The Giant Beastcast: Episode 24

It's Friday, y'all! Time to Beast the Cast.

That's alot of 0s

Just in time to get my through work, happy days.

I was glad to hear Vinny & Austin quickly shut down Alex's comparison between Lara's mass-murderin' and Nathan Drake's. Because tonally speaking they're very different games. Uncharted is generally light-hearted swashbucklin' puckish rogue treasure hunting fun times, whereas the Tomb Raider reboot was trying to portray this darkly grim, survivalist tale. It's more closely similar to The Last of Us than it is Uncharted.

Tomb Raider 2013 essentially wanted to be both a serious, harrowing drama following a young girl forced to kill to survive... while also then having her packin' a grenade launcher attachment blowing fools away left & right, and skinning animals for ''XP''. That, and the writing and the characters were horrendous in Tomb Raider. I basically couldn't stand anyone, and all of the supporting cast read like an ethnic stereotype checklist.

I still enjoyed it a lot, though, because the gameplay is superb and I'm excited to play the sequel. Given that Rhianna Pratchett is on board again, however, then I have extremely low expectations for the story stuff, which will hopefully allow me to more easily set that shit aside in favour of just shooting people.

I just had to refresh the site didnt I........dammit i was about to finally go to sleep......but now i must listen! Damnnn you Beastcast Damn You [ presses play ].

Man, this one gets off right on point. Fucking love this cast.

*hugs Vinny*

I'm super bummed about not owning a Xbone solely because of TR. I'm hoping I can hold out till PC version cuse otherwise I'm gonna go over a friends house and just steal his system for a week. :p

Aw man, the RSS feed is doing that thing again where it doesn't update, even though there is clearly a new episode and there has been for hours :(

I bet it will update at 7, just after I leave my wifi. Stupid time zones.

The hobbit-sized beastcast...

@yummylee: I actually couldn't disagree more. My biggest issue with Tomb Raider, and why I wasn't as into it as many others (I thought it was the prototypical 3 out of 5 star type game) was because that game had the worst tonal whiplash of any game I can recall in recent years. Like it started off feeling like a survival horror game, but couldn't resist within a couple of hours turning into a parkour/straight up murder a dozen dudes action-fest. The story and the gameplay just didn't match. I am with you that Uncharted is a big dumb, goofy game which trivializes murder, but it at no point does it try to be anything other than video game National Treasure. It does make me cringe any time I hear Tomb Raider fans try to claim that game is either more real or more high brow than Uncharted when it is just as goofy, just in different ways. I mean the dozens of gruesome Lara death sequences make much of that game feel like 70s exploitation cinema.

And I'm not even a huge Uncharted fan by the way saying this (though I love 2).

I have been more interested in Rise of the Tomb Raider because of the early word of it being more about tomb exploration, but that E3 combat demo really put a dent in my enthusiasm when it looked like more of the same murder sim combat that undermined any way it was differentiating itself from Uncharted. I'm eager to read reviews next week though.

Beastcast is so good.

@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.

Let's do this.

@yummylee: that was a helluva video, thanks for starting off my Friday right duder!

Glad Tomb Raider impressions are good in both casts. Loved the last one.

Hope we move past the default discussion of killing people in TR and Uncharted. They're action adventure video games.

Where is the premium Podcast. Where is it?

WHERE IS IT

It Rises!

@kanuuna: i was gna say the same thing! need my premium?!

Yay, the bestcast is backalar!

I got really confused trying to listen to the premium version of this (it was not up).

It's cool though. I'll listen to the odd ad for you guys :)

@humanity: I really enjoyed your take. Uncharted tends to be a bit of a flash point in terms of games trivializing murder, fairly or unfairly, because the body count in those games is hilarious, meanwhile Nathan Drake is kind of just a caricature of a human being (to the point the third game just outright repeated the character arc of the second game) who makes lots of smarmy comments as he mows down dozens of people. Just because say Gears is "grittier" doesn't mean it's any more mature in its murder porn. Nor would I say Gears or Uncharted is trying to make murder sexy, kind of to your last point.

