a battle that was laid out. It didn’t go narrative’s way. I wouldn’t say that many battles do. Some you win. Some you lose. You have to get used to losing more than you win.”[/quote]
On the attempted rape scene controversy:
[quote]
“Something like that would never be a controversy in anything else,” she says. “There were some people who said, you can’t do that to Lara. That would never happen to Lara, which is a disturbing line to take, to suggest there are women, albeit fictional ones, that that sort of thing doesn’t happen to and shouldn’t happen to. It’s like, well, it shouldn’t happen to any woman, but in fact things like that happen to all women in all walks of life. Just because you’re seen as a tough video games character, that doesn’t mean that sort of stuff wouldn’t happen to you.”[/quote]
On the disgraced father storyline in Rise:
[quote]
“I’ve been open about the fact I wasn’t that into the father storyline to start with,” she says, "but eventually found peace with it, and I think we did some good things with it.
“When you’re talking about teams of hundreds of people, you are really a cog in the machine. The narrative team is important, but so are all the other teams as well, and they’re all fighting for space and agency and budget and time and everything else.”[/quote]
I’ve just been replaying the first one again, and there have been multiple moments where I was muttering to myself, ‘this is one of the best games ever made’. There are some sequences in that game, that are just amazing…when I think back 20 years ago, and what video gaming was, this becomes especially true. The part where you are coming down the gondola, and it all goes to hell…is just fantastic looking, and surprisingly engaging considering it’s really just a very fancy dragons lair sequence. I usually hate stuff like that, but it’s done so well in this game, I can get past it.
For whatever faults it has, I have very often really “felt” like I did when I first started playing the original Tomb Raider when it was first released. The sense of a tangible world to explore is to me where all of the fun is in these games. I would buy a game like this that had zero combat in it, and just contained the puzzle solving/tomb raiding elements. I realize that’s no longer possible to make in the COD era of gaming. At least there is enough of it, for me to get a decent fix.
I envy your enjoyment of the first game. I wish I could see it the way fans like you do.
I agree. This game grabbed me in ways a video game hasn’t in a long while. I might actually pick up the sequel at full retail cost.
That’s how I feel about the first game too. Amazing moments and a world I want to explore. I enjoyed the story as well. Rise is still on my backlog list (I own it). Discussions about it have tempered my expectations story wise, but I’m still looking forward to finally giving it a go.
You know, I’ve never really gotten the criticism of the second game. It’s more of the same, to my way of thinking.
Just finished this 100% and it was magnificent. I loved it even more than the first one, and more than the Uncharted series. It looked, ran and played beautifully too, so why can’t all AAA games be of this quality? Square Enix’s other fairly recent big releases like Just Cause 3 and Deus Ex MD ran like pigs compared to this. My only disappointment is that they didn’t bring back Lara’s dual pistols, especially after she got them at the end of the first game.
Can’t wait for the third. Looks like it’s Mexico/Central America which should be interesting.