No Game New Year: Tomb Raider

Last Monday night I finished Tomb Raider on the Xbox 360. This brings the total number of games I have finished during this challenge up to four; not quite what I was hoping for now that we’re well in to the sixth month of it but there you go. Tomb Raider was always going to be one of the games I’d have to finish, though. I got around three quarters of the way through the main story last year, and for reasons that most likely relate to one of the XCOM games I abandoned it. Which was pretty rubbish, thinking about it, and I think the game deserved seeing it through to the end.

 

So, what do I think of the game?

Hmm… difficult to say. I think I would do the game a disservice by comparing it to previous Tomb Raider games, since the whole point of a re-boot is to offer a new experience with the same intellectual property. But the inevitable comparisons arise, and I can’t quite decide whether the new game is better than the older games, of which I have played Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II. In the new game, the world feels more accessible and at the same time more restrictive. The plot appears to be more realistic and yet more contrived. The introduction of skill development is welcome, but takes away some of the challenge of having to work out what to do and where to go.

That having been said, it is a very good game, and I’ll explain why in a moment, but to clarify: The rebooted Tomb Raider is an excellent game for the current/previous generation. It is a good game of it’s time – just as the previous games were good for their time. The franchise is nearly twenty years old now; technology and capability has come on a lot since then and it’s good to see that Crystal Dynamic made it work for the current generation of gaming.

 

I certainly like the new version of Lara Croft. Better proportioned, still conventionally good-looking, but with an air of vulnerability about her, the origin story does a lot to develop what has become one of video games’ most iconic characters. Up until the reboot, she has as far as I know time been portrayed as a kind of female Indiana Jones; polite and professional in the right circumstances, and an absolute badass when out in the field. This was great, and it certainly did a lot to promote the idea of a female protagonist. I can’t think of any other game in the mid-90s that was both an original IP and had a primarily female lead; strong female characters did exist but usually as an ensemble of at least an equal number of males. It’s more common these days, of course, but seeing the character whose main motivation is to get off the island and survive lends a new side to female characters, and indeed Lara Croft. Her previous fascination of history and artefacts are now secondary considerations, or side missions, and the idea that she’s less likely to throw herself lightly in to danger in order to pursue an interest makes her character far more believable. And she’s very well voice-acted as well, which does nothing but add to the effect.

There has been some criticism of the imbalance of her personality between the cut scenes and the game. The obvious example is the first time she kills someone; in the cut scene she’s horrified at what she’s had to do. Yet after this scene, she’ll gun down seven or eight guys at a time in open play and appear not to be effected by it at all, even uttering curses to her enemies later on. I can see the point of the criticism, but I think it is misapplied to this situation. The developers had to show that killing people is not something Lara does lightly, nor has it ever occurred to her to do so before; hence the cut scene. If the same thing happened every time she killed someone in the game – 200-300 people by the time you reach the end – then it would suck all the fun out of it and derail the whole thing. So it’s something of a non-issue for me.

 

The gameplay is good, the controls are fluid and responsive and the combat is as good as any 3^rd person action game I’ve played on the 360 – at least as good as Space Marine, and probably a little better than Gears of War. The game rewards you for exploration; you don’t HAVE to look around all the tombs and solve all the puzzles, or explore every inch of the map for every item, but if you do, you upgrade your experience, skills and equipment as a reward. In my play through, I did what I thought I needed to and ended the game with a not-inconsiderable 82% complete. It was somewhat satisfying to find all the challenge maguffins in one area, and find enough artefacts etc to trigger the Achievement Points, but leaving it all until the end felt like more work than fun while trying to cover what I’d missed.

The elephant in the room of course is the Quick Time Events, which are a controversial issue amongst many people. I’m not keen on them. It’s not actually that much fun to be in a situation where the gameplay mechanic is: “Tap this button or you fail.” I find myself looking for the button prompts, almost ignoring the cinematic sequence that gives rise to the QTE in the first place! Thankfully, in this game, they don’t outstay their welcome, though I wonder if plonking one over what aught to have been the last boss was a good idea.