Personally, I have much more of an issue with say most Call of Duty campaigns than I do with Uncharted on this subject.

Now in regards to Tomb Raider, I can't say I really got into what they were doing with the narrative or with Lara's character because of the jarring disconnect between the tone of the story and the tone of the combat. Vinny's take on the podcast mirrors mine. I think for about two hours they were progressing pretty well in terms of what you're talking about in making you feel for Lara's situation, but at some point publisher demands or focus tests or what not just won out and it went right into QTEs and brutally massacring small camps of people. And I'll admit some of this is a personal take (ex: Vinny has similar complaints, but is able to look past them), but games and stories that try to have things both ways really irk me. It's like an artist not confident in what they're saying, so they end up saying nothing, you know? I'll even fully admit the basic problem is there is probably less demand for a game about exploring jungles, deserted islands, and ancient tombs than a game heavily borrowing from Uncharted.

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).

Jeff referring to Commander Shepard as a "he" is WRONG. WRONG, I SAY.

@cav829: @thatpinguino: I actually wrote all of that while the podcast was still downloading so it was interesting to hear a lot of my thoughts echoed by various members of the crew.

I think I fall somewhere between Vinny and Alex in that I appreciate what they were trying to do with the character development, but where I diverge is that I also appreciate that Crystal Dynamics also understood they were making a game. While the tonal shifts between scared-girl and cold-blooded killer were quick, I think to do it any other way would be a huge disservice to the gameplay itself. The game wouldn't play very well if the intro period dragged on for 2-3 entire hours before her hands stopped trembling each time she shot a rabbit.

Now I fully agree that this approach may seem like the developers are trying to have their cake and eat it too, but the less pessimistic way I prefer to look at it is that the player is getting the best of both worlds. You get the emotional drama portrayed through the story, and the gameplay elements all rolled into one package. It's not perfect and the seams show here and there, but I can forgive one in lieu of the other. At the end of the day Tomb Raider played extremely well, and I wouldn't want to sacrifice that for more character development.

Of course Lara is going to walk injuries off after 5 minutes, because no matter how impactful it is to enact a forced limp with a red strobe on the screen, you get tired of that pretty quickly. You want to "feel" the pain but you also want to play the game too. Where do you draw the line? Should we critique the fact that you can get shot 10-20 times before you "die" as well? If we're going to go down this path of realism in an ostensibly serious title then Lara needs to die from a single gunshot, and that is simply not fun in this framework. Complaining about realism in arcade shooters and how it's a copout that they're trying to "have it both ways" is effectively funneling games down very pure shades of black or white.

Nice and early! Thanks duders.

@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.

Premium dolla bills y'all.

What happened with the delayed launch of the premium to the free edition.

"Make it a fire planet!"
"They're called stars."

I like supporting GB, but the recent content from GB East really makes me want a slider, like the humble bundle, where I get to choose where the money goes, because, holy crap, I'd send most of it to GB East these days.

They're just killing it with the funny, interesting, and thoughtful content.

@thatpinguino: As for how well it plays I guess that is subjective (well everything is) but it is the best playing third person platformer with shooting I've played in years. The jumps feel good because you have just enough air control to give them meaning and the platforming has enough challenge in it where you do need to actually aim and press buttons rather than the Uncharted/AC model of holding a direction and seeing your character simply move forward through all the obstacles with little to no input from the player. The customization was outstanding, with upgrades visibly all showing up on your weapons and gear. The skill system afforded the game depth and variety in that you're not using the same 3 moves for the entire game as you unlock more and more options as the game progresses. The levels themselves looked great and were designed in such a way that traversing them was fun. Honestly I don't know what else you're comparing it to because I can't think of any other recent game of this category that executed on all of this stuff nearly as well. To say it's meh, adequate, is being highly dismissive but hey like I said, I guess it's all subjective in the end.

