Game innovation analysis
In recent years, many companies have repackaged and resumed operations, which is a natural cycle, especially in industries with high intellectual property rights. This is largely the result of Kickstarter phenomenon, and the company has been reborn with a new look, just like taking dusty boxes out of the attic to clean them. But for an excellent product like Tomb Raider, the meaning of restarting is quite different.
Since crystal dynamics took over the series in 2006, many works about Laura have been published. However, although these games won quite a lot of praise and love, Laura never recovered her unique freshness and adventure surprise.
Fortunately, crystal dynamics seized the opportunity of change and learned from the naughty dog studio. The following is an in-depth analysis of the return of Tomb Raider by game critics Matthew Handrahan Dan Pearson.
Pearson: I like adventure games very much. I bought a game console, read game reviews, and even played Tomb Raider at my friend's house for a while, but I never played any games all day. I think it may be because I have some resistance to the seductive atmosphere of Laura's role, including the whole game, Laura's image and the culture reflected. Every time, it reminds me of some old-school male gamers, letting Laura hit the wall or feeding Laura to Tyrannosaurus Rex, maybe because I have some old-school friends.
All kinds of reports about re-release are not so much false or deliberate discrimination against women as bad public relations. I really don't want to press the A key to protect Laura from infringement, and I don't want to watch a frightened and injured young man put a stick in her skull. I am not a neurotic person, and I am not afraid of dark themes or difficult games, but these designs are really disgusting.
After reading the game scripts written by the creators, I feel that at least a few scenes are well described. Despite the poor sound effects, Tomb Raider may really be a game that successfully created a female character with distinctive personality. At least in this case, I will be willing to play.
So I played for a few hours yesterday. I never deliberately killed or put Laura in crisis. But I found that I really fell in love with this curved eyebrow character, not because of the instinct of a big man to protect a weak woman. I just think she screwed up, made some mistakes, and everything is unknown, which makes her more like a real person.
Matthew: Like Pearson, I have no subjective feelings about Tomb Raider. I have played this game before, but because of hardware limitations, the characters are limited. Tomb Raider seems to be waiting for high-definition fidelity, and it turns out. Even so, I didn't expect to like it very much. Within a few hours of the press conference, crystal dynamics told a good story about Laura's unfortunate experience and successfully portrayed it as the opposite of Nathan Drake's super confidence. Among them, camilla luddington's voice plays an important role, and the carefully designed lines and dialogues well render the scenes and characters of the game. Inevitably, for any game with such a huge investment, certain concessions must be made to get as many markets as possible.
Pearson: You're right. Ludington's voice is really great. I like her swearing part very much. She doesn't always speak in a heroic tone. Many times she sounds angry or tired. This is especially important when you want to describe anyone who is slightly different from others, which is the case in nine cases out of ten.
In fact, Tomb Raider has more details than I expected, and many appropriate self-deprecations and angry words have played a certain role in the development of the role. The protagonist's lines are wonderful, but so are many other lines that pop up casually. Ludington is not the only one with a perfect voice on the team.
Perhaps only I noticed another wonderful thing in the game, that is, whenever the player pauses the game, the decorative border on the menu will match the current scene perfectly. Almost every character will look like a poetic postcard sent by a backpacker, or a home page photo bought by a fearless war correspondent according to the scene. This is the first game I've been looking forward to in these years with this picture mode. I mean, it might exist, but I didn't notice it.
Some things are just beginning to happen. Looks like I'm not the only one who thinks so. As far as I know, few games can develop credible characters and stories because it is difficult for agents and creators to reach an understanding. Therefore, in every scene, Laura's risky behavior of going to fatal danger and climbing mountains is purely based on willpower. There are bandits shooting with AK47 behind the door. I will hide behind the door and hesitate 15 minutes before rushing out.
No one is against setting the players free. In fact, Laura should make mistakes. Mistakes come from my poor judgment of angle or distance. However, Laura can survive the fire, with a bullet in her face and an axe in her back. In one scene, the way she treated her shoulder injury seemed strange.
Sometimes, Laura is forced into a low drain, and I am more worried about her wound being infected. I knew it wouldn't happen, but I hesitated for a long time before jumping into the ditch. I don't think anyone wants to see a game character spend 48 hours cleaning gangrene or pressing X every two minutes to solve diarrhea.
There's one more thing that bothers me now. Actually, it's not very annoying, because it's an optional task: collection in the game.
