How come Tomb Raider gets away with it?

[Darth Rahu]

Nope. Totally different. XCOM was an RTS franchise, that's where it lies. Making it into a shooter was just out of left field. When Tomb Raider came out it was trying to be a third-person action game with platforming and puzzles. The new Tomb Raider is a third-person action game with platforming and puzzles, just with modern design elements implemented. If Tomb Raider from the 90s becoming Tomb Raider 2013 is like spending a whole summer getting an old Charger into working order again, Turning XCOM UFO Defense into XCOM The Shooter would be disassembling that charger and turning it into an abstract junk art sculpture with vague allusions to the female form. Calm down, Tomb Raider didn't get away with it, Tomb Raider just got it right.

 

[Yopaz]

As others have already said, it's not really that different from the original games. Making a SRPG into a FPS is as different as you can make a game. Making a platform game with some puzzles and some shooting focus a little more on shooting and stealth is kinda small.

Also there has been rage about changing Lara, but it died down after a while and it was covered by the hatred and controversy about rape in an AAA title.

 

[Twilight_guy]

1. Tomb Raiders games weren't really all that good, at least not good enough to be super nostalgic over.

2. Tomb raider doesn't have the same kind of fanbase. In fact Its rare to hear of a tomb raider fan as opposed to a fan of obscure old game X.

3. Tomb raider has had a series of games, none of which have been really that good, up to this point so a reboot isn't a sudden change from popular and good to new or remaking of an older property, both of which are common to fan "BETRAYAL" cries.

4. Actually there was some outcry but the game has a smaller group of fans so its a smaller outcry. They also probably got drowned out int he ocean of shrill whining over Mass effect, or some new DRM, or horse armor, or some other crap that becomes a hot topic and fills the forum with dozens of threads.

 

[lacktheknack]

2.) Because this isn't even the first time Tomb Raider has been remade or rebooted from the ground up, so people have already gotten most of the backlash over that out of their systems. X-Com, on the other hand, was one game and then the same game underwater a long time ago, so everyone who still cares about X-Com is fanatically devoted to that vision of what the game should be and have spent so long getting used to every eccentricity of its mechanics that any deviation sticks out like a sore thumb to them.

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Yes, this was a thing. Seriously.

 

[lacktheknack]

1. Tomb Raiders games weren't really all that good, at least not good enough to be super nostalgic over.

2. Tomb raider doesn't have the same kind of fanbase. In fact Its rare to hear of a tomb raider fan as opposed to a fan of obscure old game X.

3. Tomb raider has had a series of games, none of which have been really that good, up to this point so a reboot isn't a sudden change from popular and good to new or remaking of an older property, both of which are common to fan "BETRAYAL" cries.

Huh. We must have entirely different social circles. Because Tomb Raider is the one thing that most of my friends can agree was pretty great.

 

[jollybarracuda]

Tomb Raider (the reboot) respected the original games and the fanbase that helped make it popular. Her character doesn't drastically go against what made her original character memorable (besides the, ahem, obvious exception, but even that, they didn't do away with as much as they probably could have). Now had they given her some kind of Irish accent, or something, then yah, that very obviously goes against the original design of her to an unnecessary degree. With DMC, they just disrespected the character that people loved so much, with the whole brown hair and overall frat-boy design.

 

[Twilight_guy]

1. Tomb Raiders games weren't really all that good, at least not good enough to be super nostalgic over.

2. Tomb raider doesn't have the same kind of fanbase. In fact Its rare to hear of a tomb raider fan as opposed to a fan of obscure old game X.

3. Tomb raider has had a series of games, none of which have been really that good, up to this point so a reboot isn't a sudden change from popular and good to new or remaking of an older property, both of which are common to fan "BETRAYAL" cries.

Huh. We must have entirely different social circles. Because Tomb Raider is the one thing that most of my friends can agree was pretty great.

Yes we probably do. However I think we can agree that when people start talking about nostalgic games of yore Tomb Raider is not the first title to come to mind.

 

[JagermanXcell]

It got away with it cause it was a change people wanted and had the possibility of bringing life back to the dying franchise... thats kinda how things roll nowadays unfortunately. The plus being that the reboot respected the original source material.
Personally I though the XCOM shooter thing was stupid, straying away from the core mechanics for a wider audience is sort of a wuss move.

Not all games get away with it. Just look at the wild ride that was the new DmC:
-Franchise was dying, needed some sort of sequel, instead got a reboot.
-Now this is where things fall apart... trailer for new game revealed, majority of the fans DESPISE the new character design, new studio/director working on the game insults said fans, pro-DmC fans call us whiners backing the new dev team and the game.
-Dev team is eventually pressured by old fanbase, attempts to appeal to them are made (uncreative white hair devil trigger, Donte no longer smokes), it fails, devs and pro fans go back to insulting us.
-Gameplay trailer is revealed, gameplay is seen to be slower and simplified to the point where its nothing compared to original DMC standards, attempt to win back old fans fails again, devs and pro fans assume we're still mad about the hair and not the dumbed down, piss poor demos shown.
-Demo comes out, old fans still don't like it, Donte remains unlikeable in design and personality, pro fans tell old fans to wait for the full product to apparently have the right to an opinion, we wait.
-Game is released, poor sales, glitchy glitchy glitchy, poor story, poor characters, decent but slow combat, suspicious number of high scores along with comments of it being superior to the original games, evidence of multiple flaws are shown in unbiased reviews, pro fans assume we're STILL mad about the hair.
-Devs try to appeal to the old fans AGAIN, release old Dante skin, fails AGAIN. Fans are now forever alienated.

So yeah not all games get away with it.

