Tag: DLC

Ideas for Post-Shadow Tomb Raider

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It has just been over one year since Shadow of the Tomb Raider was released. I wasn’t bowled over by the game (Rise is still my favourite of the new reboot series), but it had enough to keep me engaged.

However, I feel a need for change is coming on again. 2013 was a revelation, creating a Tomb Raider game and a Lara we hadn’t seen before. Rise built upon its predecessor’s work and tweaked and refined the experience.

Shadow… it feels a bit like replication. It is a very good replication and has a few nifty surprises hidden in its backpack, but it is not so much a step forward rather than a step sideways.

I don’t think this is just personal bias. For all the talk of Shadow being the final event that turned Lara Croft into the Tomb Raider, it felt like a story being stretched further than it needed to be.

So, with the reboot trilogy finished, let us throw a few ideas around that I would want to see in a new Tomb Raider game.

Where Should Tomb Raider go After Shadow of the Tomb Raider?

  1. A Different Lara

One of the things I find fascinating about Lara is that in twenty years she has gone through several redesigns but remains instantly recognisible. That may be a statement on female characters in gaming, but also could be because of her iconic outfit and accessories.

Now that we’ve had half a decade of hyper-realistic Lara, I wouldn’t mind a touch of cartoon styling for her next appearance. I don’t mean make her the impossibly proportioned character from the 90s, but something a bit more…Amazonian (a descriptor that was actually used in The Angel of Darkness at 1:03:16).

Lara is meant to be this kickass character able to throw herself up sheer cliff faces and fight a whole manner of creatures, so make her the peak of ‘killer kickass’. Shadow teased us with a character model with biceps before they nixed the idea. Let’s see that this time around.

My main two ideas for a cartoony Croft were Gridlock from Rainbow Six Siege and Laura from Street Fighter V (seen down below respectively). Both these women look like (and can) go toe-to-toe with any male character in their games, and I think it would work well seeing a physically imposing Lara, showing how she has changed over time. I wouldn’t even mind if they kept the scars from Rise and Shadow, another token of the change and history of the character.

With a less realistic design we could change Lara’s movement as well. I’ve recently been replaying Legend and one thing that struck me was that Lara’s movement is…goofier?

For example, instead of just climbing up a ledge, Lara will fling herself up using only her upper body strength and onto her feet. If a player continues to tap the Roll button, Lara will throw herself into a gymnastic display worthy of an Olympic gold medal. I haven’t even mentioned the swan dive and handstand that she could perform in the original series. I like these more over-the-top approaches.

In terms of character, yeah, I kind of want to see a more playful Lara next time around. Rise had a few moments, but I felt Shadow had hardly any levity (although that game was about the apocalypse so I’ll let it slide). And regarding her parents, it’s been cleared up, let’s move on.

  1. A Reworked World

It was quite a big step in 2013 to have Tomb Raider set in an open world, although it seems rather obvious. Previous games would have massive levels (with some in TR4 actually having multiple points of entry and having to return to a few of them several times), but 2013 nailed a great formula.

But just like a change regarding Lara, I am feeling an itch for a change in the level design. While I was playing Shadow I went for a trek and found some interesting places and hidden nooks, but then when I returned and spoke to the NPC to start a mission, the NPC took me through a whistle-stop tour of everywhere I had just been. It felt so weird to play through, and this would happen multiple times throughout the game, to the point where I stopped exploring (which is the antithesis of the game’s vision).

However, going back to a more linear frame would hamper the series, as it seems to have flourished now it has more room to play around with. So let’s make a compromise; a big but linear hub world, with several paths leading to several tombs. These tombs can be signposted by small but very deliberate signs like rocks in an odd formation or a broken tree (similar to the Monolith Puzzles in Shadow, which I suggested could be a gameplay feature back in 2017).

Once we play through the tomb we return to the hub world and follow another path to another tomb. The hub world could be a mash-up of Prince of Persia and Mirror’s Edge, with Tomb Raider’s aesthetic and individual trappings giving the world flavour (come to think of it, with all that climbing, surely Lara Croft would have learnt some gymnastics or parkour?).

