@humanity: I've said this multiple times now, but I guess I'll say it once more: her getting hurt isn't a problem for me. My problem is using the same "oh no she's injured, this time it's real, real bad" animations, camera shakes, damage systems, and dramatic music multiple times when those injuries don't matter at all to the story. Why keep beating her up if it doesn't matter? If you want a gritty grounded story, have a time jump and a cut scene where she actually has to heal from her wounds instead of walking off a bear trap snapping her leg, a bone impaling her side, falling from a treetop, falling from a 20 foot ceiling, and taking multiple violent beatings. I don't understand why the jumping feeling good should have any impact on whether the game should be narratively consistent or not. The parts where the controls feel good are great, but they don't actually have anything to do with my issues with the game.
My issue isn't an "arcady" versus "simulator" argument, it is that the game is very interested in telling a gritty, grounded story of Lara Croft's trial by fire and I think that it fails at that goal. I think it undermines that story constantly in the interest of making the gameplay fun, when those two portions of the game don't need to be at odds at all.
I don't really expect you to agree with me. We've danced this "Gamplay v Story" dance before and I don't think our opinions have changed one bit since the last time. It's apparent that you don't play or enjoy games the same way I do and that's fine. I am very enamored with cohesiveness and elegance in game design and Tomb Raider's story is neither of those things. The last two game's I've played for my podcast were Thomas was Alone and Child of Light, so maybe I've been spoiled for the last month by playing games that were 100% committed to their story (even if one of those stories wasn't great).
@humanity: I sure don't feel like I'm getting the best of both worlds right now. I'm getting a story that barely resembles the game I'm playing and the dissonance has made me laugh out loud multiple times (The latest one was when I was escaping the burning temple and the camera locked on to a man on fire jumping off of a building while Wilhelm Screaming). In terms of it playing well, I mean the shooting feels ok I guess? I don't really think it is any better than any third person shooter I've played recently, but it is certainly fine. I feel like the enemies are so trivial on normal that Lara is basically an unstoppable machine, but that just makes the moments when the game disarms her seem all the more forced. I have never actually felt like I'm in danger when I'm actually in control of the game, but every cut scene seems to want me to think that Lara is in over her head.
In terms of the gameplay realities of having her walk off injuries, don't try to tell a serious story of a young girl in over her head if you aren't going to commit to any of the dramatic turns. Why beat her up every hour only to have her shake it off? Why not let the first time be enough? Or the second? Or the fourth? All of these hurt/not hurt shifts clash with the story they want to tell and all they had to do was cut down on these "she's really wounded for realsies" sequences to avoid that dissonance. The first time they used that card it was fine, it was the repetition that got me. At a certain point I don't know how I'm supposed to care about anything that happens in the cut scenes if Lara is completely unfazed regardless of how badly she's beaten.
@yummylee: @cav829: My third point of view on this is that both games are extremely similar, but people tend to treat them differently because of the protagonist. I don't think Tomb Raider was ever going for a survival horror vibe as much as it was trying to instill fear for the heroine in question, who at the outset is an athletic, yet very much inexperienced explorer. We treat Lara differently than Nathan Drake because she's supposed to be a "young girl" in a hostile environment, accosted from all sides by tribals that have a tendency of sacrificing women to their god. Lara is not a hardened, male, know-it-all that never misses a beat much less shows any realistic range of emotions that would be situation appropriate. In this regard I think Tomb Raider is a resounding success in that you do feel something different when you see her die or see her kill, you feel something because she herself is a lot more real than the idealized power fantasy of Nathan Drake.
I do agree that the tone of the game is much more serious than that of Uncharted which in turn, strangely enough, make some people treat it as if it's not actually a videogame anymore. At the heart of it all these are all just games and I think it's incredibly silly to say that games like Uncharted "trivialize" murder when murder has been the prime objective in a majority of games for the past two decades. The most popular gaming franchises today are all "murder simulators" and Tomb Raider is no different. It is a lot more flashy and offers a lot more options, but if it didn't the gameplay would suffer for it through a lack in diversity. No said that Gears of War fetishizes murder or war by way of those ridiculous chainsaw guns, or gory curb stomps to the head.
I'm actually playing Tomb Raider 2013 right now for podcasting purposes and I think you're right on that the gameplay between Uncharted and Tomb Raider are largely the same (though Tomb Raider is a bit more diverse in it's exploration aspects). However, I find Tomb Raider a bit more tonally dissonant that Uncharted because Lara violently oscillates between being unsure/ untrained to being a master/ action movie star. She goes from being unable to stand hunting to icing multiple fools with headshots (punctuated by a headshot bonus!). She goes from being unable to climb to climbing sheer rock faces with one ax. And every time she gets beaten up, she lumbers around for 5 minutes before shaking it off completely.
Uncharted certainly beats up Nathan Drake as well, but they only go to the serious injury well about once per game and when they do, it matters. Tomb Raider deals Lara a debilitating injury once an hour and they just don't matter at all. When Nathan Drake gets shot, he basically falls into a coma and has to recover for who knows how long. When Lara gets impaled, she medicines herself and ignores her gaping wound while clambering up cliff-sides.
The killing in both games is completely anachronistic to the protagonists personalities/experiences. However, I can believe that Nathan Drake is a sociopathic killer with a quick wit who's been killing scores of goons for years more than I can believe that Lara is the quickest learner on the face of the Earth (who also kills scores of goons).
Looks like even Bill Simmons and Grantland aren't essential enough for a ESPN to value them above their rank and file. That was a site that was doing everything right. From diversifying content types to raising the profiles of individual writers to putting out high quality work... and none of it mattered. I wish the internet writing landscape wasn't so bleak. RIP Grantland.
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