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lee-loi · 9 years ago

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My thoughts & opinions on Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness

I just replayed the game. In fact it's the first time I played the entire thing start to finish with no walkthroughs or help and with all the patches. I also did a little research into the debacle and read all the interviews and have come down 50/50 on both Eidos and Core. Obviously Eidos rushed Core but then there are things Core did which made no sense like having employees going to work not knowing what their job was for the day. Another kettle of fish to discuss but anyhow.

Personally I’m so unsure about this game or even the intended concept. The storyline was fantastic but even if the controls were fixed or areas were restored I still don't know if it'd be a good game. Hear me out!

Tombs (or lack thereof)

...How ancient were these Tombs if they had electricity including waterproof lighting in that swimming section. The flares & flashlight industry wept.

For one thing if the game was "finished" you'd be playing even longer before you reach the first tomb which took me 3.. 4ish hours to get to Tomb of Ancients... And then the total game had around 2 Tombs total. (Tomb of Ancients & Hall of seasons and the vault of trophies / weird fire underground area) Assuming Turkey and that other area was made, you'd have an even bigger game and a total of 4 Tombs assuming an additional area gets at least one tomb... And people complained about the lack of Tombs in the 2013 reboot…

An idea while playing that IMHO think would have worked really well would have been to have the tutorial level be in Egypt at the very start (maybe right after Lara fell down in that pit in TLR) so

Game reviewers and casual tomb raider fans are actually in some god damn tombs to begin. (Not sure if you noticed but even the new games begin in Tombs whether it was a scavengers cave or Syria etc.) It’s just good practice. It’s the first thing reviewers and casuals will play, tease them what the rest of the game holds so even if you spend 5 hours after that running around Paris, you've been in a Tomb and it's more reassuring you'll be in Tombs later on.

You can walk the player through everything in one section. Learn to platform AND SHOOT, possibly melee and set the player up for what's to come. Did it really make initial sense that the boxing ring in Paris was going to teach Lara how to melee, an area which takes hours to reach… A tutorial shouldn’t go on that long.

Clear the plot point up in one easy way to tell players how she survived!

The money system

It shows a €500 note yet my inventory only says like €120 :(

So I was hardcore about playing it and I chased diamond rings in Parisian sewers. One thing about playing both Prague and Paris is your only in the city at the beginning of each location meaning had the shop system been fully implemented and you were able to buy health packs and weaponry, you'd only get 2 opportunities to do so as you couldn't really hub your way back out to the city from within the Louvre or Bio levels. 4 opportunities if additional locations were added.

This would also raise issues on the difficulty of the game. In standards and practices, most games have to be able to be completed without upgrades, albeit at a harder difficulty. That’s why classic Tomb Raider levels can be completed without the use of a health pack and pistols. One could complete GTA without a visit to a gun shop just by looting enemies etc. Given the same baseline, with the shop system the game would be made TOO easy simply because in addition to all the pickups you’d find in the game anyway Lara would just have too much fire power as the game developer can’t determine how much cash or what jewellery each individual player will find.

You couldn’t make the shop system a crucial part of the game because you’d only visit once in the cities before each adventure begins, how would one know how much to stock up on, you couldn’t hub out as that wouldn’t make any story sense and it’d be cruel to be 80% through the hall of seasons and realise the game is uncompletable because you didn’t buy enough Ammo and you have to reload a save game from 3 hours prior. Unlike a fantasy RPG, the Tomb Raider games always had one foot in reality so you couldn’t put a friendly skeleton or demon in any section willing to sell you goods…

Dialogue options

No caption needed for this amazing picture I found on google. I do love Janice. I hope that lost trilogy included playing Janice tackling the Parisian sex trade...

Look: when faced with an option, of course 99% of us chose the bitchy responses in conversations Lara has in the game. They would have saved weeks of programming and development time if they hadn’t bothered. Even most triple A games today don’t use it. It’s a gimmick. Also because Lara travels to different areas and never returns back to one it’s not like a “relationship” (favours, money or whatever) could be built with certain characters.

