My Personal Assessment
I have talked about most of my favorite parts of this game. They have these things in common:
- The quality of the texture work is not up to the standard of the rest of the game
- Structurally, they are all optional
- Spatially, they are often sequestered away in small side rooms which contain only them
It's not that I like these features. It's just that these are features that the things I like seem to have. This leads me to believe that all these fun set pieces that were implemented towards the end of the game's development. I'll explain why I think that.
Planning and tweaking challenges involving the most intimate parts of platforming mechanics requires those mechanics to have been fully implemented. I think Tomb Raider's mechanics were being implemented almost all the way through development, because they were secondary to the visual design and texturing of the jaw-dropping locations. This is why, usually, you don't have to do anything very specific to move through the game's levels.
When the levels were almost finished and the mechanics had been fully implemented, someone on the dev team who had become intimately acquainted with the possibilities of the platforming had come up with some decent ideas. They knocked together the challenges I've talked about with basic textures, and slotted them into side rooms so they wouldn't get in the way of the nicer-looking level bits whose appearance had been painstakingly composed over many months.
These small challenges are now what we can look on as extremely modern pieces of platforming. Many of the movements I've talked about are short, and don't involve risking the loss of progress. The brevity lets you focus on the movements, and the forgiveness allows designers to surprise you. Surprise + Focus = Communication. Less like Prince of Persia or Mario, it puts me in mind of my favorite contemporary platformer, VVVVVV, a game which I feel communicates a lot.
Sadly, the sequels didn't really move any further in the direction of communication. The additions that were made to the game mechanics were vapid: the changes that grabbed headlines were that you could drive a few vehicles, and that you could use more guns.
They gave Lara new ways to move: monkey bars, zipwires, and ladders. These did enable the creation of new spaces, and also added to the "adventuring" feel of things. But there was never any nuance to interacting with them; mostly they are so slow they can feel like busywork. The worst example of slow busywork is crawling (introduced in Tomb Raider 3). Crawling is so dull. It's an insult to your intelligence, and mine. Cara Ellison believes that crawling was added mainly so that the player could get a good view of Lara's arse. I'm more inclined to blame the influence of Metal Gear Solid, but I definitely recommend this article of hers -- it will give your cynicism muscles a workout.
There was one addition that strikes me as thoughtful: a jump that allowed you turn 180 degrees in the air. This enabled the strategy seen above; it's interesting, though probably unintended, so I wouldn't really use it to defend the designers.
The original Tomb Raider was not entirely a good game, either. It's clear that the first priority with the gameplay was to show off animations and textures, the second priority was to make things humanly plausible. Depth wasn't really on the agenda. The developers looked at the platforming genre and decided that the most fun part was jumping from the very end of a ledge, and making it to the other side by the skin of your teeth. They animated that, and made some nice-looking locations for you to do it in. That was what they saw their job as being. The set pieces I've talked about were afterthoughts.
It would surprise me if the platforming of the new Tomb Raider offered anything cerebral at all. Its target audience are the fans of Uncharted and Enslaved. Those games are not about rewarding the contemplation of movement mechanics -- they are about rewarding obedience, and it frightens and upsets me that they are widely praised. Not that they are completely worthless pieces of media; they look and sound very nice. But I wish they would do away with the orwellian QTEs and meaningless walking around. I wish we could have more communication, and less crawling.
I'm indebted to the great Tomb Raider scholar Stella Lune for her consultation and for the use of several images.
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"Rewarding obedience". That's true, that's what those games are about to a great extent.
The major strength of the original controls is their consistency in both function and interaction with the world. If you position right all the situations in this article can be "solved" 100% of the time, and Lara having very clear limitations to understand means that if something seems like it should be able to be done, it can be, including things not intended. Outside of the boundaries of the world and rare overzealous mesh hitboxes you never have to worry about invisible walls or similar stopping you from doing something that should be clearly possible. Modern action/adventures might be far more accessible but it's pathetic how little interaction with the environment they have in comparison; the only one I've seen capture anything like the original TR's is Mirror's Edge, which has a few issues in a couple of areas but actually feels like the closest thing to a natural evolution of the original TR controls and environmental interaction (including unintentional interactions that nonetheless add depth and exploration).
