Longshot - Madden NFL 18 It's Good! What?

I was pleasantly surprised with Madden NFL 18's Longshot. I rented the game to check out the use of the Frostbite engine and see the story mode I'd heard great things about. Even expecting it to be good I was still surprised with how good it actually is. I'll avoid plot spoilers so feel free to read without to much worry, if you're really interested you'll have played it by now anyway!

Frostbite doesn't relieve the main problem I always have with Madden games, the uncanny valley is massive! Time was obviously spent on the main characters to make their models the highest quality in the game to help. Wade and Cruise specifically got a lot of work while the other cast have a range of quality between these two and the coaches in game that look pretty bad. With the massive uncanny valley in Madden shockingly they were able to string a thin rickety rope bridge across the valley making you care about the story despite the massive valley looming below daring you to look down and break immersion with every step!

So the interesting thing to me is how they did this. One aspect was the better character models for story mode. Based on what I see in the game I think the story characters have translucency and specular masks where other models like coaches do not, and spectators don't even have lighting.

Story character's skin is done so much better than anything else in the game. Coaches and crowd are really a spot Madden's visuals break down. Also the voice acting was very good. There were only a couple of lines I can think of that didn't feel like they belonged in the situation, most of them were delivered well. The music in Madden is always very far from what seems fitting for an NFL game. Longshot takes place in a Texas town and has an appropriate country style soundtrack that fit far better than their normal game's soundtrack fits NFL football.

A couple of things I hope they change for next season are the quick-time-events. I'm never a fan, but these aren't normal Madden controls and don't fit in any way with the game. The ones where you move your floating ball cursor to the highlighted location and then have to quickly press whatever button prompt only shows up when you're already tracking correctly caused headaches especially the first couple times. Also as in Telltale games the conversation quick-selection is to fast. The game should take input immediately and keep going, but stop and wait for your input too if you need more time to pick, and the defaults aren't what you always want to pick. Quick-time-events can be failed easily even when you know the correct answer and what you're suppose to be doing.

Lastly, towards the end of the game there are a string of 5 challenges that don't save between each. That's just far to much content to have to repeat if you can't get through it in one sitting. I assumed at the completion of each it would save like a normal game and had to replay almost the entire thing.

There are some pretty nice plot twists and what appears to be reuse of other Frostbite assets, but in a really cool way. I do wonder how much you can change the story by your choices such as Cruise's ending, I had to re-play a bit because of the bad save system, and it appears the story is pretty set, but you never know for sure. One character Ross is completely annoying until he has a scene with a hoverboard that just pushes him over the top and kinda made me like him after that.

It surprised me how good the story was from a game that hasn't had any in the past. I'm waiting for next year to see the next chapter of the story and see what Frostbite improvements they can make for year two! Madden is a game I normally buy one copy of per system, but the story mode might change that for me. The beginning of my play through from my Twitch stream is embedded below. Like this post it ends right before any major spoilers. And further into the game you get to use actual Madden controls and gameplay and it gets far better. Enjoy!

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels - Mini Review

So I did something I do less then I finish a game: I finished a book! I received this book from my wonderful wife for Christmas and 16 days into January I completed it with travels and all.

Who should read this book?

• Everyone considering going into the game industry before spending considerable time, energy, and money on that pursuit. You should know what you're getting into! 
• Anyone that has ever posted an angry complaint about a video game. Realize what went into the game before you rant. Chances are they are painfully aware of many more problems with the game than you are.
• Anyone who loves games and wants a better appreciation or idea of how they are made.
• Anyone already in the game industry could probably find something useful here. Either a pitfall to avoid, or just a realization that other studios have/are going though the same thing you are.

Jason seems to have a good grasp on the games industry. The introduction is about the most honest straight forward account I've read. Some of the chapters about larger studios are from an upper management point of view and so they glamorize and necessitate "crunch" as part of the process while talking only about high level issues, and filtering everything through their PR department. While these chapters are still interesting the best parts of the book are the less guarded chapters including examples of independent studios and a single developer telling his story.

