The PS1 Tomb Raider games actually make me feel like I'm doing all of the climbing and playforming myself. There's no kind of magnetism or anything, if there's a ledge you can climb it or hang from it regardless of wether or not it's part of the path the devs layed out. It's fricking insane that a game this old manages to feel refreshing just because it doesn't feel like it starts playing itself. The gameplay actually feels immersive because nothing happens automatically and you will have to input every single move Lara makes yourself. It goes as far as the game having a specific animation for diving into the water that will never trigger just because you decide to jump in the direction of water, you actually have to manually input it yourself and you can do it on land too if you want to and break your fricking neck.
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They had to dumb it down for zoomer morons who wouldn’t be able to cope with that many options.
I'm OP and I'm a zoomer
The dumbing down began in the 7th gen. Zoomers weren't a huge part of the market yet.
More like to couch boomers and millenials with no patience
Low IQs in the industry, everyone using the same Unreal Engine tools, and corporate greed.
I find it too hard to make timed long jumps on the PS1. I've heard the PC version has less input delay or something so maybe that's better
I liked the imput delay on the saturn; it felt like frame buffering the start of a super mid combo in a fighting game.
I like platforming but TR1 plays like shit tho
Needed an upgrade
This is true but now all of the platforming is so automated and brain dead that there's barely any actual game, it's incredibly boring which is probably why the newer games had to lean more into combat, the platforming and puzzle side was left to shit.
>This is true but now all of the platforming is so automated and brain dead that there's barely any actual game
This indeed. Mario 64 feels great to play still as well as some old school games
Now it's completely automatic, and even puzzles aren't as common as they were back then.
its a little bit like the original price of persia games, but in 3d
What is the price of persia these days?
about tree fiddy
It's very much like Prince of Persia, I think the devs were even influenced by it iirc.
You remember wrong
Im Syphon Filter guy from before
Duke Nukem: Time to Kill and Land of the Babes are pretty much Tomb Raider games, but more action and less puzzles, and samey but distinct atmo. Havent played Zero Hour to know, but i imagine it's the same
Holy based. Duke Nukem: Time to Kill and Syphon Filter 2 are my favorite games on PS1 along with Tomb Raider IV.
Probably mostly because those are the only games I had in my childhood but still.
tr1 movement is grid based and it works because the level design is grid based. no one wants to play 'clunky' games like flashback/anotherworld/dos prince of persia/tombb raider. the degrees of freedom that came with analog controllers makes you imprecise so they have to hold your hand with magnetism.
Nothing stopping a game being built around digital controls (shockingly all controllers ship with a Dpad - who knew!) without the need for a grid based system like tomb raider. Or at the minimum we aren't limited to giant tiles tomb raider used as it isn't 1996 any more and processing power is capable of handling much smaller tiles for more nuanced movement within those confines. At face value you'd only need each tile to be the size of the character's footprint to allow everything to line up. Downside is of course curves are the work of the devil and shall not grace such a game.
You the guy from /vr/?
Mirror's Edge captured that platforming feeling I think
I wanted to like that but I hate the first person platforming.
It does mess with depth perception but I still enjoyed it. I just can't do first person melee combat because of it
I love both games and I want to note how they get a lot of complexity out of few buttons.
TR:
>jump
>use/grab/shoot, used for climbing/hanging on
>roll and turn 180°
ME:
>jump
>crouch
>turn 180° OR turn away from the wall I'm touching
there are other buttons, especially in TR, but these are the ones you press way more frequently than anything else. "3 main buttons" seems to be a gold standard for platformers. note how TR has a crouch button but it's barely used, and how Mirror's Edge has "use" and "shoot" buttons but you rarely need them as hanging on to ledges is automated in ME. it would be really easy to make either game a 4 main buttons game. simply require the player to press crouch to make the max jumps in TR, or require the player to "grab" ledges to climb them in ME. that's all it would take. or how if TR wasn't grid based with tank controls? you wouldn't need the 180° roll button to quickly reorient yourself - 2 main buttons. or if ME didn't require you to crouch during jumps (for two different reasons) it would likewise be a 2 main buttons game.
my point is, I don't think it's random coincidence that two of the best platformers ever, despite being very different in other ways, share this characteristic. platforming is quite important in my own game and I'm going to make sure there are not two or four main buttons but exactly three, during platforming.
>note how TR has a crouch button but it's barely used
you use it to crawl through a lot of ducts and traps. you can also use it to crouch behind cover to kill hitscan enemies.
maybe you're thinking of the later games. TR1 doesn't make you crawl. in fact if you told me TR1 doesn't even have a crouch button I'd believe you. I can't recall a use for crouching in TR1.
Because they make games for the mainstream. And they are nimrods.
People like Mario though. They like platforming. Having platforming be an actual challenge with some thought rather than these boring time wasting sections between shooting and crafting menus isn't a problem.
Mario hit a goldmine of game design though. The stages are tuned to be easy to average in difficulty, but Mario's acceleration and momentum give players an unusual degree of fine control, which means you get to navigate these moderate stages on your terms. It's not too hard and players still have respectable autonomy of control. Most devs would kill to get it this right.
Yeah but there are most platformers out there besides Mario, lots of games use the challenge of jumping and climbing towards a goal. It doesn't have to be the same or as good as Mario, I'm just saying it doesn't have to be as fricking boring as it is in the recent Tomb Raider games, and Uncharted and other similar shit for that matter.
Playtesting. When you test your game beyond the conceptual phase and put it into actual people's hands, you only learn then how fricking hard it is to keep your concepts graspable to those not directly in your own head. To that end, you start dumbing things down more and more and more until the audience is capable of getting it, and by then it hardly resembles the idea you had in the first place. What you see in shit like Sony's movie games is approaching the final stage of what is at this point a functionally solved science.
>why aren't games clunky and jank now
yikes
>yikes
Can you please not refer to Tomb Raider as console shit? They were and always will be PC games.
Because triple A industry started appealing to literal casuals back in 2006.
Do we blame david jaffe for this?
Blame Uncharted and Naughty Dog.
Was about to say this.
But that sort of platforming tomb raider used - particularly being ~cinematic~ was heavily featured in god of war.
You could argue PoP Sands of Time did it first.
Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezus fc
o.g. Tomb Raiders are even more kino today when going back to since being a kid. Appreciate them more. I won't touch the new ones.
If you want the videogame industry to be much bigger than the other media industries combined you need to make your games for literal morons.