Saying the games are lacking depth just because properly understanding them isn't required to finish the game normally is a little questionable when there are many facets to the way you can interact with things that allow you to do things far beyond what the developers obviously intended even without glitches. There are also the various ways you can interrupt animations and use certain geometry to your advantage that lead to so many nuances for things like speedrunning that new things are still being discovered to this day.
As an extension of that, the dismissal of the sequels and certain things they bought also sells things short; the mid-air twist was already mentioned in this article but undersold on what a massive change it makes to the amount of flexibility you have (with the example given in the article being just one way it can be used), as well as allowing for some interesting and complex mid-air roll+air control navigation. In contrast to the crawl, the sprint that was also added in TR3 is also interesting in how the big speed improvement allowed the developers to make larger levels while minimising the amount of extra backtracking and time spent in empty space (assuming you don't get too stuck anyway, which is admittedly a pretty big assumption in the context of TR3's absurd difficulty). The sequels also generally make more complex and interesting use of space and the moves provided.
Given the bringing up of games like VVVVVV I wonder if the article writer would be intrigued by certain custom levels made for the Tomb Raider editor; while frequently incredibly difficult and complex they allow you to save anywhere (avoiding much progression loss) and many explore the kind of scenarios presented in this article to a much greater degree, from bigger scale versions of the situations in this article to crazy stuff way beyond anything demanded/explored in the main games (such as the previously mentioned mid-air roll+air control combos).
Paragraph 2: This is a very good assessment - consistency is completely crucial! In retrospect I wish I could have talked to you before doing the article, I would have slipped something in there. Consistency is why, looking for the kind of coolness I've described in this article, you would be better off looking among platformers than action games in modern times.
You would perhaps be interested in my analysis of a battle in Shadow of the Colossus http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/04/its-the-gameplay-stupid-shadow-of-the-co lossus/ - I have a little soapbox about sublime consistency at the end. SotC is cool because it manages to combine "cinematic" action-game-events with a lot of consistency (i.e. you often have to think about the physics engine). However, like many cinematic-action-games, certain "ideas" in the game generate inconsistency that feels horrible. I'd be interested if you have any thoughts about what I wrote in the last section? In that article, by the way, I'm also more willing to talk about *stuff the developers did not intend*.
I have two statements and I would like to know if you would agree with them. First: I think Tomb Raider's consistency was born of technical limitations. There is a "one-off" feeling to certain puzzles and events (like the midas hand that turns you to gold). This suggests to me that the team were saying "If we can do something cool and it means being inconsistent, we'll do it, although we often find we can't do things for technical reasons."
The other thing I want to say is that it seems that "cinematic" action-game-events are opposed to the idea of consistency. If you want to have something REALLY bombastic that feels
Paragraph 3: I only partly agree with you here. One problem is this: in a manner of speaking, all games are infinitely deep (many games are Turning-complete for example). Any game can become interesting if you're allowed to go nuts talking about "what gets utilized in the speedruns, or at the highest level of PvP? What are the player-built levels like? What happens if there's a buffer overflow?" And to be sure, when people write about that it is very cool! I encourage them to continue doing it, especially because there are a few kinds of game that can only be talked about this way (minecraft, Noby Noby Boy). But that isn't what I do.
I talk about level design, and I hope to show how important level design is. So you have some interesting *possibility* within your game engine - great, that is a good reflection on your engine. But if the player has to spend hours doing dull things to find it, that sucks. People's lives are short! There are many better things they could be doing than carrying out dull tasks in a video game so that they can make a minor discovery! And game developers need to respect that. If they don't, their games will not be played by adults who value their time. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to evaluate depth based on "what was sum total of the stuff that I saw in my playthrough?".