Matthew: I hate setting up collections in games, too. I don't think we are the only ones.
Non-mainline tasks in the game world can increase the diversity of the game and reward mechanism, and can provide real value feelings for players. So why do these rarely appear in Tomb Raider? Tomb Raider only provides more contents than the exciting main task of Akam Shelter and Akam City, but Tomb Raider rarely tries to hide many old-fashioned details and contents: burning posters, lighting candles, emitting inflatable lights, breaking boxes and so on. Every novel content is full of sub-content that is not new to the player and does not even need interaction. They are covered by the whole connotation of the game, without destroying the whole game, but they destroy the charming atmosphere created by crystal dynamics.
The idea of "I want to do the same" created most of the content of the game. For me, I am obsessed with listing what I can see and do in the game, which makes the game different. Different games seek to increase the game time and satisfy the low-level game instinct. Tomb Raider is completely different from Assassin's Creed, the worst game in this respect: the writer of Tomb Raider said that he would find all the GPS chips after the second customs clearance in Assassin's Creed.
I have the same problem with Tomb Raider's dependence on guns. Tired of reading some comments that emphasize the diversity of game characters: for example, the protagonist is a psychopath who kills people without blinking an eye while playing the savior like a god. Dependence exists in every narrative game, which is a problem to be solved by the whole game industry. There is no need to criticize a particular game. Shooting won't change my position on Laura, but shooting has made Tomb Raider more common, especially now that so many games use guns.
Pearson: I agree with the collection in the game. They are really boring. Why not add some exciting main tasks? It is true that monuments and documents can introduce the background and history of the game, but in the end, players will only focus on the main tasks and will not remember these game background information. I mean, picking up a mushroom or lighting a pile of garbage in a fierce gun battle seems trivial, even ridiculous.
However, this is a computer game, which we have become accustomed to now: guiding players to explore gadgets in unknown areas, and guiding players to upgrade along narrative routes or go to enemy crumbs, even though we know the game route like the back of our hand. But players prefer to see more real rewards than a little experience, perhaps because Laura learned to fight and crawl from walking on the path of the abandoned temple to bullets, perhaps because it is useless for players to return to the original plot after completing the main task. If collecting mushrooms can turn bows and arrows into hallucinogens, I am willing to spend a lot of time and energy collecting mushrooms. Although Tomb Raider has no disappointing elements, the process of robbing the tomb is particularly scattered, and every time you can choose to decrypt it, you will accumulate a puzzle to open the treasure chest. For example, one side of the fourth wall is on the other side, but I'm glad to see more imagination here.
I still think Tomb Raider has been unfairly evaluated. Tomb Raider is exaggerated because of these skills and upgrade system, but I think it is a bit vulgar. After all, this game is about characters, especially recasting the image of a heroine. Tomb Raider is especially good at this. Players can complete different chapters in very dangerous actions, or they can explore freely and think calmly occasionally. The emotional clues of the story are particularly short, but it is better than the sad plot everywhere in the game.
I haven't finished it yet, because I want to relive the game, which is a luxury experience for me. I just set the game to the highest level and lowered the frame rate to 40, making every scene in the game look particularly luxurious, especially the lighting, which gave me the motivation to travel around the game after customs clearance. I also want to say that I will miss Laura very much after a while. I wonder: If the story from possibility to reality really happened to Laura, what would happen when she came back?
Matthew: This is a puzzle created by the game plot. Generally speaking, when creativity and business motivation are exhausted, designers will return to their original role. Laura, who is confident and good at fighting, is one of the few idol figures in the computer game industry, but idols are inevitably forgotten. Crystal dynamics has done a good job in increasing the depth and connotation of his role, but it has also created new problems.
We can compare James Bond's rebirth from casino royale with the fall of the canopy in the James Bond trilogy. I like these three movies very much. The climax of Falling of the Sky clearly explains the role, but all the time and efforts to describe Bond's background can only explain the source of his problems. In the next movie, we will see the familiar James Bond, but fans have been familiar with it for ten years.
Obviously, we don't know what the sequel to Tomb Raider will bring, but we have solved many problems for the future. There is no doubt that the visual effect of the sequel will be very luxurious and the action will be beautiful, which is not hard to imagine. The survey shows that error-prone characters in the game are very popular. At the end of Tomb Raider, Laura sets the stage for the next transformation, which may not be crystal dynamics's plan.