Not with the level design of the old ones they don't.
Read this:
You can't pull off the same level design of the old ones with mario style movement. The PS2 era tried that and the platforming was much more boring.
Yeah, because the games are designed around the clunky ass movement. You can't just slap in a better control scheme and expect it to work.
Core designed their game around control scheme limitations and then continued to design their games that way when those limitations were no longer limitations. Halfway through reading the article now, but nothing in it sells me on anything other than the games have great level and puzzle design and lackluster everything else.
Isn't anything I haven't been reading online for 15+ years now.
The newer games were designed with mario control and yet I didn't find them as satisfying or fun to play through as the original.
As I said before, the PS2 era games dumbed everything down so much that they just don't feel as fun. The act of having to study your surroundings and planning your movement is pretty much gone.
The original games did a much better job at platforming cause of all the factors like movement and level design.
Damn, the last paragraph is brutal (not that I disagree):
It would surprise me if the platforming of the new Tomb Raider offered anything cerebral at all. Its target audience are the fans of Uncharted and Enslaved. Those games are not about rewarding the contemplation of movement mechanics -- they are about rewarding obedience, and it frightens and upsets me that they are widely praised. Not that they are completely worthless pieces of media; they look and sound very nice. But I wish they would do away with the orwellian QTEs and meaningless walking around. I wish we could have more communication, and less crawling.
FYI, there is a pretty interesting conversation between the author of the article (writer/designer Hamish Todd), on one side, and a highly proficient speedrunner of the classic games, on the other. The conversation takes place in the comments section of the article:
Speedrunner's Comment (Link): It's great to see an article on earlier Tomb Raider's controls on a high-profile site that goes beyond instantly dismissing them because they aren't immediately accessible, but some of the things on the third page make this feel a little "close, yet far" in getting to the heart of the strengths that it has over newer action/adventure control schemes.
The major strength of the original controls is their consistency in both function and interaction with the world. If you position right all the situations in this article can be "solved" 100% of the time, and Lara having very clear limitations to understand means that if something seems like it should be able to be done, it can be, including things not intended. Outside of the boundaries of the world and rare overzealous mesh hitboxes you never have to worry about invisible walls or similar stopping you from doing something that should be clearly possible. Modern action/adventures might be far more accessible but it's pathetic how little interaction with the environment they have in comparison; the only one I've seen capture anything like the original TR's is Mirror's Edge, which has a few issues in a couple of areas but actually feels like the closest thing to a natural evolution of the original TR controls and environmental interaction (including unintentional interactions that nonetheless add depth and exploration).
Saying the games are lacking depth just because properly understanding them isn't required to finish the game normally is a little questionable when there are many facets to the way you can interact with things that allow you to do things far beyond what the developers obviously intended even without glitches. There are also the various ways you can interrupt animations and use certain geometry to your advantage that lead to so many nuances for things like speedrunning that new things are still being discovered to this day.
As an extension of that, the dismissal of the sequels and certain things they bought also sells things short; the mid-air twist was already mentioned in this article but undersold on what a massive change it makes to the amount of flexibility you have (with the example given in the article being just one way it can be used), as well as allowing for some interesting and complex mid-air roll+air control navigation. In contrast to the crawl, the sprint that was also added in TR3 is also interesting in how the big speed improvement allowed the developers to make larger levels while minimising the amount of extra backtracking and time spent in empty space (assuming you don't get too stuck anyway, which is admittedly a pretty big assumption in the context of TR3's absurd difficulty). The sequels also generally make more complex and interesting use of space and the moves provided.
Given the bringing up of games like VVVVVV I wonder if the article writer would be intrigued by certain custom levels made for the Tomb Raider editor; while frequently incredibly difficult and complex they allow you to save anywhere (avoiding much progression loss) and many explore the kind of scenarios presented in this article to a much greater degree, from bigger scale versions of the situations in this article to crazy stuff way beyond anything demanded/explored in the main games (such as the previously mentioned mid-air roll+air control combos).
The author of the article (Hamish Todd) responds to that comment here, and the conversation goes back and forth for a bit, so I think it would be of interest for many folks here.
This has also been discussed a bit in other threads, where folks (like the speedrunner above) frequently mention Mirror's Edge.
I also really like the example of Super Cloudbuilt, as I've mentioned on occasion:
With regard to the idea of the tide turning just a bit, in addition to the Game Maker's Toolkit video essay that Semfry mentions, there was a very interesting More_Badass thread from last year (LTTP: Tomb Raider (1996) remains an innovative platformer and I wish there were more games like it)... I always thought that the Mechanics Demo video by the dev of Super Cloudbuilt gave a good explication/illustration of important design principles, for a non-automated, challenging/engaging platforming/traversal system:
[0m50s]...You're in full control of every part of the movement, meaning that you have a lot of freedom, but it also means you have to earn it. In Super Cloudbuilt, one input equals one action. This is an important feature, meaning that there is no automization: everything you see and accomplish is a result of your own skill. So, what does this actually mean?
[1m50s]...What's even more important is the conversion of momentum between actions. If I run up on a wall and jump before I lose all my upward momentum, that momentum will carry over into the jump. Likewise if I ran up on a wall and that momentum fizzles out before I jump, the resulting jump will be a lot lower. This conversion of momentum is true even when chaining multiple interactions, like wall running into a jump, into another wallrun, and so on...
[2m20s]...Take this case for instance. Running at it with perfect angles I can get up here. If I use bad angles it converts my momentum differently, making it hard or impossible to get up. Not only finding the combination of moves but all the timings, angles, and momentum is important if you want to be successful. There's a lot of depth here, but also a lot to learn, as most games don't really work like this...
