CALLING ALL STATIONS: The BBS Plays Rise of the Tomb Raider

Is that any good? I was wondering about getting it, but like the Hitman one, I’m put off by the IP.

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Did you see this?

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Yeah the hitman story is ridiculous and embarrassing (sexy nun killers?) but it turns out, Hitman Absolution was a very good game. Easily the pinnacle of the series in terms of gameplay, options, and flexibility. It’s kinda shockingly good.

But yeah, sexy killer nuns :expressionless:

Anyway, I built a Windows 10 install USB key earlier and will start reinstalling my main machine tonight with the 950 pro m.2 SSD – I had tried to use this earlier but the logistics of migrating from one M.2 drive to another was just too daunting to me. Clean install is easier.

I just can’t work on a machine where explorer mysteriously faults the shell, which also causes launching RoTTR to … not work. I guess if you love the command line? Kind of not why I use Windows though…

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How many armed paramilitary men must I choke in cold blood before I can pick up one of their guns?

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At least one more?

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The dialogue in this is B-movie cliche` bad.

Great graphics, fun world to explore. But I cringe when people talk.

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snicker

Incidentally, the official KSP forums are exceptionally civilised by gamer standards. Plenty of helpful advice to be found there (and you are going to need it).

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I’m about 45 mins in and have been taking extensive notes.

Preview:

Where do the bloody shafts of light come from? Why not get into the cave that way!? No, no, going to risk life and limb clambering down the side of a mountain.

/rant

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Press RT to fire standard rounds.

Press RB to fire hollowpoint rounds.

omg that’s not how guns work come on you’re not even trying now

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Don’t you? I had a ponytail for ten years and it’s exactly the sort of thing I would do.

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Swimming around in freezing water wearing full clothing, metal armor, 2 climbing axes, a pistol, an ak-47, and 27 animal pelts is exactly the thing I would never do. Yet, I suspend disbelief in the biophysics to go along with the game.

In such a world, it’s odd to see attention to such realism mainly applied to how the woman looks and moves.

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Video games usually embody impossible and arbitrary choices. In my (still) favorite games, the HL2 series, for instance:

  • I cannot use a different weapon in each hand
  • I cannot lie down flat
  • I can carry 200 pounds of different weapons with no place to store them
  • Yet I am limited with the amount of ammo or grenades I can carry. If I leave 150 lbs of weapons, can’t I carry twice as much ammo?
  • I can climb a ladder with both hands while simultaneously reloading my weapon

I agree that it is daft, but unfortunately that has been the trend across nearly all video game development. The biggest push is for photo-realism and other superficial types of “immersion” such as bobbing, fidgeting. As a competitive gamer, this is stuff I have been critical of since the late 90s. If you are trying to use every bit of system resources to make the game as responsive as possible, why waste cycles/polygons/etc on having player models visibly breathe when the gesture is completely superfluous?

The push towards photo-realism seems strongly linked with the trend of making games more like cinematic narratives. And drawing influence from Hollywood, which has its own very deep problems with representation and creative bankruptcy only compounds the problems of the newer media.

My perspective on player models in games is quite utilitarian. They are not human, not a man nor woman. They are a collection of shapes. They don’t need clothes or hair. The “realism” comes from the responsiveness of interacting with the game environment through this avatar, and the robustness of the game engine itself, strength of its AI, and network abilities.

I also don’t buy the whole fanservice/sexual-titillation angle either, since regardless of what a player model looks like, one cannot possibly have sex with it. I would think that gamers would have figured this out a long time ago.

So, I think that the games industry is more than 99% going in the wrong direction. They should scrap movie-like narratives and “realism”. Player models don’t need to resemble people any more than cars or computers do.

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I think we agree on much of this.

The Hollywoodization Effect is definitely at play in this game, where they try to make it look like the next Angelina Jolie action vehicle. Although I think another influence from the motion picture industry is also the partitioned-off manufacturing of the various bits. It feels like the avatar / animation team were off doing their work, oblivious to how the weapons system got implemented or the level design. Having never overseen the development of a game, I blame the creative director for not smoothing the inconsistencies across the components. That’s one of my big gripes here about ROtTR: this inconsistency breaks my immersion. It’s not that I don’t like eye candy avatars, I appreciated the looks of both Geralt and Ciri. It’s just with a fantasy game like The Witcher, it didn’t break my immersion in a way that detracts.

Funny mentioning movies, because as I’m playing it, the gameplay mechanics and world building would be perfect for a Hunger Games game.

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Holy CRAP this is a great looking game. 4k resolution, very high res (6gb ram video card required) textures, because that’s how I roll, damn it:

I know, fuck, it’s like she’s the main character in the game or something. Total game developer misogyny all up in there.

I don’t honestly know enough about makeup to even be able to tell? I dunno, you can compare the winter shot with the london shot above in glorious 4k ultra hi-def, and you tell me. Feels like a super nitpicky criticism to me, but I guess "we can always do better"™ as I’ve been told ad nauseam.

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Maybe she’s born with it?

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I need to test more, but I think this is an interruptible idle animation – if you start moving as soon as you get out of water it does not happen – so effectively an idle animation. With the caveat that it does seem to happen every time unless you interrupt it by moving as soon as you get out of water.

Sort of like way, way back in 1996 with Goldeneye on N64. The bad guys had a ton of idle animations that were quite funny, yawning, swatting at flies, looking at their rifles, etc. One time in Goldeneye a soldier busted through the door right in front of me… then dramatically yawned as I shot him in the face. That was hilarious.

Could also be they wanted to show off the hairworks stuff in the game on the main character.

but seriously, it’s probably mysogyny, though

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If we are to have a healthy and vigorous discourse on this game, then we ought try agreeing on terms. I’d say misogyny typically requires a more overt hostility to women, where as sexism is a type of burdening all of the set with the characteristics of a subset of the set. Fer instance, saying all black men are well endowed is a racist stereotype, while putting a burning a cross on someone’s yard is hateful speech.

The examples I’ve cited before in this thread: I’d place in the “sexist” set. And, subtle. It’s not like the driver at the beginning made a joke about Lara not being able to drive because she’s a woman, which would be sexist. And, so far, I’d say ROtTR is going less misogynistic than Tomb Raider (2013), as by the time I’d put in similar hours in the latter, I’d encountered that horrible “rape/not rape” scene.

First, systemic sexism is not measured by the intent of the creator, it’s felt by the effect it has on people. Maybe they had to show off the hairworks because they had to honor a contractual obligation with nvidia. Doesn’t matter, because I’m discussing the game and not any individual who worked on the project.

I agree she’s the main character, which is which I think she’s a swell example to analyze with the critique technique of The Male Gaze. The makeup, the thigh gap, the hair fussing, all fit the pattern. Surely, not as “in your face” (ahem) as earlier Tomb Raider games, but still a detectable pattern.

Well, if you’ve been told this before ad nauseum, then we can presume that many others also think you are a good soul and we can proceed to pondering the thickness of your skull. :slight_smile:

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Interesting that I am a male, I presumably have a “male gaze”, and yet I don’t even know what a “thigh gap” is. Nor did I notice anything about makeup, and I don’t think I would have thought at all about the interruptible wet hair idle animation had you not mentioned it. Is there some indoctrination center I can turn myself into, so that I might have the proper gaze for my gender? It sounds important.

Hey man, no need to make up your own definitions. Besides the one I already linked, you could also try the first several thousand of the 2 million google hits

Or you could try this site, dunno if you heard of it, called stack exchange.

You plan to take the Donald Trump approach to the whole thread, or just the beginning part?

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