Prince of Persia 2008
Prince Of Persia (2008) had several paths leading to each hub world, making the land feel expansive despite having a linear design. (Source: ripostedisponible.wordpress.com).

The hub world also allows us to open up geographically. While I enjoyed the single locations of the past three games (with Yamatai and Siberia having some geographical variety), the hub world allows our explorer to find all the pieces to a treasure in one location (after finishing all the tombs), before heading off to a new location with its own hub world and selection of tombs.

One request though, cut the collectibles, at least in the hub world. I get anxious whenever I access an open world map for the first time and all the items load in, and I can’t be the only one (not to mention ‘Touch The Shiny Thing’ doesn’t exactly get my blood racing). Keep the secrets to the levels and leave it as that. However, a counter argument to this would be,

“Why have an open world if there is nothing to do in it?”

This is a valid question. So I propose another solution to go with the level-based secrets; unmapped locations.

While Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag and Skyrim had some locations off their maps, the main game that gave me this inspiration was the original Mafia.

Mafia had an open city to drive around in, but many prominent locations were just off the map edge, giving the countryside a sense of danger and making any mission set outside the city tenser. There were several places in the city of Lost Heaven that the player was under no obligation to visit, such as the Lost Heaven Lighthouse or Dam. I think something like this but for Tomb Raider, like a disguised path leading to an optional tomb or puzzle, would be a good addition.

Mafia Lost Heaven Dam
The Lost Heaven Dam from Mafia. This location is not on a map or used in-game, yet makes the land feel richer for its inclusion. (Source: mafiagame.fandom.com)
  1. The Combat

Part of Lara’s iconic image is the twin pistols. They were missing from the reboot series, instead replaced with another now-iconic weapon, the bow.

Whoever the developer of the next game ends up being, the bow has been an integral inclusion of the rebooted Tomb Raider games and it would be a little sad to see it leave after three games.

The pistols were seen for one small scene near the end of the 2013 game, with Lara wielding akimbo pistols to shoot bad guy Mathias off a cliff edge. However I thought the dual pistols scene looked silly (even in a game about Sun Queens and zombie samurai) because the game had been aiming for realism for the past 20+ hours. If the series were to take a less realistic slant then twin pistols could make a return, complete with flips and kicks.

In terms of gameplay, of Lara is already throwing herself over ledges and walls why not have her take a leaf from Max Payne or Rubi Malone and fly through the air? TR has dabbled in bullet time before, both in set pieces and player enabled so it might be a cool thing to include.

The main reason why I wanted to mention combat is violence and death. The older Tomb Raider games got away with some gruesome deaths by their lack of graphics. Spike pits, being set on fire, drowned, shot, stabbed, eaten alive, blown up, disintegrated, all that jazz got Tomb Raider an 11+ rating.

Over time the series has fluctuated between 11+ and 16+, with the reboot being the first time that the series broke the 18+ rating. President of Eidos Interactive, Ian Livingstone, said the change was made to deliver the “gritty realism” that players wanted.

And I get it, the market in 2013 was heading in that direction. However, a lot of the violent deaths in the reboot felt that they were going for shock value (especially that spike through the neck, you know the one I’m talking about, 2:02).

The market today is a lot more colourful and cartoony. I want Tomb Raider to be playable to anyone who wants to pick up the controller, and I think taking that step back on the snuff film aesthetic would be a bit more refreshing.

Tracer Overwatch
Overwatch, a game with fast frenetic gunplay and only a 12+ rating. Uncharted only got a 16+ rating. Why can’t Tomb Raider go lower? (Source: polygon.com).
  1. The Story

I’m not going into an in-depth “what-I-would-write” post, but there was a tease at the end of Shadow as to where Lara would be going next before it was patched out. On Lara’s desk in the original epilogue scene, there was a letter addressed to her from a Jacqueline Natla. Natla was the head baddy in both Tomb Raider 1 and the remake Anniversary.