Lara now has a number of different skills to use with her weapons; bows and arrows, climbing axes and the like. This is commonplace in a lot of modern games, and does add to the overall experience, but falls down when compared to the older games in the franchise. It’s kind of hard to explain why, but bear with me:

In the old games, Lara has a specific set of skills and moves that stay with her throughout the game. Apart from the weapons, absolutely nothing affects these skills all the way through the game. That means that Lara is as good as she is from one side of the game to the other – and it is up to the player to figure out how to use those skills to the best effect. There was no hand-holding; the player had to decide whether she will be able to make the jump, climb the wall, and run fast enough to escape the trap, or swim to the other side of the lake in one breath. If a secret is revealed, it is up to the player to work out how to get it – it is certainly possible but the way won’t always be obvious. It puts the risks and their rewards where it needs to be: In the hands of the player.

In this reboot, Lara gains skills and moves throughout the game but their application is situational, and so obvious that it takes a lot of the challenge out of the game. Early on you acquire a climbing axe which can be used on certain walls. This is great, except that the walls which are climbable could only be more clearly marked if they had bolt-on holds. The only risk, then, is mis-timing your pressing of the X button, which can usually be saved by another QTE.

Another new trick you will be doing A LOT is using the bow and arrow to create ropes, for Lara either to pull something down, pull her up or slide down. You fire arrows with rope attached by pressing the right shoulder button, and your target is always a set of ropes wound tightly around something – or a climbable wall. If you’re creating a rope bridge, there’s a hooking post to which you attach the rope; it’s not rocket science.

Perhaps the most salient way in which the new game differentiates from the old one is the so-called Survival View. What happens here is that you press the left shoulder button, the screen goes black and white, then the areas of interest – say, climbing walls, rope attachment points or collectable items – will he highlighted. With the old games, you’d have to figure out what to do; with this new game, you can hit the left button and the game will give you hints like ‘Well, it’s to do with that hitching post, and that wall. Guess what you have to do…’

Obviously, there are positive connotations to this as well. It does mean that you’ll spend a lot less time doing something I did a lot with the previous Tomb Raider games, which was wander around the level hopelessly lost and confused, wondering where to go next and what to do. It’s kind of like having a walkthrough that they used to print in gaming magazines (and maybe they still do, I haven’t bought one in a while!) telling you what to do, and while that was pretty much the only way I was able to get anywhere in the previous Tomb Raider games, it does take away a lot of the challenge of figuring it out for yourself. But again, this is the generation we have now; we expect to be able to finish single-player campaigns in 20 hours or less without getting stuck. And a lot of the kids who will have played the new Tomb Raider game won’t even have been born when the first ones came out; they won’t remember the frustration at having to work out which key goes in which door – nor will they ever have the satisfaction of figuring it out.

These points fit in with a lot of what I’ve been hearing from certain Youtube channels, like TotalBiscuit, Yahtzee from The Escapist and some of my friends as well, about how the nature of games have changed over the years. That’s a whole blog in itself, and won’t be entirely welcome since a lot of those points will already have been made, but essentially comes down to this: Games these days rely far too much on spectacle, graphical fidelity, and multiplayer modes. It is what people have come to expect from games, but most people my age (I’m 28, the aforementioned Youtubers are a bit older and most of my friends are mid-late 20s or thereabouts) remember a time when we didn’t have the technology to provide this. What we had instead were well-designed levels, rewards for finding secrets that actually made a difference and replayable games; I’m not saying all old games had this, but the ones we remember tended to.