From chapter 4 or 5 to the end the book shines with a "tell it how it is" feel. The book has an honest portrayal of what making a game alone or as a small team might be like. It shows how even "successful" studios are often only a single failure from closing their doors and some of the struggles and compromises they make to stay afloat. It looks at why some of the design choices may have been made and the struggle between developers and publishers that effect games more then most people realize.

It's a fairly short book at 279 pages with good sized print, but the thoughts are put together and presented well including footnotes. Many of the stories I knew something about, but each had more details than I knew before reading. If the studio has released multiple titles Jason also does a quick historical overview of relevant history to catch you up with the story he's telling. The games covered in this book are:

• Pillars of Eternity
• Uncharted 4
• Stardew Valley
• Diablo III
• Halo Wars
• Dragon Age: Inquisition
• Shovel Knight
• Destiny
• The Witcher 3
• Star Wars 1313

I have slight disagreements with his conclusions. I agree that it is a wonder any game ever gets made with everything that happens during the process, and crunch will always be a part of games, but i feel for another reason.

Games can and should be scheduled out to work within the studios budget and timeline, if crunch is required something went wrong and you need to hire for the work or move the date. It's illogical and probably illegal most of the crunch that happens in the industry. Planning for everything to take the maximum time you think it might seems to be working at studios I've worked for recently. This approach gives tasks that complete early to cover the ones that go long. At some point if you commit to a deadline you might need to put in a bit of extra time to make it, but there should never be long crunch phases, it's simply unsustainable.

So why did I say crunch will always be around? It is touched on a bit in this book. Game development attracts perfectionists and people will put in the time to do as good of a job as they can. If there is often "extra" time because of proper scheduling the level of polish will be higher with less bugs. If extra work is optional people will do it as passion project in a sustainable way.

Okay, sorry for the mini-tangent on the mini-review. Buy the book, it's a great read about the industry! If you're still on the fence Jason has posted a full chapter about Diablo III here:

How Blizzard Saved Diablo III From Disaster

Read it and pick up form favorite book store!

The Basics of Importing Games

I have recently enjoyed importing games and am going to write a post about the basic considerations when importing hoping to help others interested in importing. There are a lot of details you'll need to look into, but this is a quick overview to get you started.

Does Your System Support Importing (Region Locking)?

The first thing you need to know is if you will be able to boot the game on your system. Some systems are region locked and will only read disks with a matching region encoded to them.  3DS is region locked while the DS was not. Playstation 3 and 4 are not locked, but I haven't looked into others so I won't list them. A Google search will answer this question quickly. If your system is region locked you'll need to buy a system for the region the game is made in. This may or may not be easy for example the 3DS is self contained, anything that is not you will need to know if it supports NTSC/PAL and if your TV also does. Also some kind of power/pug adapter may be required, plugs are easy but 110/220 voltage is not always.

PCs are technically always open, but I've read up on a few rare cases that require you to change the language and/or location in the operating system.Other issues may still apply though, keep reading.

Is the Online Play Restricted in your Area (IP Blocking by Region)?
IP addresses are the internet's way of telling who's who where the data needs to go. IP addresses are grouped by country like mailing address and some game servers restrict access to IP addresses for anything not in their intended area. I'll give two quick examples of this.

- Monster Hunter Portable 3rd: The middleware software that allows multiplayer on the Playstation 3 HD version does not connect in the US. So I can play all the single player content fine, but won't be able to use the multiplayer.

- Monster Hunter Frontier: This game is an always online game so basically you can't play any of it without connecting to a server as far as I can understand.

So how do you get around IP blocking? The only way I am aware of is using a VPN connection to an IP address inside the restricted access area. I've setup a free VPN and had a lot of latancy just web browsing, so haven't tried to play games over it at all. There are also paid VPNs that will probably perform better. Lastly I've also read about Frontier players being found out and the VPN being blacklisted so one one else could use it to play. I've avoided trying to get past this kind of restriction so far.

