Be Excellent To Each Other

Finished.

That was bloody ace. 15 hours, 90% complete and 22 cheevos. I don't think I'll bother with that remaining 10% either. I've seen all it had to offer (cept the multiplayer, which I'll probably have a lil dabble with before it gets traded).

It's not perfect but it's loads of fun, and I didn't think I'd be saying that about a Tomb Raider game ever again.

...and why ain't my GAME exclusive challenge tomb code working? Aye, tell me that world?

And why do I want a code for an "agility upgrade"? DLC is stupid sometimes.

Oh, and in another nod to Resi, it's got the toy models, but without the talking bases. Tch.

Mine worked and the tomb is right at the very start (near your first campsite where you meet the deer)

Finished this tonight and mopped up the final challenges/collectibles; I'd been picking them up as I went along so there were only a few to go back and get. it's a fucking dirty trick though that one of the levels doesn't have a fast travel camp so you think you've done everything and only when the cheevo not popping sends you scurrying to the internet do you realise that the Cliffside Bunker isn't in the list of fast travel locations. One of it's challenge items is a fucking bitch as well and I'd never have found it on my own. Anyway, the game is excellent fun and I've banged through it quicker than most games I've played recently, which is a testament to the fun factor but also a comment on the low difficulty that others have already touched on.

I miss the massive entire-level-sized puzzles from the previous games and it's definitely more Uncharted than Tomb Raider, but the combat's more satisfying than Uncharted and there's a depth to the atmosphere that I think Uncharted also lacks in comparison. They really do need to sort out the stealth though, it would be excellent fun to properly stalk groups of enemies with the bow but you'll be lucky to get a couple down silently before everyone suddenly knows exactly where you are and the fucking dynamite starts dropping unerringly right at your fucking feet. There was one forest level where I took down everyone without being spotted due to all the enemies being quite spaced out and that gave a hint of how much fun a stealthy approach could be if they'd just tweak things a bit.

This is a load of bollocks.

Tomb Raider II confirmed

http://tombraider.tumblr.com/post/57069 ... om-darrell



http://na.square-enix.com/us/blog/note-phil-rogers-ceo

Straight back into the format wars but Digital Foundry's performance specs for Tomb Raider 'ultimate' or whatever its being called

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... e-analysis



That sounds really weird , the frame rate was choppy at times on the 360 but if you want to play it with no lag the PC version is constantly on offer for about £6 or £7 , so to put out a 'next gen' version for £50 and then mess up the performance like that doesnt make sense to me

Not everyone has a PC.

Nope , however you can also pick up the PS3 / Xbox360 versions for between £12 and £15 - I would think to try and encourage me to buy it again they could possibly have made it work a little better ?

No, but you can get a brilliant one for less tha... (That's enough of that-ed)

The PS4 version sounds ok for anyone without a PC/Mac that would run it. Not for £50 though. 18fps on the Xbox One sounds horrid.

Yeah, but you get all of the DL...ah, nope. No, I got nothing.

Plenty of places doing £35 preorders.

Just so I know, what were the 360 and PS3 versions running at? I can't recall any frame rate issues but then again I was having too much fun to notice.

720p/30 on 360, and the same but with more frequent frame rate drops on the PS3. So the PS4 version is more than twice as many pixels plus twice the framerate.

Not everyone bought it last year either. I didn't. So I'd obviously buy the next gen one now.

XBone has worse textures too:

http://i.imgur.com/cQCWacC.gif

That's a vast difference. Ouch!

Loads more seagulls on the PS4.

Ffffffuuuuuuuuck! The next game, Rise of the Tomb Raider (which is a terrible title) seems to be Xbone exclusive:

http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/12/rise ... ombraider/

I'm very surprised they'd cut out a massive part of their audience for what's always been a cross-platform franchise; MS must have paid them boatloads of cash to do that. Unless it's just a timed exclusive and they're playing silly buggers with the wording of the announcement.

NOOOOOOO!

It'll most likely be an Xbox exclusive in the same way that Dead Rising 3 was. Timed, followed by at the very least a PC release.

If it does just come out for the PC and not the PS4 I'll probably be stupid enough to spring for a gfx card (and possibly RAM) upgrade to play it with a decent level of shinies so I'm hoping to God that's not the case.

Also, since when was 'holiday' a specific time of year? Fuck off America.

Stop reading US websites, then.

The event's happening in Germany.

An American man from Microsoft announces a game's release and an American website reports it as such. Seems fair enough.

The mistake I've made here is even responding to you letting things go down this route; I should've responded to your original post with, "It doesn't matter where the website's based, 'holiday' isn't a date and anyway there's nothing wrong with 'December' that needs a new term inventing to cover it".

Except that Thanksgiving is in November, of course.

You could use the term 'November/December' if you like, but seems a little unwieldy to me.