The game has already been re-released for the Next-Gen consoles, names the ‘Definitive Edition.’ Not yet owning a new generation console I couldn’t honestly say what difference it makes, having never played it, so I’m going on what I’ve found out over 10 minutes research: the game looks obviously better on the new consoles. The PS4 apparently has the edge in this, and there is significantly higher frame-rate in the new games presumably making for a smoother experience. (As I don’t play games on PC, frame rate is pretty much a non-issue for me.) From what I’ve been able to find out, the new game does have a little more content in single player, but not enough to justify buying it again if you’ve already played it through. So even if I do get a new-gen console, I won’t be buying Tomb Raider for it – though I may be interested in the sequel that’s supposedly in the works.

 

The game’s Multiplayer mode has been criticised for being lacklustre. I neither agree nor disagree with this, as to be perfectly honest I haven’t really been able to find out. I doubt it’s on the same level as the Call of Dutys, Battlefields and Halos of this world – and say what you like about those games, but their Multiplayer modes are well-maintained and very popular – but Tomb Raider’s multiplayer mode functions, if nothing else. There is your generic team deathmatch, and a free-for-all deathmatch mode that is the base of any multiplayer mode. There are some other modes based on survival and scavenging, that presumably fit in with the theme of the game. Unfortunately, by the time I bought the game, which was less than a year after it came out, the online community was already drying up to the point where you couldn’t get a game in anything other than team deathmatch. And now, well over a year after the game’s release, you’re lucky if you get that. It is the same logistical problem that many modern games have – multiplayer is all well and good, but absolutely useless if no one is playing it.

Tomb Raider stands up well enough on its single-player campaign for this not to matter so much, but the developers missed a trick here – Why not create a 2 or 4-player co-op campaign? There are certainly enough characters to make it work, and an alternative story could be created to work alongside the single-player campaign. There are even characters in the Multiplayer mode that, as far as I know, don’t appear in the main game at all – why not create a game mode based around a group of survivors who Lara and her friends never have the fortune to meet in their adventures? Or even an evil campaign based on the Solarii brotherhood would have been entertaining as well.

But there’s little use in thinking of what might have been. Tomb Raider is what it is: A solid third person action adventure, and a story well-told through the medium of video games. If you can find it at a cheap price, it’s worth a look – just don’t expect the old games!

 

Next, I'm giving Prototype another go; another game I never really gave the chance it deserves. We'll see how that pans out!

No Game New Year part 8: Fable 2

Fable 2

Fable 2 was one of the first games I ever bought for my Xbox360. Indeed, this was one of the reasons I chose the Xbox360 over the Playstation 3; I’d enjoyed the first Fable game and was eager to continue the story. It took me nearly two years to get from one side of the game to the other, purely because I kept getting distracted by other games. To be honest, this happens almost every time I play any role-playing game, and more is the pity because it means that I’ve only ever finished a couple of them. (Before now, that would be the first Fable Game, both Knights of the Old Republic games and Final Fantasy 1.)

I’ve heard a lot of publicity of from Peter Molyneux that Fable was supposed to be a unique role-playing experience. And I guess in many ways, he’s right – but not for the usual reasons. Here are some significant differences:

 

Character Classes and Development

Usually with Role-playing games you create your character at the start of the game based on how you want to play the game. You would normally choose ‘classes’ based on how you wanted your character to deal with certain situations, and they would normally be variations on the Dungeons and Dragons-style archetypes of Fighter, Wizard or Rogue, (but not very often Cleric, funnily enough. I suspect this is to do with the Cleric being a supporting character, and with no party to support, this class would be a bit redundant in most games!)

In Fable, this doesn’t really happen. Your character always starts in the same way, with a basic set of attacks, but evolves over time based on how you play the game. They can be upgraded based on Strength, Skill and Will. But here’s the thing: You can’t just pick one. If you’re going to make an effective character, you have to take at least some elements of all three.