As much as I have a soft spot for Janice, the surrounding characters don’t really add to the storyline beyond Bouchard and other important characters where no matter what dialogue you pick, each conclusion is the same. A waste of resources and time.

The skill upgrade system (FML)

In Tomb Raider 2, Lara said “Aha” for every pickup. If only a snippet of Britney Spears ‘Stronger’ played every time you got a “strength upgrade”... It probably would have given the game better reviews and better sales... You know, because Britney fans would buy it!!

This thing bugged out on me while playing! I had to download a save game because I was unable to finish a section as she wasn’t able to monkey swing long enough… (I had to download two, in Prague after I set the clock to 3 I couldn’t get the handle moving thing off my screen)

Rant aside, the skill system sounds nice but what’s interesting is all the skills in both the game and what Core Design envisioned were platform related, not really combat or anything like that but full on physical. She can grab ledges for longer or do bigger jumps.

The reason why this doesn’t work or would have never worked is simply because the tasks you perform to earn those upgrades are ridiculous. Opening a locked door with a crowbar gives Lara strength to shimmy longer. Wouldn’t it be more practical to do a push up as it seems every task in the game Lara does that gives her extra strength was basically a form of muscle stretching albeit in a mundane way. If she did 10 Jumping jacks and a proper exercise warmup in those Parisian back streets she’d have enough strength to do a sprint jump.

The new Tomb Raiders have a skill upgrade system which IMO is done right. You get universal points for exploring Tombs which naturally reward the player as it’s self fulfilling. The combat is first person which opens up a lot of doors to why the system works brilliantly but even when it comes to non combat skills, none of them affect how Lara traverses the environment but rather how to traverse the environment more efficiently. She won’t run faster with upgrades or hang onto ledges longer, again with the game one foot in reality the upgrades aren’t out there and are somewhat plausible.

Kurtis Trent

Before Drake (And not the Badass rapper) we had Kurtis Trent... Googling images of him just made me realise how much I hate fandoms and how CJ Cregg from West Wing was right RE: One flew over the cuckoos nest. I love naked lads but who took the time to super impose him butt naked on top of a motorcycle... Probably the same person who spent 2 hours writing this tumblr post. Point is: just log onto XTube like the rest of us...

So i’m torn on this topic because I think it could have worked really well but at the same time, I think even with an extra 2 years to iron everything out it might have been just another gimmick thrown onto the game simply because when you play him, your inventory is wiped out and your given minimum ammo. If we assume you play him for the first time in AOD was the intended start point the difficulty of the game gets pushed back so the momentum the level designers were building for the past dozen or so levels gets brought back down to “level 1”. Of course every level can be finished without a health pack or minimum ammo but the game designers assume that at expert level, not at casual gamer clumsy level. So when you start as Trent without even a chocolate bar the puzzle difficulty can continue to build momentum but the combat difficulty has to be very low.

If Kurtis got all his extra tricks he could perform as intended, that difficulty either becomes easier or you get a more puzzle intensive level which wouldn’t make sense as Kurtis was written to be more of a trigger happy shooter than puzzle solver and you’d be playing a level that makes more sense for Lara to complete… (Unless that’s what makes the level interesting. Again I’m conflicted here, I think having or not having him wouldn’t make or break the game.)

A cooler idea would have been to have him appear in some levels playable to help move forward in certain sections, think Lara Croft & The Guardian of Light.

All in all I think one of Gavin Rummery’s interviews that can be found online summed it up perfectly along the lines of “We should have just focused on making a really great Tomb Raider - not with 80 useless bells and whistles” (He definitely didn’t mention 80 bells and whistles but the context is correct!)

— Onto the blame game —

So we all love giving Eidos the blame for this game being a flop (“One more year Eidos!!” - or in a Hillary Clinton accent: “4 more years!”) but here is a can of whoop ass to the fellows at Core who did things that were plain stupid.

Pistols

...Illusive magical creatures. Stories told of people getting them on their copy of the game. It’s like getting enough points in your Leaving Cert for BESS in Trinity...

