Kinda surprised about the lack of fanfare for Lara

Cryptikk
Cryptikk Member Posts: 418

I would think getting tomb raider would be a big deal, it's a iconic series, and Lara is probably the most famous female protagonist in gaming.

I'm surprised they kinda just dropped her with no fanfare. No trailers, teasers or anything. It was just "Oh we added Lara in this PTB" The leak and thr accidentally published early Eurogamer article basically carried the hype.

I dunno, I just feel the lack of fanfare and marketing for such a prolific character and franchise is strange and that it deserves more. It also raises concerns about if Lara will be dumped into the live version with a few outfits and forgotten about after.

Comments

  • Eleghost
    Eleghost Member Posts: 1,090

    People will play her, it's just a survivor though so it's not really game changing. The perks are kind of mediocre as well so not a ton to really get hyped about with it. outfits depend on the license owner but she'll probably have a good few.

  • Laluzi
    Laluzi Member Posts: 5,992
    edited June 26

    I generally don't care about survivor-only chapters, as they don't add to gameplay. They're just skins with occasionally pithy voice lines. Nick Cage was an exception because that was a wild meme and loading into Dead By Daylight only to see four No Mither Nicolas Cages plot twist themselves in front of me lives on in my heart forever. But for the most part, licensed survivor chapters are nothingburgers unless you're a fan of their IP. And I'm not into Tomb Raider, and the novelty factor of getting all these recognizable characters into DBD has long worn off for me, so... shrug.

    Should they have hyped her more? Oh, sure. But it wouldn't have changed my reaction. Get me a full Tomb Raider chapter and we can talk.

  • Nazzzak
    Nazzzak Member Posts: 5,366

    I don't mind Lara herself joining but what gets me hype for new releases are perks. Survivors themselves are just skins at the end of the day, I'm more keen to see what new tools they bring to the table. Her perks are very lacklustre imo so yeah, this chapter falls flat to me. Lara looks good at least.

  • humanbeing1704
    humanbeing1704 Member Posts: 8,940

    from what I’ve seen online there’s been more backlash because it’s a non horror ip

  • Spirit_IsTheBest
    Spirit_IsTheBest Member Posts: 930
    edited June 26

    I’ve grew up basically with the 2013 Tomb Raider game, Lara is going to be my next p100, I do agree that the lack of marketing for her is disappointing, but none the less I’m very proud of this paragraph chapter because it’s fricking Lara herself.

    I see Lara content, my money goes bye bye. 🙏🏻

  • Science_Guy
    Science_Guy Member Posts: 1,995

    At least on the fan side, there's nothing to really talk about. The amount of gatekeeping about TR not being 'horror' is eye roll-worthy, but at the end of the day it's just another skin with forgettable perks.

  • Anti051
    Anti051 Member Posts: 602

    Same single overmastered game type + new survivor skin = hype?

    Probably not. Frankly if we don't get at least one other permanent mode of play, it doesn't matter who they add to the game.

  • Junylar
    Junylar Member Posts: 2,005

    It's always nice to know that instead of fixing year-old bugs, SWF balance or soloQ hopelessness, they spend their resources on adding Lara Croft into the game!

  • UndeddJester
    UndeddJester Member Posts: 2,862
    edited June 26

    Has there been a lack of advertising/raising awareness for this one? There is nothing in the information centre about it, there is nothing from DBD YouTube on it... I don't follow Twitter because its Twitter, and reddit is a bit of beast...maybe it was there? I didn't see it here at first for a while, as there is no mention in the PTB notes about it...

    Only reason I found out was because JRM posted a video of one of her perks and made me google it... 🤔

  • Archol123
    Archol123 Member Posts: 4,634

    In the end it is just another skin that does not change anything about the gameplay. I mean sure her perks do have potential, but they are not dependant on the chapter being licensed. So I guess many people just don't care about it... I don't know, I don't really understand the hype about cosmetics or skins anyway, they don't benefit you and are extremely pricy for what they are, you can buy one or several games for the amount of money bhvr wants for a single skin, that is just ridiculous and not something that should be supported. The price policy when it comes to skins reminds me of Metin 2 or other f2p garbage mmos, just insane that this made it into the realm of accepted things.

  • Archol123
    Archol123 Member Posts: 4,634

    I mean, you are kind of part of the issue then, aren't you? If you buy her it worked, they got to sell the character... Who cares whether people play her or not

  • BurnedTerrormisu
    BurnedTerrormisu Member Posts: 85
  • Archol123
    Archol123 Member Posts: 4,634

    Sure, so what? Where is the context? If people still buy characters, despite not wanting them in the game, because they think they don't fit bhvr still gets to sell the character? So why would they care whether you like that character or not as long as you buy it... Survivors are skins anyway, so it is not like people will hate going against that character or requesting changes towards their strenght, the worst thing that might happen is that they want a better looking cosmetic, but then again, as long as people buy it then it worked... If you don't want something to be in the game, then don't support it, don't play it don't buy it... It is really that simple.

