Well mods are complaining we are off topic so we gotta talk about something. i dont wanna get flamed again for going off topic.. sorry for the serious mood :/

This is true. If the story is told well, stereotypes and/or clichés don't matter quite so much. It must be difficult to come up with something that isn't considered a cliché. If Roth dies and Lara is bound to react, I hope it can be done in a way that people sympathise and like the outcome instead of the accusations of 'crybaby Lara' that was given to TRL/A/U Lara. I want to be able to believe in the emotion and any transformation Lara goes through.

Exactly.

Although I am interested in things like Roth dying, or other possible obstacles simply to see how Lara handles them.

I hope her mental situation effects the game play in some unique way. In a narrative context of course.

I'd love to play a nightmare, in which Lara wakes up in her bed (lol or rock, leaves IDK) and the island is super messed up, and we essentially have to survive some incredibly horrifying stuff only to wake up.

Sounds more like Silent Hill than Tomb Raider. :p

Lara wakes up in her bedroom at her manor... *it was only a dream*. The end xD.

On a serious note, i like that too. Remember MGS GOTP were Snake had that stress level bar? Your health deteriorated if that got too high, i liked that lol. Although i doubt we see that in this game, its a pretty fun thing to speculate with.

No, to me it sounds like finding an ancient piece of crap lying in a tomb which causes you to hallucinate visions of ancient people having orgies and bull**** like that.

I never played that game, not sure I'd like a stress level bar. :/

Maybe if there was a stamina bar that slowly depleted under many conditions, one being stress.

Sounds more like Silent Hill than Tomb Raider. Or one of those mad sequences from Batman AA.

I'm not sure how to tomb it up enough to make it not Silent Hill, that's hard to do when the idea around here is that TR1-8 are Silent Hill games.

Wut? O_o

In 2009 people were attacking the leaked Tomb Raider concepts for having monsters in them, calling it Silent Hill.

Now we catch wind of monsters possibly not making a return, and people bitch.

Apparently sunken ships don't fit in Tomb Raider either, says some random member of the forum.

I just think it's odd that Tomb Raider having a creepy dream sequence makes it Silent Hill, or comparable, when the first Tomb Raider game included strange visions.

What people need to realize is... this isn't Tomb Raider as we know it anymore. People just can't do that.

It wasn't so much the dream sequence itself, more the details of it that you gave. They were straight out of a Silent Hill game, there was no two ways about it.

I think there are more ways about it. If I have an important idea I usually articulate it better than that nightmare idea.

By "horrifying stuff" I mean lots of combat with the enemies of the island who you'd expect to be scary.

I don't think the scenario being a dream is too far fetched either, for Tomb Raider, I guess it depends where you wake up, but she's on the island, so I guess it's still Tomb Raider.

Oh god people need to get over it. ALOT of bloody games have monsters in them, What on earth were they saying. And sunken ships? Not related to TR?. Come On..
https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/im...HDcbkhq73VQ_eP
2nd...
Tomb Raider - 1996.
Silent Hill - 1999.
And your right, Julian, TR1 was first with visions. :/
And so the fudge what if TR gains a darker side? It's more realistic and Monsters are a big damn subject in gaming..

How do most hub world games work?

Have multiple large hubs which connect to other levels like Spyro?

The only game I can think of that I've played with hubs is Batman Arkham Asylum. With the 3 (4?) main hub areas with interconnecting buildings/caves.

I played that too.

I wonder if the game's scale would be closer to that of Arkham City...

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__...hamCityMap.jpg

Wouldn't be much of a stretch given the scale of the buildings on the map, this area (yellow highlighted) could pretty much be filled by the night hub.

http://i663.photobucket.com/albums/u...n25/baba-1.jpg

Imagine a spider diagram, that's a hub-based game in its simplest form. One circle is joined to other circles, which are joined to other circles...and so on. In TR9, accessing certain circles from other circles will be gear-gated.

I see, well I want a lot of circles and lines, big circles, and needlessly squiggly lines.

Yeah, the lines are obviously the paths linking the hubs. How they'll take shape is anyone's guess. They could be narrow, linear winding pathways, or they could themselves be mini-hubs, open spaces with routes to other hubs.

Oh right.

Beneath Arkham Island were caves and sewers which were open, with structures and links to other parts of the island.

I'd like to see it become unecessarily complex though. Having an underground cistern connecting two parts of the island, but also having a separate cave system which leads to another part of the island but also drops off at the underground hub.

Given the fact that the world is in hubs and not just one, I hope the walls aren't obvious. I'm sure giant mountains will block our paths, but I hope it doesn't look out of place and I hope that when we do go into the mountainhs (if we do) that we have the freedom to fall to the ground.

That part isn't clear to me. If you're on a mountain in Uncharted, because everything is a set- you know you were just down at the bottom of that mountain, and are now at the top, but when you're in the top level the other level doesn't exist, so jumping off won't take you to that area because they're not connected.

CD seem content on convincing us that everything you see is part of the physical game world and can be accessed, and they played with that idea a bit in GOL when they spoke about seeing other parts of the level down below, knowing that you'd end up there.

I quite like the idea of a dual travel system, one could be the fast travel, an underground cave network that gives players quicker access to the parts they've already visited.