Why did they take the time to make 3 different types of machine guns, like 8 different hand guns and a stun gun and not take the time to include Dual pistols and or refine them. A common notion is that you’d be able to pickup 2 Vectors and combine them to dual wield however that’s impractical. Who’d go into their inventory to unseparate them and make Lara shoot with one pistol which would give her half the fire power with no extra gameplay benefit (She can’t hold a flare and shoot, the game doesn’t even have flares)

What kills me is that implementing them would have made the game more complete. A more iconic game that reviewers and casual gamers AND FANS would appreciate even if they were buggy as they claim to be. It’s not like buggy pistols was going to make that 2 star rating a 1.5.. It probably would have made that 2 star rating a 2.5! You immediately solve the continuity issues with the cutscenes (even though some include Lara with sunglasses… ) The fact is implementing them would have taken a Core design graduate intern 40 minutes at maximum to do.

Make the dual pistols one of the pickups at Renee pawnshop, or systematically add them to her once the storm drain level loaded.

Make them a pickup at Von Croy’s apartment when you kill the assassin. Basically once you pick them up it triggers the cutscene before you begin the Prague levels or an easier way: systematically add them once the Prague level loads.

Hit the export button and woola! Perhaps one of those employees with nothing to do for the day (as mentioned a interview) could have implemented it! It’s not hard to do, if a fan can make a SCU that adds dual pistols without the source code, a paid employee with the source code can. In fact, that logic works when hardcore fans of the game could make control patches even without the source code!!!)

Those controls. (SMH)

Nuff said.

I’m assuming for a big game you beta test it at least once before putting it on store shelves. (Hoping you know that’s sarcasm) It really should have been caught early on that the controls were a mess and that tank controls were not the way to go. Like late 2000 caught on. Even earlier, Core was one of the first to be given a Dev kit) Ironically the controls DO get better by the end of the game because Lara’s general speed increases. Again that upgrade system was stupid!

The thing is tank controls DO work if the camera is constantly behind Lara’s back like in classic Tomb Raider but the fact most levels in most areas contain weird camera angles that make controlling her unbearable. When we see Lara away from where we want her to be, we will point her in that direction forgetting that that it’s only moving the analog stick upwards Lara will move forward. Basically playing Lara in AOD was like learning to pat your head and rub your belly. It required that concentration as moving Lara from the top of the screen to the bottom still would mean pushing the analogue stick forward even if your brain tells you to move it down because of the angle of the camera.

Back to the main point: the story goes at a buyers conference in Fall 2002 the head of Core, Jeremy Smith battled with the controls so much he cursed getting her on top of that bin in the back streets. God the controls must have REALLY sucked back then. This was just overall poor management of the game and the employees. I can’t believe I’m writing this but had I been Heath I would have returned to the office and been like “HOLD It, no one does anything until those controls are fixed. Maybe we’ll hire out consultants who made PS2 games and know how the controls work.”

Honestly I would have released an even shorter game with better controls and marketed it as a trilogy which Eidos was doing anyway…

PS, the controls or anything were not better in any “Beta” that’s out there unless Core Design was really that stupid. If the controls were great in the beta, why would they make them worse? I’m pretty convinced in the rolling E3 demos, a developer who spent months play testing that game and was just a good player was controlling Lara. When Core Design claimed to cut things out of the game, it wouldn’t make sense for animations to be on the list. Saying that the patch I played with restored these annoying Limping animations Lara made when her health was low and when I compared it to regular gameplay videos, restored annoying cameras angles when monkey climbing or going up a ladder which may have added to some of my frustration.

