Omg @ the IGN walkthrough @ 9:40.
Noah Hughes: "People get the impression that the game is really linear, but we always try to create these pockets of exploration. Just as an example, we've learned to shoot the lanterns, and if you noticed when we shot the first lantern that we actually got a challenge notification, so I have 2 of 5 lanterns now."
Also, the UI designer must have been drunk or think that the player is insanely stupid by repeating the same information twice (lanterns destroyed, lanterns destroyed).
Seriously, the mental gymnastics needed to excuse linearity by having arbitrary collect-athons must be pretty fucking huge.
Jesus fucking christ, that's a serious quote? This game might even be more disastrous than my current level of pessimism and my hands-on impressions say, judging by this and the game director's comments about why Lara should be autograbbing ledges to prevent her death and shit. Absurd.
I can't wait to collect Lanterns. True freedom!
It's not even like the Tomb Raider games were particularly nonlinear, but this is just a new level. Let the player figure shit out and die, for Christ's sake. Arne of Naughty Dog and neoGAF fame are fucking wrong: death does NOT suck. it's a tool for teaching the player to learn from his/her mistakes! Stop retarding the game community, developers!
No. Just no:
Yes, just yes. God Uncharted and traditional Tomb Raider play so differently that it's like a gut stab every time somebody tries to act like this is just the natural evolution of the series. No, it's not. Uncharted played itself during platforming segments, absolutely terrified the player might stop and die and not allow them to experience some bullshit uninterrupted seamless set piece that Naughty Dog wants to shuffle you through which looks so amazing but has absolutely no tension and the gameplay excitement of an 80 year old great grandmother playing Bridge.
Uncharted is roughly made up of maybe 40% combat, you're constantly being shuffled into combat 'arenas' where you have to take out an ever-increasing flow of idiot A.I. enemies. Tomb Raider games - the traditional ones, anyway - are roughly made up of 5% combat. The combat pretty well sucks in TR games, but no one gave a shit because they were so rare. And then when you did encounter something, the moment was special. Uncharted's combat doesn't suck, can be pretty fun at times even, but it's nothing even remotely near like what I'd want in a true Tomb Raider game (and not this pretender).
Uncharted has puzzles so laughably shitty in design that my six year old niece could solve them - literally, in this case, since I was playing a level with her at some point and asked her to try to figure out how to get through a puzzle that I already knew how to solve, and she did it in no time flat. Tomb Raider games often had complex multilevel puzzles that extended into sometimes half a dozen rooms or more, each a cog in a larger puzzle to get you to a new place in a Tomb, each with the very real chance of stumping an educated gamer for a little bit of time. And anyway, Uncharted games have so few puzzles that it seems unfair to even compare. If Uncharted is 40% combat and Tomb Raider is 5%, Tomb Raider is 40% puzzles and Uncharted is 5%.
Uncharted is made up of godawful play-itself platforming segments where everything is so exactly labeled PLEASE CLIMB HERE and when you do start climbing, there's hardly ever a chance that a player is going to even come near death's door. Shit, sometimes during those "set pieces" where you're climbing and ledges are breaking, you can actually move to a ledge which is creaking and breaking away from the wall as you climb, and then just sit there... and no matter when you decide to jump to the next ledge, it'll always so conveniently break the second you leap off. HOW TENSE! Tomb Raider was made up of long extended platforming segments, sometimes in the deepest dark, where you were often making jumps that you had to hold your breath and hope Lara extended her arms for, because even a little timed off and you were screaming to your horrible death. And this shit is far more tense and gameplay rad then any of the tortured "Lara Croft is in pain" moments that they have shown in any trailer or gameplay video so far.
These games share so little in common. Tonally, gameplay wise or focus. It's all just fluff because Lara Croft hunts for treasure and Nathan Drake hunts for treasure, and sometimes occasionally Nathan makes it into a tomb to boot.
To be fair to this game, I think she crashed on this island so it hardly makes sense she'd be dressed to go...
I mean it's not particularly surprising, is it? Games in this particular genre now have to have at least 14 platforming scenes where stuff is breaking as you climb, but you're never actually in any real danger since the game will just blissfully wait around until whenever the moment is you decide to leap, conveniently dismantling the beam below you at the last second no matter how you perform! But it sure looks swell!