Problem is, making sure that players pick up on and fully comprehend a possibly-very-delicate phenomenon in your game engine is extremely hard. It is why I am not impressed when I hear someone say "we're still discovering interesting things in [game] today!". That doesn't mean it's much deeper than other games. It just means that it was bad at expressing itself in a concise way, but it has a dedicated fanbase.
I fully agree with paragraph 3 - the midair roll is very thoughtful. I'll even tell you this: Tomb Raider 3 was the only entry I played in my childhood, and I would never have done this article if it hadn't been for the interesting opening to All Hallow's (hopefully you know what I'm talking about?). I do admire that part, but it wasn't interesting enough for this article.
"The sequels generally make more complex and interesting use of space and the moves provided" - I agree there are some interesting spaces (and they are made possible by the moves that bore me), I said as much. But "interesting use of moves"? I don't think you can substantiate that - though I would LOVE to be proven wrong. As I say I played a lot of TR3 , and researched TR2 for this article, but after many hours I had come up with very little (jumping-while-shooting-the-bell I will give you). Even Stella didn't recommend playing 4 and 5.
All this said, I would be quite interested by player-made levels. I came up with lots of ideas myself while writing the article, but I think if I were to make them nobody would be very interested ;) Since you've mentioned they are hard-yet-forgiving, I can see that you have understood my point about communication.
First I'll note that my laments about modern platforming are based around 3D games; I don't think 2D games have fell into these issues with inconsistent design, and are still mostly based around giving consistent limits to the player character. I agree that 3D platformers do a much better job avoiding the inconsistent design that action adventure games seems to have fell in to, but even they feel thin on the ground lately (the Mario Galaxy games are the only ones that immediately come to mind, unless you count Mirror's Edge under this genre).
Your link to the Shadow of the Colossus article makes me realise you're the one who wrote things like the article on Medusa heads and others that have been some of my favourite recent articles on game design, which is cool. I'm not sure on what I could add to that end part of the SOTC article, but I guess I agree about variety vs consistency, and would say that modern action/adventure platforming seems to be suffering from too much bias towards the former.
Your second statement seems to have cut off so I can't really answer that without the full thing, but I'd agree with your first statement. Many of Tomb Raider's stronger aspects being born of technical limitations and perhaps unintentional design is pretty clear in several ways, right from the base design of it having to be optimised around a D-pad rather than analogue sticks. This is slightly off-topic from platforming and I'm not sure if you know of it (here's the video if you don't http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtvNYM1wY7s), but I think the fact that Core Design's cancelled version of Anniversary shows the T-Rex encounter as a cutscene just like Crystal Dynamic's released version is a big hint at this. I'd say the T-rex encounter in the original is such an iconic moment in major part because of how it doesn't disrupt the base gameplay at all, and simply expects a natural reaction to something horrible coming around the corner at you and runs with the consequences of the choice you make in that moment of terror. There's a lot of belief (that I fully agree with) that Anniversary butchered the sequence, and I think that's the fundamental issue; making it a cutscene and removing all player interaction from the reveal inherently destroys what made that part work in the original. The fact that Core Design's own version of Anniversary would have ruined the encounter in the same way makes it clear that they would have probably did a cutscene there if they had the technology in the original game too; which I think is a pretty big hint of technical limitations driving many choices in it. this tangent is admittedly a bit of a leap, but it's the best way to sum this up I can think of.