 

[lacktheknack]

1. Tomb Raiders games weren't really all that good, at least not good enough to be super nostalgic over.

2. Tomb raider doesn't have the same kind of fanbase. In fact Its rare to hear of a tomb raider fan as opposed to a fan of obscure old game X.

3. Tomb raider has had a series of games, none of which have been really that good, up to this point so a reboot isn't a sudden change from popular and good to new or remaking of an older property, both of which are common to fan "BETRAYAL" cries.

Huh. We must have entirely different social circles. Because Tomb Raider is the one thing that most of my friends can agree was pretty great.

Yes we probably do. However I think we can agree that when people start talking about nostalgic games of yore Tomb Raider is not the first title to come to mind.

I'm biased because Tomb Raider was the first game that anyone cares about that I ever played. (Unless people started caring about Myst when I wasn't looking...)

But you're right, most people say Mario.

 

[Snotnarok]

I think the answer is play through the old Tomb Raider games, see how it progressively got awful after 3 and we come back to how people view the series after that. It was milked and abused and it needed to be new to be of interest. Besides Laura ...wasn't exactly built to be a respectable woman with her previous design. Pretty sure at some point everyone backed her into a corner to get the camera close to give her gun straps a good once over back in the 90's.

Honestly it took a lot of effort to get people to even try Laura Croft: Guardian of light with me, every time "Tomb Raider? Seriously that series has just hasn't been good for ages". So it needed the fresh start.

 

[wulf3n]

FPS is kind of a dirty word these days. If you don't love FPS [and in some cases even if you do] the saturation of the FPS genre [specifically the MMS] gives rise to the feeling Oh, another shooter, they're just trying to cash in on the CoD/Battlefield craze, whether that's the intention or not.

 

[Auron]

Tomb Raider has been awful since the first game in every way imaginable including gameplay, the only redeeming fact being it's basically Indiana Jones,the new game however manages to actually be interesting.

 

[VoidWanderer]

In 2010, 2K games announced that they would be reviving the X-COM franchise in the form of a first person shooter. This was met with much rage, due to 2K taking a beloved old franchise and turning it into something vastly different that had nothing to do with the previous games except for its name and having aliens invade earth. As we all know, 2K received so much negative feedback that they decided to make a much more fitting game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and the XCOM FPS was never heard from again to this day.

For some reason, Tomb Raider doesn't get the same response. Lara Croft is a completely different character - she doesn't look, sound or act like the way she was liked/disliked for (depends on personal taste), and the gameplay is now about on shooting and sneaking rather than platforming and puzzle solving - basically changing genre from action-adventure to third person shooter with stealth elements.

I'd like to say that this doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the game, but whether it was right to call it a Tomb Raider game, when it's different to the point where under a different name it wouldn't be seen as such. Can you imagine this game being called a Tomb Raider successor/clone/ripoff if it had a different name?

So, is it as similar to the X-COM case as I think it is? If so, why didn't it get the same reaction?

EDIT: It seems that most people's replies are about how awesome the new game is. As I said before, it's not about whether or not it's better, but whether or not it's actually Tomb Raider, or a completely different game using its name.

...

Like others have said, there were TWO different X-COM games being made. The FPS and the Tactical Game. The Tactical game came out first, and because of how well people reacted to it, the FPS got turned into a TPS.

Tomb Raider is a prequel. It shows how Lara became the woman we know here as. They focus more on the survival aspect, ie shooting the people who are trying to shoot her, tyhere are the jumping puzzle aspects, but there si less of a focus on that. The X-COM game that hasn't come out yet, and I personally hope never will, is not focusing on the original gameplay so it should be named something else.

 

[The Selkie]

It's their game, they get to make it however they want. If you don't like the direction it's gone in then don't buy it, but realistically the platformer seems to be a dying genre. Feel free to complain and say it's not a Tomb Raider game, but it is if they say it is.

It might be different, but times change and if they didn't start making serious alterations to the series then it wasn't going to last much longer.

 

[JellySlimerMan]

Because Tomb Raider isnt comparable with XCOM, by the sheer quality of the later?? the first TR game was the only "good" in the eyes of the fans before Crystal Dinamics pulled the eternal reboot and made basically the same from one another.

The fans hopes and wills were drained with each release, unlike XCOM that only got 1 game and an expansion and nthing else for an eternity

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Because as fun as Tomb Raider was, it was trapped in adolescent sex fantasy for far too long. It was about time they did something about that. The result is glorious. New Lara is better than the old one in every single way. And this is coming from someone who's played all Tomb Raider games.

Crap. New Lara is sexier than the old, and at least the old Lara didn't moan and squeal the whole way through while rolling around in mud like you see in those american mud-wrestling competitions. Adolescent sex-fantasy... yeah right.

 

[m19]

Whatever you may think of the balance between combat & puzzles. (IMO: Combat is fine and better paced than some people say, can use more puzzles) There were things about Tomb Raider that even many hardcore fans agreed were outdated:

- Lara's design looked like a caricature once those original polygonal proportions were translated into modern graphics.
- Her characterization was lacking.
- Those lock-on shooting mechanics are simply terrible in this day and age.
- Controls were awkward.
- The story would have to start fresh anyway since the arc of the latest instalments had nowhere else to go.

 

[suitepee7]

I guess a better question might be, why does "metal gear rising" get away with it?

pretty sure rising is meant to be a spin off, so not a proper metal gear game (at least, thats my understanding of it)

OT: personally i haven't given the time of day to a tomb raider game since 3, so in my eyes a reboot was direly needed. the franchise was becoming stale, and they reinvented the IP rather than just make another one in the same formula, have it fail and blame the IP itself rather than the game.

 

[Assassin Xaero]

Probably because, now days, most everyone loves FPS games or hates them just because they are FPS.