I don’t want this to be the next Tomb Raider game. That story has already been done twice and I don’t know what making that game a third time will add to the experience.

So instead, I propose this. This is the trailer to the Hitman reboot, released in 2016.

To fans of the Hitman franchise (such as myself), this was a geek-out moment. All of the kills featured come from the previous games.

The sniper kill is “Kowloon Triads in Gang War” from the original Hitman game. The sushi death is from “Tracking Hayamoto” from Hitman 2. The drowning man is Fritz Fuchs in “Traditions of the Trade” from Contracts. The cello player is Don Fernando Delgado in “A Vintage Year” from Blood Money. And the final bullet through the one-way mirror kills Dom Osmond during “Hunter and Hunted” from Absolution.

There was a lot of grumbling in the Hitman community as to what it meant to the legacy of Agent 47 when 2016’s Hitman was referred to as a reboot. Fans were assuaged when we heard David Bateson’s voice in the “Sapienza” trailer, and this trailer was even better. We weren’t losing the character’s history, this trailer showed we were continuing on from Absolution.

I think this would be a good way to reintroduce Lara. A trailer in a similar style, seeing Lara at Yamatai, Kitezh, and Paititi (the reboot games), then St. Francis Folly (TR1), Venice/Barkhang Monastery (TR2), River Ganges/RX-Tech Mines (TR3), Valley Of The Kings (TR4) and beyond would be a great moment. It would allow Lara to grow beyond the reboot without throwing out the character established in the past three games.

Call it a soft reboot; heading back to square two, restarting the series but with the knowledge and experiences of previous games filling in Lara’s backstory.

Speaking of all of that established lore, a soft reboot allows us to keep the excellent Camilla Luddington as Lara and bring back many characters. Winston and Jonah are a given and I would personally love the return of Sam, Zip, and Alister as periphery characters.

One thing I would love to see in Tomb Raider are rival archeologists. We had Pierre and Larson in TR1/TRA and Chronicles, Von Croy in TR4, Chronicles, and Angel of Darkness, and Carter Bell in The Temple Of Osiris. It would be fun to have a story where Lara is facing off against people who are just as smart and slick as her. There is even a multiplayer component there, having players face off against each other if the developers wanted to.

Conclusion

I remember when Shadow was first teased, Square Enix said in a statement that it wouldn’t, “…be very long between the official reveal and when you can play.” With Shadow Of The Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition releasing earlier this month, a new lease of life has been given to the instalment.

There will probably be a moderate wait before any new moves for the franchise are announced. Square Enix, working with Eidos Montreal on Shadow, were able to deliver a relatively quick follow up to Rise as most of the pieces were in place. But for now they should have some time to relax, celebrate their success, before coming back with whatever new ideas they want to explore.

The reboot was a much needed boost for Tomb Raider. It brought me back to the series, and brought in a whole new set of fans. I don’t want to forget it, but I think Tomb Raider needs to strike out again.

Gridlock Photo Source: rainbows.fandom.com

Laura Photo Source: reddit.com (r/StreetFighter)

Photo Banner Source: twitter.com (@tombraider).

L.A. Noire and Pacing in Games

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It is weird to think that L.A. Noire came out eight years ago, back in the good old days of 2011. And being in development of some kind for nearly six years, we are fast coming up on fifteen years of L.A. Noire being a “thing”.

And in the past few years the game got somewhat of a new lease on life, being released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in November 2017, with enhancements to accommodate for new features such as the touch screen on the Switch and VR abilities for the PlayStation.

With these new enhancements came the “complete” story, compiling all of the cases that had previously been DLC (short for downloadable content) into the experience. For me however, these “new” cases being placed into the story has made the game feel a little disjointed.

La Noire VR
L.A. Noire VR allowed to players to step into the (gum)shoes of Cole Phelps in specific cases made for the system. (Source: dualshockers.com)

Let’s have a look at the cases, because while I love nearly all of them, the fact that they are DLC makes me view them differently. And part of it is to do with pacing.