Is the Game Localized in Your Language?
This can be a bit one... Here are some considerations.

- If you are importing the game anyway, check all regions to see if any are better. Gundam Breaker 3 for example was never released in North America, but the Asia release had English subtitles and menu translations, so importing this version was far superior to the Japanese version.

- Look for versions that have language more similar to yours. I don't have a ton of experience with Spanish or German, but both are easier to try to decipher for me than something without the Latin alphabet.

- If other games in the series are in your language play a lot of them first. In my case most of the titles I've imported are Monster Hunter titles and I started by playing their English versions and mostly imported to play on the big screen instead of handheld. The game is still very recognizable to the original so most of the mechanics and iconography are similar enough to understand knowing them in English first.

- This one will require some gray areas, but a lot of games have fan-translated version. If you are playing on PC you might be able to patch it in, or if it's not a current generation console you might be able to find an emulated version of the game that has been patched you can use as reference to learn some of the mechanics. As long as you actually own a copy of the game and the system it seems gray, but I'm not a lawyer, so don't take my word for it.

- Look for community sites, YouTube videos, etc that other people have posted to help out.

- Google Translate

In my opinion this is the big one and what really makes importing a language you don't understand doable. Sorry for the boor quality shot, but Google Translate allows you to use your camera's phone and will in real time translate the text in the camera to your language. You can also take a picture and highlight just the text you want translated. The translations aren't perfect by any means, but normally will give you a good enough translation to figure it out.

- If you find yourself wanting to import from the same country consider learning the language.

Research the Specific Game and Region Requirements

In conclusion the internet is a big, wonderful, scary, disgusting, amazing place. Someone else has probably already imported the game you are looking out to your region if it hasn't just released. Do your research. Internet searches on every game I've imported and numerous ones that I didn't have told me exactly what to expect. They'll tell you what features will or will not work, the back of boxes will tell you what languages will have auto and subtitles and multiplayer options. Also any third party online middleware should be listed there and you can search for other games using it.

After importing a few games I was surprised how easy and enjoyable it is. And currently I'm spending a large percentage of my gaming time playing Monster Hunter Online a Chinese MMO version only in Mandarin. If there is a game you really want to try go for it and enjoy!

What do you do with game mechanics you don't like? (Hollowing in Dark Souls III)

First a quick disclaimer: There are spoilers for a very early NPC you come across at the beginning of Undead Settlement, and the game mechanic surrounding it. If you've already read the various posts around the internet about unlocking the secret endings to Dark Souls III, this purposefully gives less spoilers.

Hollowing has been a part of all of the Dark Souls games in one way or another, and though the mechanics have changed I've never really liked it. In Dark Souls III it is optional. I read up on hollowing and it appears you really SHOULD follow this quest line... you are given free level-ups, and the "best" ending of the game requires you to see the quest chain through to completion.

So the real reason I find this fascinating is that the only real draw back (that I can confirm) is it rots your character cosmetically. You go from looking like this:

To looking like this:

To make this less rational... I normally wear the highest defense armor I can find that isn't super over-weight. So normally that involves a helm that completely hides my face. (In my current game I'm not there yet, but it's coming, and the camera is behind you in game anyway.) It's completely irrational that I would miss out on a large quest chain, the "best" ending for the game and free level ups to not look like a zombie right?

But still I rolled back my save losing a weekend's worth of play to avoid going hollow in the first place.

So now Yoel of Londor is sitting at Fireling Shrine offering to "Draw Out True Strength" while I still look like this:

I read up and know I have a limited time to make my choice, but I just can't bring myself to go hollow now that the game doesn't require it. The first words out of Yoel's mouth(y thing) is "kill me" so I even did that before reverting that save as I didn't know if "sin" was tracked in this game. Maybe in New Game + I'll try out going hollow, and maybe I'm more opposed to it because of some of the horrific drawbacks in the previous games. I do really like being embered, I'll just stick with that! :)

A couple more spoilers, but if you've read this far I don't want to lead you astray: What makes it worse is I know I can even cure hollowing if it does indeed get bad (I read some of the mechanics may actually degrade if your hollow level gets to high), so it's not even an unrecoverable choice... Part of me is made for not making it, another part mad for reading up on it and spoiling it, but I was already at the point I was going to revert my save to get rid of it, I just wasn't sure what I was giving up, the answer is a lot... but somehow for some reason it doesn't matter.