Re: exclusivity, Eurogamer says it's a full-on exclusive. Doesn't rule out a GOTY re-release later, perhaps, but that could be a year or more rather than a matter of months.

Re: "holiday": it's a perfectly reasonable synonym for "Christmas" used in a country that has a lot more non-Christian religious believers than we do.

But the event was in Germany. Phil Harrison should have announced it in German.

It sounds horrible though.

"Some time holiday next year".

At least try, "Some time around the holidays next year"

Though I do always want to ask which holiday.

To me, using the term holiday to describe a date makes as much sense as not adopting the metric system but I'm not American so what would I know?

Geography, history, culture...

Seems far more likely it'll be a timed exclusivity with MS, and part of the deal (as it always does with MS) requires remaining silent on other platforms until an agreed later date.

Maybe they were scared of going toe to toe with Uncharted 4, which is due out in the same timeframe.

I suppose this way the PS4 install base will be huge by the time a PS4 version comes around.

I don't care about Tomb Raider, but i hate exclusivity deals. Specially for the Xbone, since it's the worst excuse for a console ever. And i'm serious about that.

Timed exclusive confirmed.

While it's good to have that confirmed it really grates that there has to be this extended dialogue around their weaselly worded announcement. Obviously it's the first thing people are going to ask so why make it so difficult? Are they hoping that people will just run out in droves and buy Xboxes before the inevitable clarification comes in?

It's wearying how the entire industry just feels so insulting and consumer unfriendly at times. "Here is a new game, it'll be coming out at roughly this time" so easily turns into this kind of bullshit over timed exclusives and retailer-specific pre-order DLC and all the other shite. Christ, even the fact that we've had to invent and all understand a lexicon that includes phrases like 'timed exclusive' and 'retailer-specific pre-order DLC' is just soul destroying.

I agree, totally. Well put.

Yep. Worse still that the contract between MS & SE seemingly prevented SE or Crystal Dynamics giving out clear information (lying by omission), but an MS exec just let it slip in an interview. Why couldn't everyone involved just be upfront about it from the start?

Something else I forgot to moan about: that article points out that the game's being released on the 360 as well as the Xbone, which I genuinely didn't realise until now. So two years after the current gen hardware hit the shops and brand new AAA games are still being targetted at a hardware set which, by that time, will be fully ten years old. Surely that's way past the point it's time to move on and properly commit to the (by the time now very) new generation?

Not if people still own the 360, you would be missing out on a lot of sales..

The sneakier way to do it would have been to pull a Titanfall and not mention the 360 release until people were already sold on the Xbox One release.

But yes, it's disappointing. The Crew just got announced for Xbox 360 too.

Not many publishers are pumping a lot of money into a current gen only game unless Microsoft or Sony are bankrolling them.

This is mostly fine by me, I like a lot of the smaller games, and Sony's first party output is usually pretty good, but it's weird that I can't really think of many games that aren't being put out for the old consoles outside of AssCreed Unity, The Witcher 3 and Arkham Knight.

Well, yeah. but I'm not convinced there'll be a lot of people left who would buy a new game and haven't yet upgraded two years down the line. And it's not like those sales on the 360 are pure profit or anything; they need to be balanced against the dev and test time you spend on that specific version which isn't going to be a trivial cost.

ETA: also at some point it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; if you never stop releasing games for the last generation then people don't have a reason to upgrade. You need to just cut the cord at some point.

Sure, but the Xbox 360 is still selling in good numbers today. There are people buying an Xbox 360 today, maybe buying Tomb Raider, and they won't even think about buying another console for at least five years. Plenty of other people who game on an Xbox 360 with no plans to upgrade any time soon. These groups are actually the majority.

SE will absolutely get more sales by releasing it on 360 too, even if it's a bit disappointing for those of us with the new consoles.

This console generation we are in at the moment is going to be very drawn out. It really is early days at the moment. There's going to be a bigger overlap than with any previous generation, most likely.

Don't forget that publishers will lose out on millions of potential customers if they only release them on the Xbone and PS4. They only have combined sales of less than 15 million, whereas the PS3 and X360 has combined sales of 160 million. While they can do games for only the new consoles, they won't until it's properly worth it.

Looking here, there are a good few games that were released in 2006 and 2007, two whole years after the new console came out.

MS killed off the original Xbox quite quickly anyway (the original Xbox was expensive to manufacture, and they had a bad deal with their chip manufactures, making cost-cutting really hard), if you look at the PS2, there was loads of stuff released on PS2 that also came to the 360 or PS3.

Architecture-wise, it's a bit easier to port up these days too. The PC market is really robust, so you want to be doing a PC version. Cross platform just makes most sense from a publisher's perspective.

My brother's family just got an Xbox 360 this Christmas with some sort of Xbox Live Gold offer. Not sure why, but yeah, it's still selling.