No dev's got that right so far (IMO), if Crystal don't either then I won't be blaming them (unless the walls are as bad as they were in Underworld). It's the limitations of the tech which is at fault more than the dev's lack of ability when it comes to walls.

You mean like a thousand foot-tumble shown in glorious bone-breaking detail? Yeah, that would be pretty damn awesome to watch. I don't think that sort of thing is beyond a developer, the amount of open space they can cram into one area is pretty phenomenal nowadays. But I guess, in terms of a fall, it comes down to how quickly the data can be shifted about and streamed, which leads nicely on to...

Most of the time when you're in an area where you can see for miles, like at the top of a mountain, the bottom isn't actually in the game's memory and what you're looking at when you look down is a visual trick. Falling from the top to the bottom would be dependent on what I said above about shifting the data around to actually load the bottom of the mountain. That's why tumbles like that normally end in a lousy fade to black.

To all intents and purposes it will be that way, but it's all visual trickery. If you stand on a theoretical TR9 beach and look at a mountain in the distance, the mountain won't be the same model that you get to climb when you actually get there. That's what I think they call level of detail (LoD) management.

Unfortunately I'm sure our fast travel will just be a click on the map to travel. I wouldn't mind some sort of sliding between hubs, through dark tunnels.

Yeeah, I've been playing Alice Madness Returns and there are a few obvious invisible walls in the giant environment as well the boundaries feel somewhat inconsistent.



Something like that...





Just Cause 2 was huge, in fact I think it may be the largest open world game ever created. Some people don't like the graphics, but graphics are something I'd give up a bit for a bit more space.



I see, so CD would probably need to tailor their engine to handle the amount of memory you see in an open world game.


As much as that doesn't sound nice, they do it the same way in pure open world games, don't they? Chances are high in TR9 that we can see the mountain, but we can't just run over to it and watch is load in like you'd see in most open world games.

OMG, yes -- something just like that, except with more realistic collision with the ground. I love it! :D

Wait, that character survived tumbling down that really high mountain...yet dies instantly when he lands in the water? :vlol:

It would be awesome to see Lara fall down a mountain, but she'd better die after a fall like that and not just brush herself off as if she'd fallen off a low wall :pi:.

I hope not.

WTF!? And he got up after it. I can't even...

But yeah, that was a good fall, if a bit uneventful. The landscape was all a bit flat and featureless between where he fell from and where he landed. But that's the kind of thing I'd like to see in TR9.

How old is the game? Two years? Yeah it was a big space, but the visuals in that vid were a little too bland for my liking, there was a lot of 'wallpaper' going on with the mountainside texture as he fell.

That's where it goes above & beyond what most people think about. The engine is limited by the tech it's running on. The 360 is the weakest of the three main platforms in terms of graphical clout, but it has better (faster) data transfer rates and more RAM than the PS3, but then the PC trumps both the 360 and PS3. So the devs have to find the balance that works on all the platforms.

All games do that, not just openworld ones. LoD management covers everything you see on-screen. Surely you'll have noticed in some games that textures on models further away are less detailed than they are close up (a popular trick is to blur stuff), or that models themselves are simplified when viewed from a distance. That's down to the RAM, the amount of information each machine can handle at any one time. Having 'cheaper' models and textures in the distance is just a way of lightening the load on the machine and freeing up more space for more important stuff. Which makes sense to me. Let's face it, do we really need to be able to make out every branch on a tree fifty metres away?

The game was released in 2012 I think....

This is the map...

http://uppix.net/7/d/4/8f1fe67866e98...47a222e8tt.jpg

It would be worth the effort.


Would it even be that realistic to display such details from so far away?

You can swim in that game, but he hit the ground and tumbled into the water.

According to Wiki it came out in 2010.

It's a very impressive map, but then so is the map to Red Dead Redemption, and that's a whole world of nothing. With the technology we have, it's currently a formula that dictates larger = less detail. Maybe Crystal started off with a ludicrously huge island for TR9 and then started scaling it back in order to add the detail.

It's not necessary no, but graphics whores are everywhere. I care not one bit when a tree in Red Dead Redemption sprouts unseen branches and leaves as I approach, nor do I care for the changing detail of the surroundings as I race past in Burnout Paradise. It's the package as a whole which counts, not insignificant details that you notice once and then never notice again.

Well, fine, but he shouldn't really have survived the first fall and then die after the second, which is why I found it funny. But we're not on here to discuss that game other than for reference to hubs/open world so...[/off topicness]

I hope so, some unnecessary. empty space is necessary IMO.


I'm sure if it happens in TR9 there will be an angry thread about it.

From the video is does look inconsistent, but iot's sort of an unwritten rule in the game that when you jump, it depends how far you fall on the first jump, if you die. If you jump a short distance and tumble the rest, you're likely to be okay, but if you just a long distance, you'll just smack the ground and die.

Some is, yes. But only some.

Considering people here complained about strands of Lara's hair in the GI reveal screenshots, I think you're probably right :p

^lol!

edit: wait where am I?

Ha ha I mis-posted as well :D. I need to sleep, I am clearly exhausted :).

Leaked footage, what did I miss?

nothing ...only a 1-2 minutes off screen bad quality camera footage from last E3


We need something relevant from CD !!!

3 mins :pi:

There was me getting excited.