Game Art: The Ideal Art Style vs. Reality of Hardware Limitations

Fire Emblem Fates 2d and in-game models

There is something interesting that has been going on in video game art for a while now. In-game models haven't been able to be displayed at the fidelity of the target or ideal art style.

Fire Emblem Fates 2d and in-game models

JRPG's like Fire Emblem Fates pictured on the right have been dealing with this for a while now due to limitations on their former and current systems. The genre has always been big on hand-held systems and has been popular since at least the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), if not earlier.

As a result of these limitations you see beautifully hand drawn portraits shown over the top of in-game models that fit inside of the system's limitations.

Recently, fighting games were still using this technique. It appears Street Fighter V is using in-game models (possibly with higher texture quality), but Street Fighter IV still looked like this:

Street Fighter IV 2d and in game

Technology is getting better and the newest of titles on the current generation of hardware are using in game models. As an example Killer Instinct:

Killer Instinct vs screen in-game models

Even Gigantic is replacing some really nice 2d artwork with in game models:

Gigantic 2d art and in game model

This is done for various reasons both officially and unofficially. It's easier to maintain one asset as opposed to all of them. Some studios like ArenaNet have said they want customers to know what to expect in their game so they've gone as far as to make all promotional tailors using in-game assets. I just kinda miss the 2d assets. They are softer, more real, and more artistic in my opinion. They allow for something that either can't be done, or is too time consuming to make in the actual game.

I've been searching for a firm grasp on an art style for some Unreal Engine 4 work I've been doing when I have spare time so I've been watching this a bit more closely than in the past. Right now, I think cinematic mixed with a few post effects that are actually in game are getting close to what I'd like to get to.

Fire Emblem Fates cinematic

Other than finding out what all the fuss was about, I picked up Fire Emblem Fates because their cinematic are so good! I think with the limited shadow calculations I believe a better system could render these on the fly with only a few miner tricks.

Blizzard cinematics

Of course the day we are all waiting for is when the Blizzard cinematic quality can be rendered real time in a game... I feel we are probably many years from this, but honestly I don't care about pure realize if this can be pulled off.

What goes into a Sequel? (Rise of the Tomb Raider)

First off a quick reminder, I really like Tomb Raider and my time so far playing Rise of the Tomb Raider. So anything negative is in service of making games better, not putting down Tomb Raider. The first (well remake) I finished (with 81%), and it's rare for me to finish a game. Even though I rushed through the end to get on to the next one, it was an enjoyable experience!

This seems like an appropriate day to post since Rise of the Tomb Raider is coming out today for PC. It looks like we got a good port too!

Kotaku: Rise of the Tomb Raider Can Really Push Your PC

(although his PC specs are pretty crazy, unless you just built your rig)

So what goes into a sequel? Well, fans have to feel like you put in enough effort to justify a sequel, but if you mess with the formula too many fans of the original will hate the sequel. Everything here will be opinion, but I'll try to give a small list of what worked and didn't for me. First off, will be the two changes I feel the strongest about:

The Expanded Crafting System:

Instead of a single crafting currency there are now many. In Tomb Raider (TR), I get currency from all locations and then I have enough and the upgrade is unlocked, I just spend it. In Rise of the Tomb Raider (RotTR), I have limited inventory (that's still unrealistic so why?) and have to watch out for the exact consumables I need. I'm at a point I need a bear pelt for the upgrade I want, but they are rare. So to keep from wasting materials (if you're over the cap you can't carry them), I've been crafting upgrades I care much less about. There is always the problem of getting the materials you need.

