Poll: Worst reboot franchise this gen? Tomb raider or Wolfenstien?

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

But the new Wolfenstein games? You'll have to break down what makes these bad games (as opposed to ones you didn't like) because critical acclaim and sales figures say otherwise. I'm most of the way (I guess) through New Colossus and although I enjoyed New Order quite a bit more it's still a good game - sets it's sights admirably high, makes some bold decisions, attempts to add flesh to the bones of one of the most venerable characters in computer gaming history, and remarkably hits the mark at least as often as it misses. That's not to be sniffed at.

Gonna just repost my previous post about The New Collossus, then, with a bit more detail.

The New Collosus Wolfenstein's game mechanics were woefully lacking.

1) The pseudo stealth "Hunt the commanders" thing was awful, and not at all supported by the level design or the movement mechanics. And if course when you fail the stealth, you face infinite reinforcements until you kill the remaining commander, who you now can't track down with the little compass thingy. Meaning you now have to run into to the open and run-and-gun until you find them.

2) The insane fragility of the main character compared to the HORDES of enemies made combat intensely frustrating. Yes, it makes narrative sense, I get it. But when I'm facing hordes of enemies that make run-and-gun and hide-in-cover both unfeasible due to the low health pool AND endless reinforcements unless I make a desperate run for the commanders...It's not fun.

3) The game felt like it just ENDED like 2/3rds of the way through. I was looking forward to ACTUALLY taking back the country. But nope, knock off one big airship, kill your nemesis, done, you can just assume all the liberation is happening afterwards as you do the mini-mission mode where you hunt down more commanders.

Like, I'm not the best at shooters, but I'm no slouch either. And I had to drop the difficulty down to the absolute lowest level to get any enjoyment out of the game. I did that stupid annoying new york "hold the penthouse" type mission like a dozen times and could not pull it off.

At which point I threw up my hands and said "!@#$ this, I'm playing this to get the thrill of gunning down nazi scum, not to suffer this unfun design. This ain't even the fun kind of suffering like Dark Souls or Etrian Odyssey, or whatever!".

Once all the difficulty was gone and I could just effortlessly dunk on my enemies, it was a passable shooter experience, although it still ended before there was enough proper narrative/emotional payoff.

Now, I'm aware a lot of people liked it. Good for them. I did not. I felt like it was very poorly designed.

And also, plenty of people like things that aren't great. Sword Art Online, as far as I understand it, is a really dumb anime series about a ridiculously overpowered protagonist, and yet it's insanely popular.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The insane fragility of the main character compared to the HORDES of enemies made combat intensely frustrating. Yes, it makes narrative sense, I get it. But when I'm facing hordes of enemies that make run-and-gun and hide-in-cover both unfeasible due to the low health pool AND endless reinforcements unless I make a desperate run for the commanders...It's not fun.

It doesn't make narrative sense at all. B.J. is wearing the damn super suit, the one that Caroline used in The New Order to stomp a giant robo-panther. Yet when B.J. wears it he has the physical resistance of tissue paper.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

The insane fragility of the main character compared to the HORDES of enemies made combat intensely frustrating. Yes, it makes narrative sense, I get it. But when I'm facing hordes of enemies that make run-and-gun and hide-in-cover both unfeasible due to the low health pool AND endless reinforcements unless I make a desperate run for the commanders...It's not fun.

It doesn't make narrative sense at all. B.J. is wearing the damn super suit, the one that Caroline used in The New Order to stomp a giant robo-panther. Yet when B.J. wears it he has the physical resistance of tissue paper.

I meant in the sense that they wanted to convey "BJ is a dying man on borrowed time, he is fragile right now".

But yeah, he's wearing a goddamn iron man suit (minus the flight), in no way should he be that fragile.

 

[Squilookle]

having not played either and just going off what I've seen- Wolfenstein looks like it's taken a bare bones shooter and thrown it through the goddamned renaissance- with compelling characters, interesting alternate history social commentary, and good wholesome shooty bang bang fun.

Tomb raider 2.0 (and 3.0 if the latest is another origin story)... is just torture porn. Lara getting thrown through the absolute mincer to elicit a protective response from the player. Which is kind of pathetic really.

So my vote's for Tomb Raider.

 

[Dalisclock]

Hard for me to judge here. I've only played Tomb Raider(2013) and Wolfenstein: The New Order, but none of the sequels for either. Choosing from those 2 I have played, I'd have to say the Tomb Raider Reboot is the lesser of the two games, due to a number of factors. Among them, the wierd nature of the upgrade system(No, you can't upgrade a Japanese WW2 sub-machine gun into an AK47, no matter how much wood and metal you tape onto it), the dissociation between gameplay and story(Lara is Sad about the Deer she killed, but not the 200 dudes she shanked this morning) the wierd torture porn nature of half the shit that happens to Lara and the fact Sam spends the entire game being a distressed damsel who is always in another castle.

Wolfenstein, while not perfect, doesn't have nearly as notable flaws.

 

[Batou667]

Gonna just repost my previous post about The New Collossus, then, with a bit more detail.

The New Collosus Wolfenstein's game mechanics were woefully lacking.

1) The pseudo stealth "Hunt the commanders" thing was awful, and not at all supported by the level design or the movement mechanics. And if course when you fail the stealth, you face infinite reinforcements until you kill the remaining commander, who you now can't track down with the little compass thingy. Meaning you now have to run into to the open and run-and-gun until you find them.

2) The insane fragility of the main character compared to the HORDES of enemies made combat intensely frustrating. Yes, it makes narrative sense, I get it. But when I'm facing hordes of enemies that make run-and-gun and hide-in-cover both unfeasible due to the low health pool AND endless reinforcements unless I make a desperate run for the commanders...It's not fun.

3) The game felt like it just ENDED like 2/3rds of the way through. I was looking forward to ACTUALLY taking back the country. But nope, knock off one big airship, kill your nemesis, done, you can just assume all the liberation is happening afterwards as you do the mini-mission mode where you hunt down more commanders.

Like, I'm not the best at shooters, but I'm no slouch either. And I had to drop the difficulty down to the absolute lowest level to get any enjoyment out of the game. I did that stupid annoying new york "hold the penthouse" type mission like a dozen times and could not pull it off.

At which point I threw up my hands and said "!@#$ this, I'm playing this to get the thrill of gunning down nazi scum, not to suffer this unfun design. This ain't even the fun kind of suffering like Dark Souls or Etrian Odyssey, or whatever!".

I finished the game yesterday, and yeah, your criticisms are all fair.

You're right, finding the commanders to assassinate is far too difficult. The game engine and level design don't lend themselves to that at all. The enemies patrol routes don't seem to allow any real sneaking and as soon as the first corpse gets spotted the alert meter fills from "peaceful" to "DEFCON 1" so quick it may as well be a switch getting flipped. I *think* in theory you can make enemies suspicious and then evade them long enough for them to return to a default state, but I never managed it.

Perhaps it was the difficulty I played on, but I felt there was too much health and armour littered around. If a firefight ever got a bit hairy the best tactic seemed to rush blindly into the next room hammering X to frantically scoop up the medkits that must surely be there between the armour, ammo and ten different varieties of collectables.

And again, I agree: despite all the self-evident care and effort that went into modelling the levels and characters, the worldbuilding is fairly shoddy. At very few points do you feel the magnitude of the world around you. Occupied America doesn't seem all that bad - or if it is, we don't get to see much evidence of it. The two resistance groups you encounter along the way similarly have incredibly little impact on the overall story.

The game was... disjointed.