Rise of the Tomb Raider [XO, XOX, X360, PS4, P4Pro]

yes effectively on this first cutscene.

On the gameplay part, it look really good, i dont have see collision problem or erratic movement like it was sometimes the case with TR 2013... The strands movement are a lot more natural.

The body animation is really good and smooth, you see really well the impact of the " muscles" linked together.. its subtle, and maybe without having see a presentation of it, i will have not see it, but in fact, im impressed by it.

I was affraid that it could be only used on cutscenes, but you see it really well in the gameplay part ..

 

Game looks great! Sold to buy this day one.

 

Skin and cloth shaders are probably the best I've seen so far in a game. Lara's animation is also on a league of its own (Skin an Muscle deformation on her back and arms is crazy good).

Also lots of nice touches like the blood on the rock after she rests her right hand on it:

 

Really hyped for this game, but I really wanna play this on PC in 3D, that's gonna be a amazing, like the first game.
Can only pray PC version isn't far behind.

I wonder how the 360 version is coming along also, it'll be interesting to see if it's like the Forza Horizon 2 comparison, in terms of details in the environment and effects they've adapted.

 

Thanks for the link, they have a better quality video to download ( 1.4GB ) than the Youtube one.

 

I skimmed the video. Wasn't too interested in the cutscenes, but I have to say, the location(s) look very good. That's exactly what I want. That and more. Microsoft may have a killer app on their hands here this fall.

Gameplay (the platforming) looks just like Uncharted, which I guess isn't a bad thing (was already the case in the last one). Very solid mechanics, very nice graphics too. Would be a definite day one purchase for me for sure (irregardless of some of the criticism from me further up).

 

This new gameplay does look pretty nice, finally a true 1080p game with decent graphics on the Bone. Looks like I'm picking this one up first at Nov and double dip it on PS4 next year. Still, hope the next TR ditch the last gen console and let the engine spread its wings in full.

 

Things I've seen

• Hair in the moving jeep looks way too floaty indeed but it may have to do with them moving in the jeep and that may not be playing well with the hair physics so they might have had to tweak some settings for it to not look even stranger (pure speculation on my side, but it doesn't look as floaty during gameplay..)
• The jeep crash is probably key-frame animated as it doesn't look like it obeys the laws of physics, comes down crashing way too fast.
• I don't like the running animation at all, it's not athletic (while trying to escape the flood), looks a bit too fragile, doesn't convey the emergency.

 

Yeah Lara doesn't look athletic at all (her movement not her body), and 90% of animations seem reused from the reboot, maybe improved slightly but they look the same to me. How she stumbles, how she walks, how she limps etc.

I could understand her not understanding what shes doing in the first game but why are we getting the same whiny Lara in the sequel is beyond me.

 

Only things I can nitpick from that video is that the narration and voice acting is really really bad for a game with this kind of production value. I still don't like the new PTSD Lara just because that her character was always confident and ambitious in previous to reboot titles but whatever.

But the game from a technical level looks pretty good and I like the lighting art direction from what I have seen.

 

This is the only aspect that disappoints. I could accept 2013's Lara in an origin story but a second outing is less appealing. I'd prefer they skipped ahead a few adventures where she was a lot more confident in her abilities.

 

Another thing I had noticed during my first time viewing is some animation problems. Compared to what we're seeing on Uncharted and The Order, this is a bit lacking:
http://imgur.com/UKMofGs
VS the Order:
http://imgur.com/xhk3YPZ

Please focus on the sliding feet on TR and well grounded feet on The Order. Ready At Dawn did an amazing job.

 

Maybe The Order's quartermaster puts rubber soles on their boots and Lara's butler uses.. uh.. PTFE coated with Vaseline.

 

with a quantum levitation engine.

 

Wow that looks amazing. Better than UC4 I think, although less physics, the textures and backgrounds are often much

The order guy does not look like he is really on the ground, or natural movement at all. Something seems very off with that Order animation clip.

.

 

I honestly cannot see what you are seeing, let alone detect something "very off". I'm hoping you are also noticing it's leaps and bounds ahead of the TR example in any case.

Game animation needs to find a balance between looking totally realistic vs being responsive, the two can almost certainly never go hand in hand. Maybe that's the thing that you are seeing (but I'm not), but Tomb Raiders animation in that example is very atrocious.

 

Could this be using some sort of dynamic res like Halo 5? I noticed some weird aliasing throughout the video

 

Looks like AA gradient blends into wrong color.
Scene rendered in wrong order for their AA implementation and samples blending into skybox?

If I remember correctly this is something that can happen with EQAA/CSAA.

 

Really? I got most of all collectables in my first run through. Revisiting areas to find the few I had missed had no deeper value to me. I enjoyed the superb polished execution of the game and didn't want it to end but then I realized the game itself was too shallow. It had no depth. It's too small, needed far more secrets, puzzles were too simple and for replay ability it needs more paths/options.

How you can compare this game with Metroid(at least the ones I've experienced on the GC) or Arkham escapes me. The first is far more complex in the paths you can take. It literally trains the player's memory. Arkham is just so much bigger...

 

I thought this was the gaming thread? Can we keep the visual nitpicking to the tech threads? Thanks!

Tommy McClain