This isn’t me railing against the fact that these are cases that should have been in the original retail experience. The game is already 20+ hours long, five cases of varying length is hardly going to up the playtime.

I can also understand why DLC cases work for something like L.A. Noire. L.A. Noire is designed almost like a TV serial, with each new case being a new episode. It will have scenarios that link between cases such as the Black Dahlia in Homicide and morphine in Vice, but each case is mainly self-contained. And yet these new cases seem to alter the balance of the pacing of the game.

From Snails to Speeding Bullets – A Quick Look at Pacing

Pacing is something that never gets much attention when it comes to games. Similar to editing in film, it is a phenomenon that you don’t know is there until it is not there. For example, pacing is only really brought up when it is a detriment to the game, with many walking simulators or opening hours in open-world games being criticised for their slower pace.

Open-world games are probably the hardest to do; how can you have a character-driven story if the player can decide to head off and not focus on the narrative (see Bethesda’s games). Pacing can also affect a sense of time, feeling like scenes are shunted together. I felt this in AC: Unity, where a moody European white boy became an Assassin and then due to the breakneck presentation felt like he attained the rank of Grand Master within a week.

Talking of assassins, AC: Syndicate’s pacing is better than many of the previous games by virtue of one screen; the shot of Big Ben ticking by. Any time the game wanted to move forward in time the screen cut to sped-up footage of Big Ben cycling through the hours. That at least gives us a sense of progression rather than the Frye Twins seemingly dissolving the criminal underbelly of London over a weekend.

AC Syndicate Big Ben
This one aspect of presentation helped Syndicate’s narrative feel more expansive than previous entries. (Source: steamcommunity.com)

I’ll hold up Spec Ops: The Line as a game with excellent pace and flow. While the twist doesn’t fully work as it shows new material, the pacing goes a long way to help play up the insanity that fuels the twist. Each new chapter from the very start to the very end, starts slow before methodically upping the action, drawing you into the experience and mimicking Walker’s slow descent into brutality and madness. You have your peaks and troughs, intense action with stealth.

That’s why CoD4: Modern Warfare works well too. The game starts slow with the SAS in Russia before becoming an all out action game with the Americans in the Middle East. Once the nuke has gone off, the SAS take over the main action, but the game starts with a distinct “medium” in between stealth and OTT action in the level “Safehouse”.

This works wonders because after the two stealth levels of “All Ghillied Up” and “One Shot, One Kill”, we have the level “Heat”, which uses the same map as “Safehouse”, but has the action on full. CoD4 gives us the stealth to get to grips with the level before ramping up the action. This is seen in the micro in levels such as “Crew Expendable” and “Sins Of The Father”, as well as the macro in how the acts are structured and levels follow on from each other.

CoD4 Crew Expendable
CoD4 starts with stealth to ease players into the controls, before slowly ratcheting up the action. (Source: nerdreactor.com)

Call Of Duty: World at War has some interesting pacing issues. Since the campaign of WaW can be played co-op, certain levels had to be left out. This means that the excellent stealth level “Vendetta” is cut. The following level, “Their Land, Their Blood” works because of the juxtaposition and slower pace of the preceding level, going from being on the back foot to charging at the enemy.

Going straight from “Hard Landing” to “Their Land, Their Blood” feels exhausting. It could be argued that the change of character may add to this jarring tone, however we hardly get any character introduction in “Vendetta” or even at the start of the game, so it feels more to do with the unrelenting gameplay.

This is the same reason I had real trouble with the original Black Ops. My favourite level of the game is “U.S.D.D.”, a level without any shooting and is one big cutscene. I love it because it allows a break after the all-out action of “Operation 40” and “Vorkuta”. And while there are stealth sections in Black Ops, they aren’t mandatory or last an entire level (such as WMD and Rebirth). This can get instill a sense of weariness when explosions end each level.

Now you see how pacing can make a good game turn into a great game. So, back to L.A. Noire.