This is an interesting one because I think my younger self with more time to game may have liked this change. I was the one playing World of Warcraft killing Onyxia and complaining that she dropped a ready-to-wear helm that fit my character without so much as an alteration... However, I'm not a fan of farming. If I kill something the size of a dozen buses, I shouldn't have to kill it a half dozen times to get enough materials to create armor for my puny human character. (I'm looking at you Monster Hunter!).

The Overuse of the Gating System:

From the very start of RotTR, it's clear their level designers knew what tools they had to work with from the beginning and did a much better job. A drawback to knowing their tools is the extensive use of gating in their early levels. Recognizable rope arrow points are used extensively from the original TR before they have been made available to you. A new mechanic of lock picking is also introduced along with all the returning mechanics: pry points you need a reinforced climbing axe, explosive walls, etc... The game shows so many places you'll be returning to later once all your gear is available.

As an explorer and completionist, this drives me insane! I like to take my time and comb the area for secrets and feel good when I find them. It seems as if I'll finish RotTR by rushing through the story to the point all "progression gear" is available. Then, I'll go back through the entire game like I normally would.

Okay, now for some other changes that are noteworthy, but don't carry the strong feelings of the two above:

Quick Time Events:

These are back, I played quite a while before I ran into them and thought they were replaced with slow-motion sequences (that use the same controls as real time), but they are there in smaller numbers. A big plus! The less QTE's the better!

Forced Gun Play:

These were points I struggled with in TR. When the game takes you out of cover and everyone sees you and starts shooting at you and you have to fight back. I feel both games are designed better for stealth take downs and spend the majority of my time using the bow and sneaking so mechanically, I haven't spent time with the "normal" guns. So these were difficulty spikes because the game mechanics were forced on me. So far RotTR hasn't done this, but I'm not done with the game yet.

Crafting Arrows & Instantly Healing:

This is a good thing about the new crafting system. Consuming a small amount of materials will allow you to craft your own arrows if you can't find any laying around as well as special arrows like poison arrows. Also, you can heal intently instead of ducking behind cover and waiting for re-gen to start. These are both welcome additions.

The Tombs and Puzzles are Much Better:

I already called out level design, but this is worth noting in it's own section. Level design in RotTR is much better than TR. I think this is almost entirely because game mechanics were mostly in place at the star of development so their team knew what they had to work with.

Changing Controls:

This one may not have been as big of a deal if I hadn't played TR and RotTR back to back. Having controls change between the two games for some of the most used features was annoying! Things like rope arrows (though they probably didn't need their own button) and whatever Laura's sense ability is (think Batman's detective mode) being remapped caused issues as I instinctively reached for the TR controls even after hours of play. I'm still playing Laura, who looks like the old Laura mostly, but controls differently.

The PC Port is Again the Definitive Version:

Granted it is releasing as I'm writing this, but everything points to the work being put in for the PC version of the game including improved graphics, shaders, new nVidia tech, hair simulation, etc. At the time of release, the PC version of TR was the best, but with the next gen update the PC version was left behind mostly (it had some advantages, but overall next gen was better). This is a big deal especially with questionable ports of things like Arkham Knight and Warner Brothers (again) recent announcement they are abandoning the PC port of Mortal Kombat X. It's nice to see some companies are still doing it right!

There are other differences not listed, but these are what stand out when I think about them as mentionable. I would recommend both games and they are both solid entries in your gaming library, but surprisingly I think I like Tomb Raider slightly above Rise of the Tomb Raider as I think a lot of the additions made were more about game play time padding. These days I don't have a lot of time and I don't want it wasted. If a game is beatable in 15 hours, but a solid game with a good story and progression, I'd rather play that game then the exact same game that takes 30 hours because there was 15 hours of padding thrown in. I'm not saying Rise of the Tomb Raider does this entirely, but my first two points I feel like are just for padding. Gating makes you return to areas for the completionist and while a more realistic list of crafting materials is logical, it basically ends up padding the crafting system and as a result, the progression system. I hope you enjoy both games, and I'm looking forward to the amazing looking visuals in the PC release!