I don't agree with the idea that any game is "infinitely deep" though, and that's there's no difference except player interest; many games clearly have lower skill ceilings regardless of how many take interest in them. I can relate this to the series itself (I admit this is a little technical as it based around the speedrunning community); despite having a pretty equivalent fanbase and heavy initial interest speedrunning of Crystal Dynamic's Tomb Raiders have mostly died simply because there's not too much you can do with them. Beyond certain glitches, past a point it just becomes about throwing yourself at stuff and praying it works because there's almost no room for player skill or style to come in, which isn't very fun either, and, despite them being easier and more accessible than the older games, far more runs of the newer games have been ended in ragequits because even basic things are just luck past a certain point. Whereas the earlier games have many subtle (and not so subtle) ways to interact with things that allow for constant refinement, and players have different ways of doing things without them necessarily being "worse" than each other, along with that final element of consistency meaning it's possible to keep getting better and better at them with little except your own skill level holding you back from doing so. regardless of how much of it is intentional, the level design plays a vital part in all this too. Unless I've completely misinterpreted your point about depth or something.
"The sequels generally make more complex and interesting use of space and the moves provided" I admit I kept this pretty vague because I wasn't expecting much of a response, but this is somewhat of a gut thing based on my experiences with things such as speedrunning; between certain new moves and the design itself the levels in the sequels generally have many more ways to optimise your movement through the spaces, as opposed to the original where things remain relatively basic. Maybe I'll think about this more in terms of posting something more concrete.
One thing that quickly comes to mind that would fit this article (in the "parody" category) is a room from "Living Quarters" in Tomb Raider 2 (around 6:44 in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnGNEahuStY). You trigger two timed trapdoors over a spike pit and have to precariously shimmy across them, the timer is extremely forgiving and it'll only really catch you out if you don't realise they are timed, but the mere knowledge that they are combined with the slow shimmy animation makes every moment agony as you think it could give away at any moment, it's a small acknowledgement of the slow speed of the shimmy, while also making use of that to create high tension despite relatively safety.
As for Tomb Raider four and five, I think the first half of four is very strong, but I think the game falls apart the moment you reach Cairo (and for me that marks the moment the original series falls apart for me too), and I think five is very weak beyond one or two vaguely interesting levels.
I agree Re: 2D-3D split. It's annoying because it's not that hard to get a pretty challenging 3D platformer without too much effort, like Kororimpa or Igneous.
I went a little nuts saying "all games could be infinitely deep". I kind of meant that if you have a level editor you can treat any game like Minecraft and play with the physics engine.
Allow me to modify my words to make it more relevant: I want to say that it is not very hard to make a game with the depth Tomb Raider had. I could take any of the by-the-numbers platformers on the nintendo 64, most any sports game, most any First Person Shooter. They will all have possible sequence-breaks, AI exploits, path-drawing questions, and physics bugs for an enthusiastic player with savestates and random-number-generator-manipulators to get their teeth into. Do you know anything about the Pokemon Yellow speedrunning community? It. Is. Bananas.
The reason the crystal dynamics TR games come out looking quite so ridiculous is that action adventures have measures in place that seem to *prevent* depth.
I watched a couple of TR 1-3 speedruns, and while I'm not acquainted with the community, I'll bet that nobody likes those block puzzles, huh? A lot of time spent sitting there watching the same four-second canned animation. Modern action-adventures, including crystal dynamics' tomb raiders, their problem is the same as what is happening with those block puzzles: the desire to show off animations takes priority over giving players autonomy.
This conversation makes me want The Last Guardian to come out o_0 will it keep SotC's potential-filled physics engine, or will animations take over?
You are right that many games are filled with tons of glitches and tricks that can be used in higher-level play, but I don't agree they are all potentially equal because of that; in many cases the tricks just simplify things or add a bunch of luck manipulation; it's pretty sporadic whether they actually add to the overall skill ceiling or not. While there are major exceptions, when I think about it (in terms of 3D games anyway) this seems to happen most often among relatively early 3D games like Super Mario 64, Tomb Raider and Quake (and games sharing that engine at the time), which makes it seem like an inadvertent feature of the relatively undeveloped engines of that time period. It's shame more modern games don't try intentionally experimenting with that kind of "strangeness" though.