Topic: CROFT MANOR (all things Tomb Raider/Lara Croft)

It seems all Tomb Raider threads are archived so let's see if an all encompassing one for the franchise can sustain itself. Hopefully the two new games Legacy of Atlantis and Catalyst and upcoming television show give us much to discuss.

Quite a bit of new footage coming out from hands on sessions. It looks very good to me.

Genuinely cannot wait for this game! Still think they missed the trick not releasing the game on Lara's birthday (14th Feb). I think it's about time Tomb Raider got back it's crown from Uncharted (love that franchise btw) who kinda stole it's thunder. Really excited to see how Atlantis will look like in this remake.

@Oram77 I've got to assume it's just because the 14th is a Sunday next year so not a day you release a game on. The Friday before seems a good enough fit, they can hopefully celebrate her birthday by revealing great first day sales or something. Maybe drop a free costume into the game for extra promotion.
With Uncharted retired and quite a few years since the last TR I'm eager for a new adventure.

@BearsEatBeets I'm just happy they seemed to have nailed both the vibes of the OG game but also the game play looks incredible! I said this in another article but I doubt it will happen, but I hope it's real challenge just like the OG.... maybe not that unforgiven but at least hope for no YELLOW PAINT.

@Oram77 There seems to be a lot of people who got hands on as videos seem to be dropping. I just watched one mentioning you can tailor the difficulty of puzzles/combat to your desire much like the last TR game so no yellow paint 👍. Just discovered another vid I'm about to watch.
I love the acrobatics being back, the slow-mo move looks very cool.

@BearsEatBeets it looks better than the 2013 reboot and that game was amazing in itself. i have high hopes for this game & pc mods are gonna make it even better

@nomither6 It does look great visually but having watched the gameplay footage they have now released I think they do still have a bit of work to do on smoothing out some of the animations. Certain movements look great but the transition between some actions look too 'snappy'. Plenty of time until release to polish that.
The survivor trilogy, while quite different, were still fun games. I'm beginning to ponder a replay in the coming months.

AI debacle aside, Legacy of Atlantis is quickly becoming one of my most anticipated games, alongside GoW Laufey (As I sit here enjoying HFW I’m thinking maybe I have a thing for ‘girlbosses’… 🤔. Hmm, need to book that appointment to check my testosterone level… 😜)

Jokes aside, Atlantis appears to have been tailor made for what I am hoping for with a reboot/remake of the classic era Lara adventure. I’m averse to retro gaming, and so haven’t revisited the old PS1 TR games (remastered or otherwise), despite my many fond memories of them. I have trouble going backwards to the dated controls, design, and graphics (even when they’re remastered a bit). Playing Alan Wake Remastered now has convinced me that I can only take older games in small doses. But this game seems like it will have the best of both worlds, as in the charm and adventure of the original game, but newly imagined for 2027 with bells and whistles of modern gameplay and design. We shall see.

@BearsEatBeets Watching this preview footage also has me also tempted to replay the survivor trilogy. My schedule doesn’t really have the bandwidth for it without a significant blow to my backlog reduction plan, but it’s been long enough that I bet that playing TR (2013) would feel new again. I actually only played it at release on PS3 and never tried the Definitive edition version on PS4.

@Th3solution Other than having a large backlog, everyone of your statements echo very much my own thoughts. The slight unease the AI news elicits, my most wanted games all having 'girlbosses' (TR, Laufey and RE Veronica) and my ability to replay much older games no matter how cherished or formative they may have been.
I wonder if Catalyst production is going smoothly if we end up with 2 games quite close next year.

I'm curious if Atlantis does very well if they are going to be tempted to do a Capcom and revisit a few of the originals for a remake treatment.

I'm going to say this with a full chest, rise of the Tomb raider is the best of the entire franchise. I will also be doing a replay on the survivor trilogy in the build up to release of this game, Yeah I'm curious to know how the development is going for Catalyst too, all I know if it plays anything like modern trilogy we will be in for a treat

@Th3solution same here, i have the 2013 version for dirt cheap on steam after only playing it once years ago on xbox360 when it came out. i remember being blown away by how tense it was. to be honest, i think they took it too far with the lara deaths; idk if it was for shock value or what. but overall, the game was still 🔥. i plan on replaying it this weekend.

@BearsEatBeets huh, it didn’t look bad to me.

@nomither6 I wouldn't go as far as say it was bad but some of the transitions seemed a bit to arcadey fast. I think it was just the bit were she was fighting the velociraptors, the dodge and the reload, plus the zoom out after combat had ended. I'm just nitpicking but I think it would benefit from smoothing out to be a bit more realistic.
Like I said it may all still be in the stage of tweaking, or may not even be an issue when actually playing. It was just my gut reaction to seeing it.