Location in Video Games: inFAMOUS Second Son

Infamous is an interesting game for me it's the first game I remember buying just because of the location.

Currently I live in Seattle and Seattle is the most familiar I've been with a real world counter part to an in-game location. I've been through L.A., D.C., other major metropolitan areas, but not spend the time I have here in Seattle.

I've been to all the locations shown here and fighting in the Seattle Center, Pioneer Square, etc... is a lot of fun!

After playing for a bit I realized what was bothering me about the game. It is a compressed world of course so things aren't lined up like they are in the real city. The 520 bridge is located closer to the actual West Seattle Bridge location, but is by far the most hated bridge in the City. Not only does it congest with rush hour traffic, but it is also a tole bridge with a money sink of a replacement protruding out of the water next to it... so choosing this to be the bridge to blowing it up is a no brainer even though the location is wrong.

So I'm not a huge fan of the game... I received the first game from the infamous PlayStation Network outage of 2011 and picked up the 2nd in a bargain bin, playing both very minimally.  I'll probably put up a post on my thoughts about the game at some point, but this is for the environment art only that looks fantastic! If it wasn't for the slightly off locations I don't think I'd have anything to complain about and that is very minor indeed! I do wonder if Pike's Market is included or more of the waterfront, but I'm to low to venture into parts of the game at this point, so those are questions to be answered later. This is a very good job recreating Seattle in the confides of a game environment!

Genre Mashups in Video Games

I'm talking about genre mashups using Tomb Raider because I just finished the first one and am a few hours into the second so it is fresh on my mind, but this could be said about almost every game coming out. The Tomb Raider remakes are move of an answer to Uncharted than a throw back to the original, and this seems to dictate the genres they include.

The basic genres in Tomb Raider (broadly) are: Platformer/Collection, 3rd Person Shooter, and Quick-Time-Event. I haven't played the original Tomb Raider for many years, but I remember it being mostly an exploration/collection/platformer. The current Tomb Raider is fairly linear to be considered exploration and the puzzles are on the light side. As for collection, many of the collectibles are dropped in front of you and platforming is fairly light. I think you could say the game is trying primarily to be exploration and platforming, but it's linear enough you can't really miss much of the content and fail safes are put in for the platforming portions.


So where the game fails in my opinion is the other genres that are "forced" in. The first I will keep brief because I HATE quick-time events, so any inclusion is going to cause me grief and instantly be unhappy. The areas especially in the first game that included QTEs were the first road blocks I encountered. Luckily most of these were from the E3 Demo very early on and thinned out later in the game. Rise otTR did a better job, they are kinda there, but instead of true QTEs they are time slow downs requiring you to do normal gameplay operations... still annoying, but much better as knowing the controls are normally the worst part of QTEs.



The second mechanic kinda shoe-horned in is the forced 3rd person
shootouts. This won't be an issue for everyone, but I used the bow the rest of the game so when the sections they force you to do a shootout happens the bow isn't always viable and having no previous experience with the other weapons I got stuck on one of those sections for 2-3 play sessions trying to get past it. Forcing players to use one of your systems that has been optional for the majority of the game is okay, but then difficulty needs to be at a beginner level for it, not at a half way through the game expecting everyone to have been using it for hours of play.

Why this matters...
I don't have the time anymore to play games endlessly. Tomb Raider is a game I really like so I persisted, but any game that I'm borderline enjoying I won't pick back up if I hit a wall I can't complete in a few tries. Especially if it is because of a side game mechanic that I don't enjoy playing. I don't think I'm alone in my thinking at least in my demographic with a family and limited gaming time. I think meshing mechanics is possibly a good way to get people into a game, but if you use mechanics that don't mesh well together it was at least keep people from completing them.

Lastly I just want to reiterate that while I picked on Tomb Raider, it is a game I completed (though a little rushed at the end because Bloodborne was in the mail). That means a lot for me, I maybe only complete a dozen or so games a year, so holding my interest to the end is an accomplishment! And Rise of the Tomb Raider is my casual go-to-game right now when I don't want the difficulty of Bloodborne. So these are good games and the critique should in no way take away from that. With their faults they are still a worthy playthough!

