LogFAQs > #946190818

Kungfu Kenobi posted...

I think where they went wrong with TR2013 in the low-res big-picture sense, is that it was an action adventure game, and not a survival horror. The action adventure formula is fundamentally at odds with the story they were trying and mostly failing to tell.

I think you could tell that story. But the problem is whether or not you trust your audience.

Basically, you need to keep combat very minimal for a LONG time. Focus on exploration early, have the story emphasize just how hard things are for her. Once combat does commence, have it occur in very small, very isolated pockets. Give time between fights for Lara to emote her reactions. Establish the arc. Then, accelerate the pace... and slowly desensitize her. By the end, give her a thousand-yard stare as she's picking off baddie after baddie and make it clear that something inside of her is very much broken now. You can GET to the action game you want, but you have to earn it.

The problem is that a) if your audience is going to spend most of that time going "So when do I get to shoot the guns?" or b) you don't trust your audience enough to assume they're not going to do that, then that kind of structure is going to result in a very boring game (at least early on, which is where most players will quit out of boredom, never seeing what happens later), that most players are going to hate because they don't care about your artistic pretensions as much as they care about playing the game they expected to play (and previous Tomb Raider games had given most people a very clear mental image of what Tomb Raider SHOULD be).

Arguably, it's a similar problem to what Spec Ops was trying to do (how effective is a "You're a drone and a killer" storyline in an FPS entirely built around following orders and shooting literally everything?), and I think that game handled it well. There ARE ways around the limitations, but you have to work at it, you have to trust your audience, and you have to be willing to suffer the potential loss of sales.

In other words, you can't be working for Squeenix, who will say that your 4 million sales (at the time) were a disappointment because their vastly ignorant and unrealistic expectations were way too high in the first place. You need to be in a position where you can accept lower sales for higher critical praise - and if you're very lucky, the critical praise will help fuel your sales (see also, Undertale).

Ironically, the other game that springs to mind for me when it comes to a developer trying to tell a story that the audience is simply not interested in hearing is Last of Us II. A LOT of the backlash basically boils down to the audience wanting more Joel and Elly bonding adventures and the developer very much unwilling to provide that. If anything, it almost seems to be deliberately shitting on players who enjoyed the first game for enjoying it. So in that sense, it kind of has the spiritual influence of games like Spec Ops - it just handles it much, much, MUCH more poorly.
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