For example, say you’re making a Rogue character. (This was my choice, as I wanted to create an evil assassin-like character, more on this later.) You would think that the Skill abilities would be the best ones to upgrade, and they are – but they’re not the only ones. The game doesn’t really have a stealth system, so most of the Skill-based abilities concern the way you shoot your ranged weapons, and one of them gives you a dodge roll (I think.[1]) However, if you want your hero to be any good in melee combat at all you need to at least give them the Strength upgrades that gives them access to the combat moves, and investing in Will points isn’t a bad idea either as it gives access to a ‘time’ spell that can be used as a teleport. So, you can’t make a pure or ‘mono’ class. Apart from anything else, if you sink all your experience points into one path, you will find that you’ve run out of things to improve long before the game ends! I’ve not really tried playing through the game with a massive focus on any of the other classes, but you can’t for example make a pure Fighter as certain sections of the game do require you to cast spells, and you need at least some way to aim a ranged attack for the last boss. And being a pure Will user is not much use either because you won’t develop any extra hit points or any means to avoid damage, so as soon as the enemy breaks through you will be very vulnerable indeed. So the game almost forces you to take at least some measure of all three.

Incidentally, the archetypes are covered by the supporting cast, who do seem to be purely one kind of hero.

 

Alignment

I played the game to the end with an Evil character, for little reason other than in the three files I have saved onto my Xbox, the Evil character is the one where I’d made the most progress through the game and I wanted to wrap this up reasonably quickly...

This is probably one of two games where I’ve played an evil character and looked for the so-called ‘bad’ ending. I don’t usually like doing this because I hate being chided for my actions that I know are wrong, or ‘evil,’ during the game. However, because Fable 2 doesn’t take itself too seriously, and the consequences of evil actions are often quite comical (try sacrificing someone to the Temple of Shadows and listen to the guy’s reaction and you’ll see what I mean,) this time I didn’t mind playing an evil character too much. I ended up with a character that looked for the entire world like a Demon; grey skin, veined lines and horns, and people ran away from her[2] in terror when she approached. There were some foolhardy enough to marry her, and then she sacrificed them to the Temple. I won’t say it didn’t make me feel a little bad – immersion in the game is one of the reasons I play games, after all – but in general, this is one of the games where I didn’t mind being the evil character.

Incidentally, the other one was Star Wars: Jedi Academy. That was only because no matter how you play the game all the way though, the decision you make that gives you the ‘bad’ ending comes right at the end of the game and you’ve only got to do one more level anyway.

I did find it a little odd that the game doesn’t force one particular ending on you. Without spoiling any of the individual endings, at the end of the game you basically get to choose how it all turns out from a choice of three endings. One is obviously the good ending, one is the bad ending and one is the neutral ending.[3] Now, I’m glad it lets you choose at least the latter, because playing a neutral character in any game is surprisingly hard to do. Having vastly different motivations within the same character makes the game feel a little unbalanced; most quests that have a degree of morality in them have either a good or evil ending, and if you’re not consistent with your choices you might find playing the game a rather strange experience. However, Fable 2 seemed perfectly happy to allow me to choose the ‘good’ ending, even though by that point I was about as evil as you can get.

 

Voice Acting

Most games these days use voice actors to one degree or another, especially RPGs. And with enough talent, some of those voices can be stellar performances; I’m thinking mainly of Jennifer Hale here because nothing she’s ever lent her voice to came out badly, that I’m aware of. And I keep seeing her name coming up in voice-acting credits, so she seems like a pretty big name!

Fable 2 differs from this in the sense that its supporting class are people I’ve actually heard of. I’m not sure how famous the British actors are in America, but Zoe Wanamaker was very good as the sage-like-but-slightly-creepy seer Teresa. People from the UK would recognise her as Susan from the TV Sitcom My Family, and our friends in America are more likely to remember her as Madame Hooch from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s (Philosopher’s) Stone. Julia Sawalha was a surprising choice for bulky fighter Hammer, but she did a very good job. I’ll always remember her as Saffy from the TV Sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, but if you’ve ever seen the film Chicken Run, she performed the voice of Ginger. Ron Glass (I think he’s American) put in a good performance as the Will User Garth, and I’ll always remember him as Shepherd Book in the brilliant Firefly. However, the best character for me is undoubtedly Reaver, voiced by the always-excellent Steven Fry. It would have been so easy to make the evil rogue a shadowy assassin in a cowl, but they really gave the character its own lease of life and Fry’s performance was incredible. I’m told he appears in Fable 3 which I also have but have never played; I’m looking forward to seeing how he’s developed in the later game!