Thanks for listening to my rambling.

Bloodborne Progressive System [mini-post]

I'm a long time 'Souls game fan! Bloodborne feels like their first "new" game though. Dark Souls felt like a more polished Demon Souls, Dark Souls 2 felt like small game tweaks and mostly phoned in sequel and lost part of it's soul. yuk yuk. But Bloodborne is different. It has the soul of Demon and Dark Souls that was missing from Dark Souls 2 and is set in a different environment and basically lacking shields and magic speeds up melee combat to a sweet spot!

So my point: You can explore much longer in Bloodborne than you could in Dark Souls. The Estus Flask system limits how far from a bond fire you can travel AND requires you to rest at bonfires you come across re-spawning enemies. Bloodborne uses 2 main consumables: Blood flasks and silver bullets. The blood flasks refill health or as I like the idea better your "will to continue fighting" and drop fairly regularly. Because of this as long as you don't take a significant amount of damage from trash you are clearing you can keep going almost indefinitely as long as you can loot more than you use. The silver bullets are a way to score a one-hit-kill on some of the tougher mobs in the game and you can trade some health for 5 of them if you run out as these are rarer drops.

So that's it, just highlighting what in my opinion is a great improvement on their gameplay system. A fairly small tweak that no longer forces you to stop progressing/exploring just because you are out of healing charges, and keeps you from having to re-kill trash if you don't want to. It fits well with the faster paced combat as well, and while it was a rocky start I'm enjoying Bloodborne so far!

The Strange case of Tomb Raider Definitive Edition

So I am late to the party on this one... but I had a very interesting thing happen with Tomb Raider. I purchased it shortly after release on the PC because I'm generally a PC gamer. It recently was one of the free games on Xbox Live, so I found myself sitting on the couch playing it and confused on if it looked better or not.

After some comparisons and playing both to the same point (my guess is roughly half way through), there are big pros and cons to both. At release PC was far superior to consoles, but something interesting happened... the game was enhanced for consoles and not PC... a game that had already been ported to PC didn't see a patch or Definitive Edition release. The new higher resolution Laura model did not show up, neither did the improved shaders or lighting from the DE (Definitive Edition). The PC version still has better post processing effects, higher texture quality, tessellation, ambient occlusion, hair physics, etc, but lacks the emotion possible in the new facial mesh and rig.

It's very disappointing to not see a PC release of an already ported game by Crystal Dynamics. So why wasn't the DE brought to PC? Well the changes were not mechanical, the DLC was mostly multi-player and most people don't play Tomb Raider for multi-player, at least not in the generic third-person-shooter low rated version that went into the game. The the question is would people pay for the DE release as either DLC or re-release? Metro pretty much did this, and while they were slammed by some for minimal updates, at least they gave the PC crowd the choice and anyone picking up the game late could take advantage of it.

So other than direct sales what other reasons could it be? Right after release (before an early patch) the PC version was plagued with slow down. I don't remember if it was the hair or rope physics, but it took an early patch to fix this. If we look at another example of Batman: Arkham Knight while it always ran fine on my system, it was pulled from the Steam store for months and offered no questions asked returns even after patching. So it's clear PC ports are still difficult at times especially on in-house or heavily modified engines. So maybe Crystal Dynamics thought it was to big of a risk?

So in conclusion the most interesting thing to me is I think I'll be finishing the game on the Xbox One. I'm a nut for lighting, sub-surface scattering, and beautiful shader work! The extra emotion you get from the new model isn't always in frame, but when it is it makes the difference! The post-processing effects on the PC do make in-game (at least without fire) look better over all, but foliage movement adds a nice touch in the DE and a lot of things like tessellation, AO, and higher texture resolution do get somewhat lost in motion. It's a strange day for me to prefer a console title over a PC, but either game is worth the money as a great game! I hope Crystal Dynamics will release the Definitive Edition on PC before it's 10th anniversary!