@BearsEatBeets Just wanted to say thanks for making this topic! I was probably about a week away from doing it myself. Like you say, between two new games and a live-action TV show, there's gonna be a lot to discuss, so it's nice to have someplace specific!

Hopefully we'll be able to keep this Croft Manor a little more intact than Lara's...

@Werehog To be honest when I looked to make a comment I was a little surprised there wasn't going already (that was still open).
Great to see you back and in reference to your other post don't worry about when you get to responding to any tag. We all pop in at our own times and schedules.

Hopefully the cadence of new stuff coming will us keep this Manor in good condition. 😄

I wonder what they're going to do with Lara as a character in Atlantis.

The original games portrayed her as a spoiled rotten rich kid who evidently had tutoring in language, gymnastics and a bunch of other skills, with a penchant for adventure and peril. She wasn't particularly soft or sympathetic. More cool and slightly callous, mowing down countless endangered species and then adding to the list of difficult HR conversations with the newest members of the Widows of Evil Corporation Goons club.

I do kind of miss that, weirdly, and I have expressed my distaste for the torturous way Lara was treated in the survivor trilogy. They really went out of their way to inflict as much trauma on Lara as possible, to the point I stopped believing she was human. I thought to myself on many occasions that there is no way she'd still be walking after the first few hours but I can't get too caught up in realism here. For a woman who can vertical leap a storey in the air my sharks will need to remain un-jumped.

What possible character development is there? I don't mean that rhetorically, I am genuinely curious to know what kind of Lara we'll get with the new game. Will she be more akin to the Sexy Indiana Jones In Hotpants or the Traumatised Teen in Trauma Tribal Town? Or someone else?

I understand more recent portrayals have had to move with the times. In the last 15 years, the idea of a wealthy caucasian protagonist who guns people down in the name of stealing culturally significant relics from their native internment with no fear of repurcussion is problematic, so they kind of didn't have a choice but to literally and figuratively wring her through the mangle so to speak.

Lara has always been my favourite video game protagonist. This sounds like I don't like her but quite the opposite.

There's a lot of really interesting history around marketing and how Toby Gard had his issues with how Lara was used in a plethora of promotional works, everything that happened with Core, Eidos, and Crystal Dynamics... it's a complicated beast that covers a range of philosophical, economic and social veins.

@BearsEatBeets that's a very interesting take. If Atlantis does very well, wouldn't that bode better for the STARVED New Ideas market?

Seems you can't throw a rock around the figurative here any more without hitting a remake. Granted, it's not every tree in the forest but there sure are a lot around.

I fear for the future of a profitable video game market being swamped with remakes because nostalgia is the only fuel keeping the fire alive. Call me a pessimist but it worries me.

There was a whole lot of scrapped content they'd planned for the original Tomb Raider. I wonder if we'll ever see that come to life?

When I was about 12, I made a list of all the places Lara had been to over the course of the games at that point, and was really wondering where else was left. What other stamps could Lara get on her passport?
Maybe that was a bit too reductionist of how her adventures played out, but it did seem like every game had her going to a new place and I wanted to imagine what else she could do and where else she could go. At that point, she hadn't been to Japan or America yet. Maybe she's due an Outback Adventure...

@DemonStar89 Although there absolutely are a lot of people who are vocal about their disdain for there being too many remakes, I'm not one of them. No other entertainment medium that has undergone such rapid advancements as gaming. Although that advancement has reached the point of diminishing returns I do feel like there are plenty of fun games from the past that can be made even better with modern tech. I would imagine in an era where ballooning budgets are an issue I would have thought remakes would be a cheaper option.

Of course this all depends on the quality and effort put in but I do feel like the RE model is a successful one. A benefit of doing these means the studio/publisher can take longer on the new entries with the remakes filling gaps.

I'm not saying I think every publisher should do it but I think it could work for this IP. And as you mention it can be hard to come up with places/adventures to have. I think it's a big part of why Naughty Dog didn't want to make anymore Uncharted games, I don't think they felt there was much new they could do with it.

A lot is going to depend on how the 2 new games turn out. One might end up being much better than the other but with CD overseeing both there should be some consistency.

It would be cool if they decide to do a demo before release.

Ugh did anyone else lose all their TR1-3 remaster collection saves with the recent update?

@DemonStar89 I don't personally have the collection to help with that but hopefully someone else can say if they have had any issues.

I can only think of @Werehog who might have it maybe.