[4m27s]...Mastering these techniques... is key to becoming a successful and skillful [player]... If you pay attention and practice a bit, they will soon become second nature, and let you move around the maps freely. When you eventually get there, it will feel great looking back and knowing the journey and [the fact that now] everything you do, is your own skill...
Richard Moss: ...The grid [in Classic TR] meant that players would always know that if they jumped forward, backward, or sideways from a standing start, they would finish exactly one block [one unit] away. Likewise, three steps forwards or backward were equal to the length of one block [one unit], as was hopping backwards, while a running jump took three steps to prepare and traveled a distance of two blocks [two units] forward. And you knew that you could execute a running jump, without fail, by walking to the edge of a block, hopping back, running, and jumping...
Part 1:
Richard Moss: [3m11s]"...an alluring world that demanded a kind of patient precision... its mechanics, its rules by which players could navigate the world... Lara Croft moved predictably and consistently. Controlling her at times felt like moving a remarkably agile tank. But that was a small price to pay for the intricate environmental puzzles that this enabled. There were multi-jump maneuvers, desperate leaps across chasms, dives between poisoned darts, spike traps, backflips up to secret areas..."
[4m23s] "...And all of those things might have been totally different if not for one simple decision during development, one pragmatic choice to lay the levels out on a grid of square blocks. Everything comes back to that: the majority of the puzzles, and certainly all of the platforming owe their existence to that decision... the cavernous chambers and ruins and outdoor areas that provide a sense of isolation, of solitude and discovery... Lara's almost iconic movements, her backflips and sideways somersaults, her swandives and 180 degree forward rolls. These were all defined by the grid. The grid meant that players would always know that if they jumped forward, backward, or sideways from a standing start, they would finish exactly one block away. Likewise, three steps forwards or backward were equal to the length of one block, as was hopping backwards, while a running jump took three steps to prepare and traveled a distance of two blocks forward. And you knew that you could execute a running jump, without fail, by walking to the edge of a block, hopping back, running, and jumping... when you coupled all these abilities with the grapple button that allowed Lara to try to catch a ledge while airborne, plus a few environmental elements like movable blocks she could push or pull, and steep inclines that she could slide down... you had all the tools needed to devise some masterful environmental puzzles. Tomb Raider's grid was game-changing, it defined and confined the problem space for both players and developers in such a way that it became liberating…"
[14m53s]"...This is the moment, perhaps more than any other, that defined what Tomb Raider would become. It meant that the game would have a fully realized 3D world, but also a clear and consistent internal logic. Switching to a grid-based system, with a purpose-built room editor, would have huge ramifications for the game's development..."
[26m20s] "...they learned more about the most interesting ways that Lara could interact with this grid-based environment, and began to think of more intricate puzzles involving sliding jumps and timers, and the full extent of Lara's acrobatic abilities. And still always, you could identify your possible routes through a level, not by finding the shiny surfaces, or following the onscreen prompts pointing you there, as has become the norm in today's 3D action-adventure games, but rather by understanding that relationship between Lara's capabilities and the geometry of the world..."
Part 2:
Gavin Rummery: [0m20s] "...becuase [the grid-based Level Editor I created] was so easy [for the Level Designers] to use... that's what made Tomb Raider [as] intricate as it was for the time, because the levels could be modified so easily... in some ways I do feel that's been lost... I love games like Uncharted and whatnot but you can tell that – I've looked into how they're doing it – and you can see that they have to just kind of design the path through the level and where you're going to be able to grab onto and where you're not, up front, and then the artist then just [makes] these fantastic-looking environments, but they're kind of restricted to what's been decided already... having that kind of easy way of building environments is obviously just not possible anymore..."
Richard Moss: [3m30s]"...it's much harder now, to keep the playfulness and flexibility in the game's level design as it moves through the stages of production... just for simple reasons of logistics, dozens of artists might have to redo parts of their work, or sit around twiddling their thumbs, if a designer wants to do what Heather [Gibson] and Neal [Boyd] did, during the original Tomb Raider development, which was to keep experimenting and tweaking the layouts, throughout the process...
[27m50s] ...Minecraft's blockiness is no mere aesthetic: it's the consequence of its voxel-based engine, a cubic variation on the same grid conceit that Tomb Raider used... the Tomb Raider Level Editor was released for free with the PC version of the 5th game, and it's still used by a passionate community of fan creators today, many of whom are involved in the level editing community because they don't see any other games that can scratch the same itch as the old-school Tomb Raider. And with their custom modifications and extensions to the editor, it's actually able to produce some incredible levels, and remarkably organic-looking environments, all while still adhering to that grid, that preserves the game's internal logic..."
How Tomb Raider's grid-based level editor shaped the early series' design and identity (part 1) | The Life & Times of Video Games
Every aspect of the original Core Design Tomb Raider series (and by extension the franchise's success post-Core) comes back to the grid that lies beneath it — the majority of the puzzles; the platforming; the cavernous chambers and ruins and outdoor areas that provide a sense of isolation, of...lifeandtimes.games
It comes down to the fundamental problem of 3D gaming: depth perception. For a platformer, running and jumping in 3D space is the most important aspect. Without stereopsis, judging jumps in 3 dimensional space is significantly more difficult than in 2D games. Most games got around the issue by just not having a lot of difficult to judge jumps and making it so if you missed a jump you could retry. Tomb Raider, however, chose to make the controls and Lara's moveset very precise so that you could always judge the distance and type of jump you needed...
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