What I find fascinating is that the lead Tomb Raider programmers were working on Chronicles until late 2000 before starting AOD and till then, new hires worked on the engine. (and basically making a balls of it) It’s fascinating because Chronicles technically wasn’t that much more advanced than TLR, the engines the same and besides a few new moves which we learn with that with the level editor, is nothing more than animating and scripting (ALA programmer not needed) it was poor management of the company having them not work on making their next big hit. Isn’t that common sense? …Put the new hires on the game project that’s to hold you over until your next big thing and in the meantime have the champions work on that from start to finish…

Another thing they discuss is how with Lara’s animations, they took form over functionality. (the animations took too long to perform thus slowing Lara’s momentum down) After working on 5 successful Tomb Raider games I find that a novice excuse, an animation AND programmer after working on 5 games should have caught that straight away… …Why is she able to run after a running jump but can’t run after a standing jump, ugh! That would have taken extra lines of code to make the differentiation. They basically worked to frustrate players even more and slow her momentum down.

One last thing I find interesting is in interviews for TLR after Tomb3 the feedback they got was the game was too modern, people wanted her back in Tombs, apparently Smith said at the first meeting “Put her back in F**King Tombs”. Sure enough critics considered TLR an improvement over Tomb3. So how did they think spending all that time in Paris and Prague was a good idea when they had feedback from 2 years prior when the consensus was gamers hated city raider… Personally I don’t mind a level or two set in the city (Like Legend) but most of AOD even in it’s finished form if Turkey etc was included would have been set in the city.

I was also going to bring up points about how the tombs in AOD weren’t really special and felt more like a PS2 tech demo for how good it’s particle system is with fire and water.

I was also going to talk about the stupidity of not writing the game with a streaming engine. When they were making grand big ambitious plans back in 2000 the programmers should have realised a streaming engine would be needed. Even if the game was as a mess as it is today, at least you wouldn’t have annoying loading screens walking from one section of a Parisian ghetto to another and it would have solved like 10,042 bugs this game has... You know out of the 50,000 bugs the game has.

But i’m too tired and frustrated to go on.

I will mention however that in hindsight, wasn’t this a long time coming? Core Design had a thing for over promising features and it eventually bit them in the ass. The earliest broken promises I can find begin in Tomb3. Ropes were originally supposed to be in that game as mentioned in an Australian preview. Tomb4 was to include diary entries, flash lights and a range of other features which are actually on a Tumblr post if you look at TombofAsh’s uncovered post here

Anyway I’m loving the new games. Missing the dual pistols but besides that I think the franchise is on the right track! I needed this sad post to end with something positive... Also I need to point out like many other reviews, we can tell that the game really tried. Like the kid with the bad limp at the egg and spoon race that stumbles after the first hurdle but you cheer him on... But you also didn’t spend millions in production costs and nearly destroy a franchise or spend €39.99 on the actual game.

Ok to end it on a funnier note, lets all watch that pretentious “Making of” Angel of Darkness video which I hope for sanity reasons, was produced like in 2000 before bad controls and making a really bad game - otherwise they should have made an 8 minute apology video!!

youtube

After watching that again I think this video was produced close to completion... As Adrian Smith said: "It will be a new experience. One that almost will be shocking to people who've played Tomb Raider in the past."

Oh it was a shocking experience alright. The shock of those controls!!! I think you were implying something story related but I’m interpreting it as shocking controls. For everyone. Even Core employees. Heath was shocked as he cursed getting Lara on top of THAT BIN.

Scaling that bin was harder than “Luds gate” in Tomb3...

Also I’m LOVING how the story is not black and white and Lara will have a “moral decision to make.” Do I stop a bunch of evil alchemy folk raising a nephilim demon and ending the world or do I go home and watch the Buffy finale... (2003 remember! ...Also the Buffy finale EVERY time)

It’s the most pretentious video I ever watched considering we know what the result product is and I LOVE IT!

And maybe most of all, if the Core design employees spent less time watching old men at train stations to see how they walked with a club foot and more time programming you’d be still around...

TL;DR: If they had 10 years to make AOD, it probably would have still been a mediocre game. My 2cents… Or entire €50 note!

#Tomb Raider #Lara Croft #The Angel of Darkness #Core Design #Eidos Interactive #Crystal Dynamics #Square Enix #Tomb Raider The Angel Of Darkness

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