So, Fable 2 takes itself less seriously than other role-playing games, and for that reason I think I had a lot more fun with it than I had with, say, Skyrim and Dragon Age. Not that those are bad games, but Fable’s pacing just made it a little bit more fun. I’ll keep the game for now as I’d like to finish it with the other characters, but I’ll put that on the back-burner as I might try something a little different for next week

---

[1] At the time of writing, the Fable Wiki was either so poorly coded or had such a lot of traffic on it that it froze up the moment I tried to take it past the first page. This makes research for this game a little bit more difficult than I would have liked, so you should be aware that I am making educated guesses for some of this.

[2] Don’t ask me why, but where there is a choice, I generally prefer to play female characters. It’s just my ‘thing.’

[3] The same was the case in the first Fable game as well, except that there was no ‘neutral’ option.

No Game New Year Part 2: Grand Theft Auto 5. This is going to take me a while...

Hi there.

So No Game New Year is going well so far in the sense that I haven't given in to temptation and bought a new game. Early days, I know. But it's rare that we get this far in to new year and I haven't so much as set foot in a game store! In terms of my progress with GTA 5, I wasn't expecting to have much time to play this week due to work/band/Dungeons and Dragons/girlfriend commitments, but an unexpected day off work on Wednesday (I was sick with a cold) meant that I had some time between sleeping and eating to go through the game and I'm up to roughly 28% so far.

Two major things to mention today, and the first is character development. I'm actually really impressed with how this is working out. Michael, Franklin and Trevor (I've now found all three) are their own characters. There is evidence of crime movie tropes within them, but they all have there own different ways of dealing with things and people, and it makes them a lot more believable than characters in video games might otherwise be.

This is quite hard to explain without giving away spoilers, but I think I can say with some certainty that Michael is the character I can most relate to at the moment. In terms of the decisions I've made that have affected the course of my life, I haven't always got it right, and now that I'm 28 I have to live with the consequences of those decisions. And while my personal issues aren't on quite the same level as Michael's problems, it does make me empathise with him. He's well aware of his faults on being too quick to anger, but is desperately trying to make things work with his family, only to have it all blow up in his face because in reality, the damage was done a long time before... and he is forced to follow the only option left open to him.

Contrast this with Trevor... if you've played the game, you'll know what I mean when I say he is at the same time the most and least likeable character in the entire game. Yes, he is an absolute badass. But at the same time, playing as him, or watching his cut scenes, actually makes me feel very uneasy. You've got no idea when he's talking seriously about something or is about to lose it completely and violently murder somebody, or both. He is clearly a very dangerous man, fitting for a GTA game, but not a comfortable or enjoyable character to play. I'll tell you what he's like: He's like the 'hard' people I knew at school, the violent aggressive gang of bullies that prided themselves on nothing but their opinion that they could beat up anybody in the whole school. The only method I had of dealing with those people was to avoid them if at all possible, and if our paths ever did have occasion to cross, I had to keep my head down, my mouth shut, and utter a silent prayer to a God I didn't believe in that they wouldn't decide to mess with me today. That's what it was like when we were all 15. Trevor looks to be around 45, and it looks much, much worse.

And if you're wondering why I'm going in to such depth about the characters... well, that's how good this game is. It actually makes you care about the characters involved. So yeah, well done for that.

