@ares42: You're right I forgot how different she looked in that first one. I had played Rise more recently and they got a lot closer to the actress on that one (pictured). She still does the voice for all three games but I really just meant she still looks close to how she did in the second game. In this interview from 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPj_5xlQVk4) she says they used a new mo-cap technique that upped the facial capture from about 90 points of reference to around 7000. In the first game they took artistic license to fill out the rest of Lara's features since they couldn't make her look just like the actress. People can prefer the 2013 face if they like but they haven't changed her as drastically this time because they're working off the same face.
@ares42 they've based it off her for the whole reboot trilogy and that's why she actually has natural body proportions. I know back in the Core studio years they went through different models to represent her at trade shows but this was before facial mapping. Not sure if they had an actress mo-capping her face in the early Crystal D games but I remember EGM running a story about Lara getting more realistically proportioned boobs in Legend which might be the weirdest thing I ever read in that magazine besides Seanbaby's column lol.
It seems like Brad has zero enthusiasm for this game which is weird because he found so much to like about Rise of the Tomb Raider, so much so he championed it to a respectable spot in the middle of the GB top ten games of the year. I don't agree that it's more of the same but even still that shouldn't be a big issue for a game he enjoyed so much. The underwater sections are completely redone and remind me of the underrated part of Black Flag where you explored shipwrecks and hid from sharks. The town looked much more lively than the settlements in the last game and the side quests seemed more involved. The graphics looked a good bit more detailed (to me) and it's cool to see Jonah actually play a part throughout the story and have his own perspective. The combat taking a backseat shouldn't be an issue considering almost everyone on the staff has complained about there being too much in both Tomb Raider and Uncharted, plus the stealth seems to have many more options. When comparing Rise and Shadow he seems to act like they weren't building off a great base already. He showered the last game with praise and then goes to "I'm not hating it" after a couple of hours of playing the new one while admitting his complaints are nitpicks (eye lines not matching in cutscenes, mud not sticking to her clothes all the time, too many crafting resources). On the bombcast this week he said it has nice attention to detail but in the next sentence completely contradicted himself. I generally find our tastes align pretty well so this just perplexes me but maybe it's as simple as I was ready for a new Tomb Raider after 3 years and he wasn't.
P.S.: I hate to bring up the Brad Quick Look situation since it's a dead horse but dude complained about how often they were telling him to lock the left counter-weight as he's trying to lock the right one. Also near the end when they're looking for Jonah who outright tells her that he's downstairs and Brad immediately went upstairs I face-palmed.
P.P.S. @mister_v and @ares42 We can agree to disagree on the faces looking bad here (Sony games share face-tech expertise so that's why Spidey, GoW, et al are top tier) but the actress who has played Lara in the last three games just has naturally good skin. I don't wanna sound like a creeper but as a trans woman who drinks a ton of water to keep her skin clear, I can appreciate someone with that feature. I googled her without make-up and I don't see a huge difference.
This is literally the first demo derby I watched so maybe they already commented on it but at the end of the ps1 disc they didn't notice Andrew House' name in the credits. He introduced the PS4 and is CEO of Sony Interactive, I figure someone would've pointed this out almost two years later but I just have to even if I'm late to the party
Not sure if I agree that for a character to be a hero they need to be "good". Look at the characters of Martin Scorcese movies, Ray Liotta's version of a real life gangster in Goodfellas is not what most people would classify as good and indeed he acts with a high level of impunity. We care about him though because even when he's pistol-whipping a dude in the street he does it to protect Lorraine Brocco's character from the man who beat her up. You can make the argument that he is presented as a bad guy from the start but so is Nicolas Cage's Bad Lieutenant and yet even when this cop is cutting off an old woman's breathing tube you know he's doing to bring a murderer to justice. I don't want to go as far as saying the ends always justify the means but for me to relate to a character I simply need to understand their motives and the devil is in the details. The Division gets many of those details muddled but it at least presents the player with a strong motive
Austin this is a fantastic piece and you made me think critically in new ways about a movie I thought I had already examined to my heart's content. To your question about game mechanics and common feelings my mind goes to end of Brothers where spoiler: your brother dies and you must go home and do the same puzzles to get there but with just one person and it gave me just about the most depressing feeling of loneliness I've ever experienced. I'm sorry if someone else already posted this but it looks like you articles are just too good because there are too many comments to sift through. Please keep it up and I look forward to more articles of this caliber (Soul Calibur?) from Austin Walker, the Games Doctor.
EDIT: Damn a simple CTRL+F has shown me just how much people really latched onto that moment. I offer instead a moment near the end of MGS V: The Phantom Pain where your crew gets infected with the language virus and the seemingly irrelevant information attached to each person is given purpose as you look for common factors to quarantine only infected personnel. This may appear on the surface to be no different than the spreadsheet menu management that most people just ignored by auto-assigning but to me it gave the staff system they'd been developing since Portable Ops and Peacewalker a real reason to exist beyond just color text for silly MGS names. I was legitimately shocked that so many of my Fulton-recovered troops were dying and I frantically searched for a way to make it all better and when it came time to seemingly send scores of (hopefully actually sick) men to die so that rest of Mother Base could live I felt conflicted in a way that no game has made me feel. Also I've never used that spoiler masking feature and I may have gone overboard but it just looks so cool. Take that Freedom of Information Act cuz you've just been redacted
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