Game Informer's Latest Shadow of the Tomb Raider Preview

In short, for years these types of games have focused their difficulty shifts on a single aspect of the game - the combat. With Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the developers have broken difficulty out into puzzles, combat and traversal, meaning that in addition to making combat easier or harder, you can receive fewer hints from Lara's inner monologue and see fewer highlights when using her Batvision or whatever, and if you want to you can completely remove the markings for all the various handholds and climbable ledges that are a constant through games like Tomb Raider, Uncharted and Horizon Zero Dawn.

I'm curious whether this is actually a positive change or not, but it's certainly an interesting one that I'll be glad to give a go whenever I get ahold of the game. I'm not so stellar at solving video game puzzles so I'm not sure I'd adjust the puzzle system to any more difficult - if it involved something else, like perhaps remixing the puzzles slightly to involve more or less steps, I'd be more likely to adjust it, but maybe that would be too weird to allow users to adjust on-the-fly, not that forcing users into decisions before a game starts is unheard of either. As it stands, I really rely on Batvisions and "Well, hmmm..." dialogue from the protagonist to get through most puzzles at some point in the game.

It sounds like the combat difficulty is mostly related to how easy it is to get in and out of stealth, though I'm sure health bars will be adjusted on both sides as well.

What say you, duders? Would you turn the paint off in this game, or others like it, given the chance? Or is this just a cosmetic adjustment to you, and you always felt like you could read the environment without the paint anyway if it weren't there?

I like that it's there: more options are always better. While I find the kind of rote "platforming" in the games you mentioned to be a little boring at this point in that they're basically automatic, I also wonder if without it I'd just get frustrated from jumping to my death several times and end up turning the original feature back on. I'm very curious to try it though. I'm glad that they're at least trying to come up with ways to make those segments a little more player intensive, since as there are so many of them.

Hmm that's interesting. I find the climbing in these and Uncharted so mind numbingly boring at this point this change could be a welcomed one. But I'm also not sure that this will just trade that boredom in for frustration. I still have yet to play Rise, so I don't know when or if I will ever see these changes. I remember someone once calling Uncharted a climbing sim and my eyes rolled so hard they opened a tomb up.

Aren't we just going backwards now? I'm getting flashbacks to Prince of Persia and early Assassin's Creed. I'm so burned out on the climbing mechanics in these games and the last thing I want is more time spent staring at walls, hemming and hawing at various nooks and crannies, wondering which one of them is an intended handhold.

As much as I liked the last two Tomb Raider games, the climbing/traversal/platforming might be the worst part of those games. There's typically only one linear-ass way to do everything, so the "puzzle" elements of those games, outside of the occasional well-designed tomb, are massively overstated here unless they made some serious changes from a fundamental design standpoint with Shadow of the Tomb Raider (which I doubt). As such, even though I generally support games being less hand-holdy, the reality of turning off the ledge paint here won't transform the game into a hugely organic experience so much as it will just make it to where "the way" isn't as apparent. The satisfaction of an "oh, this is what they want me do" moment isn't all that great.

Also, they're not really inventing this concept. HITMAN had a terrific system of allowing you to remove waypoints on opportunities, which added quite a bit to the game. Even though most of the opportunities were step-by-step things, you could organically discover portions of them in the world, and it was always really enticing to try to figure out how to pull them off without help and tremendously satisfying when you did. That's good game design, whereas what they're talking about here with Shadow of the Tomb Raider seems more of like a surface-level thing that won't actually add much to the gameplay.

If anything, this just seems like it will make things more frustrating. In practice, I'm picturing Lara trying to jump for a ledge that you're not actually sure if she can grab or not in some annoying, repetitive trial-and-error bullshit. (At least it will probably lead to more comically violent Lara death animations.) If they want to improve the traversal with multiple ways to get from A to B, then we can talk, but guessing at what the linear route is sounds like a bad time. It's a step in the right direction, but until they start designing the game in ways that encourage/reward player creativity, this is merely a cosmetic change.

I mean, it's always good to have options, but really the solution is better level design. The problem with these types of games is that there almost always one A-->B path for the climbing sequences, even when there is clearly more than one way you could go. Part of the puzzle should be giving players more paths to get to the goal, or at least more "false" paths, so there is some work involved in figuring out how to get to the goal.

It would also let them have a place to stick more secrets and side-areas.

I agree that this isn't a novel idea (I can remember calls for the removal of this style of pathing since at least Uncharted 2) nor a real solution to the issues players have with these games (that whether painted or not, the path is the path) but I think it's neat that someone actually gave players the option to give it a shot. If nothing else, it will give the team that worked on this game useful metrics for both how many players choose to forgo the paint and how many users have a good experience under those parameters.

As soon as I hit post, I thought "Fresh Idea Alert" was a silly header for this, but that's mostly why I committed to it!

The main problem with games which optionally remove guidance's (like yellow handholds) is that there is often nothing in place to fill that void. They offer the option as a way to appease game players who desire a specific hardcore or old-school expeience. But simply removing the UI crutch does not take away that the designers also used this crutch, and without them the game becomes a frustrating, ill-designed mess.

A prime example are options or mods for bethsda games, or just open world games in general, which remove quest markers/ compass guidance. They are thinking "this will make it feel closer to how Morrwind did it". But the stumbling block comes when few of these quests have usable directions like Morrwind had. A quest in current games might say "Speak to elf_1 in city_A", but then you get to city_a and your tools for finding elf_1 are simply not there. You can't ask around, or find environmental clues, because the game was designed around that little arrow.

A funny example was when Metro Last Light first released and their mode Ranger Hardcore. It completely removed the UI. I believe this was since fixed, but on launch you had no way of seeing your ammo counts. And even more egregious, because they moved away from a "switch to hold a grenade, and then fire to throw it" to a "hit the grenade button to immediately throw it" model, you had no way of knowing what type of throwable you had equipped. And switching throwables was done through a radial menu which you couldn't see.

In the end, I hope the takeaway isn't "Gamers find these modes frustrating, they aren't doing well". People really want this stuff, but it is just not executed correctly.

Options are good. I play Hitman levels without clues or assists until I run out of ideas. It let's me have that hardcore experience and then go back fir fun like Terminal Veloicity on the Paris map.

The sounds a lot like the option to turn off the red coloring in Mirror's Edge that indicated optimal paths.

I'm playing with all indicators off and no monologue hints. It's honestly better. Yes, there's bit of awkwardness to finding some of the climbable ledges that is a result of this being a band-aid fix, but I don't feel like I'm just being guided by glowing symbols everywhere (there are still the big text prompts that can't be turned off, it seems). The game has issues with lighting that makes not having the glowy bits annoying at time, as well, but I feel more immersed in the game. I'm enjoying it more than the previous two entries, I don't get all the lukewarm-ness. It's a good middle ground between the last two games in the series. Though, I didn't really care for Rise that much, the story and setting were just super boring. I like the ancient South American civilization stuff a lot more.