Back on the Beat – L.A. Noire and Pacing

As previously mentioned, while nearly each case in L.A. Noire is its own story, some cases add together to form a larger picture. These mostly happen on the Vice desk. There is a running B story throughout the whole of L.A. Noire about gangster Mickey Cohen staging a heist of army surplus morphine, which the majority of the Vice desk is spent dealing with.

These cases then lead into the Arson desk that has its own mini arc. Another B story is about property land developers in a building scam, pretending to build homes for returning GIs before burning them and then collecting the insurance. But the man they have sent to burn down the houses (a mentally scarred flamethrower from WW2) has started targeting any and all houses rather than the ones they told him to.

The Arson desk follows this plotline all the way to the conclusion, with every case about the arson attacks and the development fund.

The DLC cases slide into each desk and end the steady pace that the game has because of these running B stories.

LA Noire Gunfight
The DLC is at least thrilling, with several action sequences and memorable investigations. (Source: geforce.com).

Traffic seems to get away pretty unscathed. Each case of Traffic features new suspects and scenarios and has no overarching narrative like the other desks. The new case, A Slip Of The Tongue, slots easily into Traffic, following the same one-off pattern as the previous crimes.

In Vice, things start to get a little tricky. In the original edition, there are only three cases (the same as Traffic), compared to six of Homicide and five of Arson.

The new cases add more variety meaning the Vice desk isn’t all about morphine. One of the new cases, The Naked City, also sets up that Det. Bekowsky, the partner on the Traffic Desk, eventually moved up to Homicide and was partnered with Rusty Galloway, the partner from the Homicide desk.

It is strange how this case was cut, especially as it introduces Bekowksy as part of Homicide before he appears in the final Vice case, Manifest Destiny.

Another reason why it is strange that these cases were cut is that they actually foreshadow Cole’s later infidelity. During driving sequences, Roy mentions Cole’s regular visits to the Blue Room and Bekowsky asking what Cole looks for in a woman. But these lines should have been in the original experience to make that character turn actually feel plausible instead of bizarre.

Arson is the “worst” offender when it comes to pacing. I like the Nicholson Electroplating case and I think it is the best of the DLCs, but when looking at the game as a whole it feels out of place.

First, some background.

Elsa Lichtmann, jazz singer and mistress of lead character Cole Phelps, receives the life insurance payment of her friend, Lou Buchwalter.

Lou was working as carpenter on one of the doomed housing projects, but the timbre he was working on gave way and he fell to his death. The house fires that Cole has been investigating are on the land that the property developers want to build on.

After putting two and two together (the house fires are perpetrated by the developers so they can build shoddy houses), Cole gets threatened by his higher-ups and told to close his investigation.

To keep pressure on the situation outside of the police force, Cole enlists comrade-now-turned insurance investigator Jack Kelso to inspect Elsa’s friend’s death, thus exposing the racket. Jack’s cases play one after the other in the original experience (including the final level), but the DLC case Nicholson Electroplating slots in right before the final level.

LA Noire Nicholson
Nicholson Electroplating starts with a bang…and puts a stop to the Kelso-centric cases. (Source: dsogaming.com).

This completely upends the narrative, with a case that has no bearing on the story while said story is hurtling towards its conclusion.

But that is why they work perfectly as DLC.

Instead of just ANOTHER case in a long line of cases, the DLC is a reminder of that appealing central core of the game. Seeing these old friends again, Bekowsky, Rusty, Roy, and Biggs, and getting to do the old “crack the case” thing one last time (which could get tiring after having several in a row), it feels comfortable, safe even.

So while these new additions can feel out of place, seemingly halting the steady pace of the game, the episodic nature of L.A. Noire allows them to work as individual cases, unmoored to the extravagant length of the base game.

Remasters and definitive editions are becoming a bigger draw in the industry than ever before. Games like Dark Souls and Resident Evil 2 have been remade and changed aspects like bonfire warping and enemy introductions. So that is why we must remember and catalogue the original way that games were played and delivered.

The way L.A. Noire was originally published must be remembered for posterity, a testament to excellent story pacing within the art form, as well as the power in how a narrative can be structured.

Banner Photo Source: ign.com.