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Old 08-12-19, 20:36   #11
larafan25
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Yes because the creative direction of the marketing team who's artistic opinion is dominating the game's artistic opinion has decided it needs to change... For no different a justification than that of the colours in the game. Somebody cared more about money than the game, couldn't see it's value in the context of a new world for some reason...
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Old 08-12-19, 21:13   #12
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I don't even think the developers had a concrete vision of what they wanted the game to be. That lack of vision definitely contributed to the development hell AOD went through.
I'd say this is unfair. Every ambitious creative project is constantly in flux until the moment of completion. It has to be. Think on how many rewrites and cuts a film may go through; you've got many people contributing, revising, reiterating... improving. They had the ambition, direction, tone, aesthetic and story, but it was the many pressures coming from all kinds of places, all at the most inopportune times, one after another, that prevented them from being able to reach the level of completeness they wanted. You can tell there was still something anchoring the project despite the "chaos".
Oh I agree that basically all projects are in a state of flux, as you said, until they are complete. But allow me to clarify with a few quotes from the Eurogamer article -

Quote:
The Tomb Raider team swelled from 12 to 60, then 100.

[...]

The Angel of Darkness' disastrous development, people who worked on the game say, was down to a lack of structure, a lack of process, and a failure of management. Core had no idea how to manage a project of its size. Staff were rudderless and demotivated. The game was too ambitious. It tried to do too many different things.

[...]

"There hadn't been enough organisation," [Gavin Rummery] says. "Everyone was keeping their head down. No-one wanted to take responsibility, so it had no leadership. It was just the mess you would expect to get if you allowed 40 people to do their thing without anyone coordinating it."

[...]

"I started off with the lead programmer and said, so what's the problem?" Rummery remembers. "Why are these not getting sorted out? He said, oh well, blah blah blah. You need to talk to the person who's putting them in. I went to talk to this guy and he went, blah blah blah, you need to go and talk to this person. I went through a chain of six people. The last person went: yeah, you need to go and talk to the lead programmer.

"Oh my god. I'd gone in a circle. So I went, right, you six, come with me! We need to talk this out! We thrashed out who needed to do what and what the problems were. Everyone was waiting on someone else."
Source

This is what I mean when I say the team didn't have a concrete vision of the game. What I should have said was they did not have a unified vision. They had this massive team but no one was communicating with each other. It's not just that the final product was being revised, tweaked, etc as development went on, it's that team a was doing one thing and team b another, and neither was in sync. It's just not possible to bring a product together in a cohesive way when the goal post is not only moving, but no one knows where that goal post even is.
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Old 08-12-19, 21:55   #13
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I think it's odd, because the game we had to me seems to have a very strong, unified vision. I don't know if the interviewee is exagerating or if the Chronicles guys managed to fix so much since joining the team. But something seems to have fixed that lack of direction.

If it had no bugs, and I'm considering the controls we had as a bug too, I think it would be successful, just not successful enough. Too much cut content. Now a fully realized AoD could probably never happen. But that game would be, IMO, revolutionary, genre-defining and it could very well be the game every other action game of the time would be compared to, the complete AoD.

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Old 09-12-19, 05:17   #14
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Even if the game had no bugs, I'm not sure everyone would have liked it.

I've heard some people dislike this game for city areas and lack of tomb levels. These problems would still exist within the game.(Even if they never removed Germany and Turkey, those parts were also going to add their own city areas and NPCs to the game which means more boring parts for those people that disliked those.)

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I'm a diehard TRAOD fan but let's be honest here, the game we got was cut so much it is only but a shadow of the original idea. Paris section is short and completely deserted while Prague looks like it's made of scraps from other levels. The game also has some plot holes like Lara's resurrection or Lara knowing Karel.
Wasn't she knowing him from that Boaz transformation cutscene ? (I remember he was in that cutscene)
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I have a funny story with that actually. I skipped TR IV and Chronicles, and when I saw that cutscene, I assumed that Karel played a big part in the story of the Last Revelation.When I played them later, I was even more shocked, story of Werner just didn't fit,
That's because originally that archaeologist friend of Lara from TR 4 was going to be in AOD but Core Design and Eidos were forced to remove that character from Chronicles and AOD due to this that he looked too similar to a real life archaeologist.(So they replaced him with Von Croy in AOD)

Last edited by dg1995; 09-12-19 at 08:31.
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Old 09-12-19, 12:50   #15
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His name is never mentioned in the game up until Lara says it herself
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Old 10-12-19, 01:00   #16
Jorje Croft
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as a young brat I never knew AOD was unfinished, however I played on PC and don't remember any dramatic single bug, every gave has bugs. had no problems with controls either. as its almost same as previous games, only thing what bugged me was her running speed. annnddd killing boaz was almost impossible unless I found out online that u need to change targets with ''end'' button on keyboard, like eeeewwww. I don't think all the rumors about the team is truth as we can see game has a very polished direction and art, which still feels strong after these years,you can't make such an artistic game without management, I blame only sony and no one else as they asked to rebuilt almost finished product which was shown at E3, AOD had very similar controls as LAU trilogy had after. as I said in another thread, eidos and core should release another PC version for PC and different version for playstation, lot of games did that in the past, and nobody complained. they should kept original system for PC.I believe these files still floating in someone's basement. even so game wasn't popular for mainstream audience I think its still worth it to release ''fixed'' version on some platform as companies doing with other old games, I would pay a top dollar to buy it and I believe other ppl would do too, there is kinda big AOD fandom out there. Xbox should release remasters of all classic games including AOD, with updated controls and fixed bugs. worth it.

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Old 10-12-19, 06:43   #17
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Those aren't rumors tho but keep on living in your world, where Core never did anything wrong
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Old 10-12-19, 08:36   #18
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We wouldn't even be grieving about it if this game was ever properly finished during that period.

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Those aren't rumors tho but keep on living in your world, where Core never did anything wrong
You're absolutely right about that. But Core Design had the inauspicious time to get this game finished properly unfortunately.

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Old 10-12-19, 09:18   #19
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Those aren't rumors tho but keep on living in your world, where Core never did anything wrong
He is right though. The game has very defined art direction and storyline. They knew well where they were going with "new but familiar" approach. They hired Murti Schofield as a writer so he had a very strict idea of the plot too. Richard Morton was the lead level designer and he had experience with TR levels. I think the leads did know what they wanted. It was the management and inexperienced team that messed up the production. TRAOD had all of its plot planned early on and while the Germany and Turkey were removed (before the work on them even started) Paris and Prague were pretty much the same in the early documents and the final version. The stuff that was changed was mostly related to performance (scrapyard) or lack of time (Prague probably).

They knew what they wanted. They didn't want Tomb Raider though.

Last edited by Caesum; 10-12-19 at 09:22.
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Old 10-12-19, 18:34   #20
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Those aren't rumors tho but keep on living in your world, where Core never did anything wrong
NO.
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