My second point regards the missions. If you read last week's blog you'll recall I talked about the missions that, while good in their own way, lacked variety in the ways you might approach them. This didn't change all that much to begin with. Again, the missions worked well as set-pieces, and the Heist missions (of which I have done one) give a choice when planning them of a gung-ho or stealthy approach which was nice, but once you actually get to playing the game, it does sometimes feel like an elaborate game of Simon Says.

This got better once Trevor came in to it. Once this happened, I noticed a lot more of, shall we say, 'classic' GTA missions where far from running and gunning, you actually have to think about how you're going to do it. For example, the mission where you have to destroy the O'Neil farm is an absolute beauty. While I'm sure it's possible to rush the whole farm with the right combination of weapons and armour, I actually prefer sniper rifles, even if I am appalling at using them. The game really did make you think about what group of enemies would be best to take out first, what weapon to use, and whether another option is available to you. In the end, I took out the middle rank of guards first with the sniper rifle, the front two using stealth, and by the time I got to the house, there were few enough left to make running and gunning an impossible task so I got to do a bit of that as well. Now, this might have been the optimal way to do this mission, I don't know. But the crucial point here is that the game let me figure it out. It didn't keep flashing pop-up messages at me saying "Take these guys out with the rifle" or "Stealth-kill these guys." That made for a much more enjoyable experience. I would like to see more of this as the game progresses. As I said before, I am aware that some of the missions were designed as set-pieces and have to play out in a certain way. But it's good to have a little bit of choice in the matter.

I also noticed the 'Skip' button, where if you fail a mission three times you can choose to skip it. I've never deployed this, but I'm assuming it means that the game will continue as though you had finished the mission, even though you hadn't.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I can see why it has to exist. The storyline and character development have been by far the strongest point of the game so far and you wouldn't want to de-rail the whole thing because you got stuck. On the other hand it can take a lot of the challenge out of the game simply by giving you the chance to avoid it. And not in a clever, Metroid-Vania style 'cast-a-spell-that-turns-you-in-to-a-bat-and-allows-you-to-fly-over-the-fight-you-can't-do' way, because at least you have to find the spell that turns you in to a bat and you can give yourself a pat on the back for figuring out that particular strategy. No, this literally allows you to skip the bit you're on, like a level skip cheat on a Sega Megadrive/Genesis game, only this time you don't even need the cheat code.

Well, fair enough, if that's what it needs to keep the story going then that's what it needs. But I'm unlikely ever to use it myself. I'd be depriving myself of the immense satisfaction of either figuring out how to do a tricky mission, or getting past a tough part; that's where the game gets really good and I'm not going to throw it away!

A few additional points:

One of the things Rockstar don't really appreciate - and to be fair, they're not the only ones, I've seen quite a few games do this - is that not all of us have screens the size of classroom whiteboards. Mine is about 16 inches by 9, and due to the layout of my bedroom, this is not likely to change. While this rarely gives me a problem in playing the game, it does make the text a little difficult to read. Particularly in this game where messages come through the cell phone, I've really had to strain to read some of those text pieces. A bit bigger please, guys!

I've had a go with some of the mini-games as well, namely Tennis, Darts, and 'that' section of the strip club. They function well for what they are, but they are far too easy. Maybe it's because I've played Topspin on the old Xbox, which works in much the same way as the tennis game in GTA 5, but it was much too easy to beat the computer, and not that hard on Multiplayer either. Yeah I get it, they've made GTA 5, not a tennis game, but it takes some of the fun out of it knowing there's almost no challenge in there. Then again, maybe I'm just not playing the right people.

I also had a go with GTA Online and I'm liking that a lot better now that it's not just a free-for-all and there are actually some missions involved with it, as well as some more conventional multiplayer modes like death matches and team battles. I'm not awful at this, (I am in some other games) but I'm not great at it either. I think in some cases I have pissed off members of my team, not because I don't know what I am doing but simply that I'm not very good at doing it. But it's enjoyable enough, and probably as good as an online version of GTA is going to get.

We'll see how far next week takes us!