The Video/PC Game Discussion Thread

I actually normally prefer stealth combat - I sneak everywhere I can in Skyrim and Fallout 4 for instance - I just don't think it was executed that well in Shadow. Like when you do a stealth kill Lara will sometimes drag the body into nearby cover, but not always and there being no option to manually do it. Puts enemies on alert to see a body lying around. Actually I also found that even when they were patrolling normally and I was fully in cover they had a habit of suddenly walking directly to where I was, even when it wasn't an obvious patrol path. And when they do that it's very hard to get away from them again without being seen. Those mind control arrows were something of a life saver actually. I should have remembered them in the final boss fight, but I was too boss trying to dodge everything and get a few shots in on the actual boss. 

Just finished Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I have to say that in the end I have mixed feelings that lead me to conclude it the weakest game of this reboot series so far. Aside from technical issues I've already talked about, the combat was lacking. Not so much in amount but when it was there it felt really jarring to me. Almost half-arsed even. As the combat was good in the last two games I'm not sure what went wrong here, but it felt considerably more clunky to perform and I found that most encounters were a real pain in the arse, especially when the game tried to force stealth, such as one particular big encounter where the game decided it would be a good point to make you lose all your weapons just before except for your knife and climbing axe (rather useless as weapons go in the game, since by the time you kill anyone with it the rest of the enemies have located you and shot you while kill animated are playing). I despised that encounter as it absolutely forced you to complete it never breaking stealth which led to me dying maybe a dozen times before I managed to clear that area. Before you had weapons to fall back on, but there it was suddenly impossible. Given how few and far between encounters in the game are I have to conclude that as bad game design. If they'd been more enemies around and more chances to get used to stealth maybe it would have worked better, but it was really just a really annoying sequence. The boss fight at the end of the game was also really bad for the opposite reason, since the game put all this reliance on stealth which was of very, very limited use then, since even in the first phase of the fight before the boss even attacks it was very rare that you could get an enemy alone to take them out with alerting another. 

Edited by adg211288 - 26 Oct 2018 at 11:04am

Yeah, that does sound like it would be extremely annoying to deal with. Now that I have a laptop that can play reasonably high spec games, I've gone through some of that as well, where a game would be listed as having less demanding specs than games I can run flawlessly, but then I try it and get stuck with sub 30FPS, and have to play around with settings for sometimes up to an hour, to see if I can even get it to be salvageable or not. That's one reason I prefer console gaming: Less FPS overall, but at least it doesn't give you a headache trying to get games to work, sometimes. 

Edited by DippoMagoo - 22 Oct 2018 at 1:19pm

It did get discounted very quickly, for that kind of game. The real concern is, that's probably a sign the game's sales bombed hard, so the series might be over, at least in this form. Which would suck, because I never got into the series before, but I've loved these past three games.

I think it's another case where it's just been terribly optimised on PC. I'm saying this because even turning down the settings to lowest doesn't even fully fix matters. And lowest looks really bad on this game. I can tolerate it when it's flitting down into the 50's and even the 40's but when it goes below 30 that's when it becomes hard to play. 

And the performance of Shadow of the Tomb Raider just gets worse and worse. Sub-30FPS and crazy unplayable stutters now I've reached the Hidden City, especially in the higher area of the map. 

Well Shadow of the Tomb Raider was going great until I reached Kuwaq Yaku, then performance absolutely tanked from a steady 70-100 FPS to a choppy 30-40! It's not unplayable, but it's a ridiculous drop and far more severe than any found in Rise. 

Yeah, I lasted about 10 hours with Shadows of Mordor, before getting sick of it. Both because it was killing my thumbs, and because it was just not fun for me, at all. That was modeled after early AC (well, anything up to Syndicate, really) and the Batman: Arkham games, where Odyssey and Origins are modeled after Dark Souls, except they're faster and don't have the stamina bar. I generally like the combat, but it gets super repetitive, plus I'm like you in that when I'm exploring or doing a mission, I'm focused entirely on that, and want nothing to do with random combat, so it's been driving me insane. It also has bounty hunters, which are super strong enemies, and they modeled that after Shadows of Mordor. Needless to say, that's my least favorite part of the game.

Edited by DippoMagoo - 17 Oct 2018 at 2:44pm

Possibly 

Edited by DippoMagoo - 17 Oct 2018 at 1:40pm

I'm not too sure why it's getting mixed reviews on Steam (though browsing through, lack of combat seems to be a part of it) but at least for the console versions, a lot of people are comparing the current trilogy in general unfavorably to Uncharted, which I personally disagree with, because I actually think Tomb Raider has much better gameplay, and like that it isn't totally on rails all the time like Uncharted. Plus, I find Uncharted 4 in particular to be one of the most overrated games ever, as people act like it's some great example of videogame storytelling, when in reality it's damn cliche, I was able to predict every twist hours before it happened. Obviously, though, the comparisons wouldn't effect you, anyway, since you'd probably have no interest in Uncharted, with it being PS4 exclusive and all.

Edited by DippoMagoo - 17 Oct 2018 at 12:58pm