To your second point - I say once again, it is ridiculous to hold those "realism" complaints over the developers head when the gameplay is good. There is always going to be suspension of disbelief and it's really up to the player how hung up you want to get over a fake game being too fake at some moments or not real enough in others. What you are indirectly proposing is that you either go all out or don't try at all, which means we either have super realistic simulators or completely goofy Mario platformers because mixing and matching just takes you out of it. I don't think thats the right direction or attitude to have about games at all. We are all playing make-believe fantasies that have shades of realism sprinkled here and there. You can't seriously be arguing that she either breaks her legs and limps for the next 10 hours of gameplay or she can't hurt herself period, thats it's, a finite, binary choice of one or the other. That sort of thinking would suffocate creativity in game design.

Dare I say neutral Witcher talk? Not positive , not negative. Somehow refreshing. I'll take it.

@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).

90 minutes? I need more distraction from my humdrun

I just recently finished MGSV, and I find the tonal discussion around Tomb Raider to be a weird contrast.

Like, MGSV placed a lot of dramatic emphasis on its characters being killers and soldiers, and about how they don't know how to do anything else and are unapologetic about that fact and blah blah blah ("I'm already a demon").

And yet, at the same time, that game not only went out of it's way to provide the player with non-lethal alternatives for most in-game objectives, it actively rewarded the player for using those alternatives.

Going from that to Tomb Raider seems like it would be jarring, to put it mildly.

Edit: Like, it felt like if there was anything that MGSV (and even that series as a whole) wanted, it was to make you care, at least for a moment, about the lives of the random mooks that you go around killing in these sorts of games.

Here's some an apple fact. There are over 7500 breeds(species?) of apples now.

Also ambrosia apples are the best. They taste like candy and are cheaper than honey crisp.

I agree the new TR games rather tend to take themselves too seriously (most games or movies with a female protagonist seem to have this problem) which is where Lara's wanton killing spree raises eyebrows. While UC is delivered like a fun action flick ride with a somewhat reckless hero who generally thinks on his feet as he generally at the recieving end, its to be noted that no one looks at a UC game as a realistic game. I also agree the supernatural stuff was pretty shallow in TR 1 but I would like it to be more fleshed out than the few bits of info you find in places. I peronsally like the littke supernatural element in UC games which is why the ending of UC3 felt flat (the whole thing was a hallucination)...

Laura LARA

LAHRAH

LARUH

Them discussing the idea of implanting memories of watching a movie sounds like an episode of Black Mirror waiting to happen.

@edgaras1103: bombcast talk was pretty neutral, too. They just decided they weren't feeling it like others were.

Fuck Honeycrisps. Ambrosia apples are where it's at.

That's a lot of zeros.

It was wonderful to hear some semi-positive discussion of the witcher 3 again from people who are actually actively playing it. I think maybe beastcast is bestcast. If Jeff B ever leaves I'll stop listening though, he and Vinny playing off each other (I'm just finally figuring out that Vinny is the master podcast troll) is by far my favorite banter of late.

Jeff Smackdownular

As a Brit I can confirm it is Lara as in rhymes with Cara

I must say this is my favorite podcast on the site.

@thatpinguino: at the end of the day it's still a video game. Playing as someone who moves or climbs super slow because they have a wound isn't fun. Missing a bunch of shots because the character isnt a combat vet isn't fun. Sure, there is some dissonance but I still think Tomb Raider is a much better game to actually play than Uncharted.

Both series have such generic, forgettable stories that makes them irrelevant to me. The fact that Uncharted gets a pass for it's mediocre gunplay, flat out bad level designs(jet ski, ship graveyard), dumb supernatual stuff, generic stories and characters yet tomb raider gets tons of shit because "there aren't enough tombs", dumb supernatural stuff, cookie cutter characters and Lara kills too much is pretty lame.