  • Nun_So_Vile
    Nun_So_Vile Member Posts: 2,293
    edited June 26

    The real hype will be when she gets a 90s retro skin.

  • Nun_So_Vile
    Nun_So_Vile Member Posts: 2,293
    edited June 26

    There has been little hype outside of what has been said. To paraphrase I also think some people didn't have their expectations tempered after hearing "We have someone who knows how to survive" and see it as violating the arbitrary "strictly horror" rules. Their hype died seeing an "Action/Adventure" and "Horror-adjacent" IP instead of some of the other horror names floating around like Isaac, Jennifer, Sydney Prescott, etc…

    The Dead By Fortnite crowd is expecting FNAF soon.

  • Cryptikk
    Cryptikk Member Posts: 418

    whenever people say she has nothing to do with horror, I roll my eyes so hard

    Dweet addressed this stupid attitude best:

    also tomb raider is heavily intwined in horror:

    https://x.com/dvveet/status/1805469881468408131

  • Archol123
    Archol123 Member Posts: 4,634

    Well words do have meaning if you cannot define something then what is that word good for if it does not give the person you are talking to information? When using words both sides of the conversation should understand the same thing when a word is used. When I say banana, then I can expect the other side to know what I mean.

    Sure it gets more complicated with abstract concepts, but there should still be a line of what is and what is not horror aside from the blurry border.

  • Aven_Fallen
    Aven_Fallen Member Posts: 16,036

    I mean, I want at least something to do in the game. Sorry.

    Yeah… Some Horror elements do not turn a franchise into Horror.

  • Nos482
    Nos482 Member Posts: 40

    In the last 12 months we've only had 2 original chapters drop being End Transmission and All things Wicked. Everything else has been licensed. I'm putting it down to license fatigue and that also makes the game more expensive for completionists.

  • Archol123
    Archol123 Member Posts: 4,634
    edited June 26

    And something to do is unlock new perks and spend bloodpoints? Damn dude I would rather want to actually play the game xD If the BP cap would not exist I would not even bother to spend them ^^

    I mean you don't need to apologize to me, but you need to understand that the customers opinion about a product is only relevant when it leads to the company making less money because of it... If I complain all day long about peaches being terrible fruit, but in the end I still buy 300kg of peaches every month then why should the peach company care if I buy their product anyway...

  • Archol123
    Archol123 Member Posts: 4,634
    edited June 26

    In addition to them including skins in the chapters you can buy on steam to artificially increase the price of the chapter and offering no way to buy it via steam without the skins... At least they went back for that concept in the future, but it is still a smack in the face that they did not revert it for the already existing ones...

  • UndeddJester
    UndeddJester Member Posts: 2,862
    edited June 26

    If anyone wants a read this article is pretty good:

    https://www.thegamer.com/tomb-raider-scariest-moments/

    For those who want a quick summary, there are definitely horror elements to Tomb Raider, fighting ancient monsters, undead, and more recently cannibals and psychotic cults.

    I will agree that horror is not however the main focus of the series.... however I guess the leeway I give it, is this a Survivor chapter... a survivor is a survivor, not a necessarily a horror icon.

    Dwight, Claudette, Meg, Jake, etc are not exactly what I would define as your typical horror tropes... the closest to a horror trope is maybe Meg as a last girl... but we are kind of reaching.

    Lara Croft as a survivor doesn't really betray the foundations of Horror... in the game, she seems a fitting entry to the universe of DBD...

    Now for killers I offer a little less leeway... the killer is the star of the show, and if they don't fit a horror theme we are definitely betraying the point of this game...

    The goofy Clown and Legion skins I'm not a fan off myself... and I do also tend to gatekeep vs. FNAF because to my mind that is Milktoast horror... but that's because its the killer side of the equation.

  • Archol123
    Archol123 Member Posts: 4,634

    I don't know, but aren't nerdy geek and sports cannon aka Dwight and Meg not quite stereotypical characters in horror movies? Unless you want to be ultra specific when it comes to the victims in horror movies I would say that basically everyone can fit that role...

  • UndeddJester
    UndeddJester Member Posts: 2,862

    Yeah but that's kinda my point... those characters in horror media have specific roles in a story, and in DBD we lack that story, so the lining of those characters as horror tropes in more subjective than objective...

    And the Black Canadian Botanist and Korean Survivalist Hermit are most certainly not typical horror tropes...

    So my point is, Lara Croft has pretty much just as much right to be in DBD as anyone else.

    Would Isaac Clarke, Richard Grimes or Sydney Prescott be better fits? Absolutely... but that doesn't mean Lara Croft is a bad fit... she fits better than a lot of the main cast.

  • Archol123
    Archol123 Member Posts: 4,634

    I guess that would be a bit specific if it were ^^

    But yeahs seems arguable ^^

  • dwight444
    dwight444 Member Posts: 322

    not in to that IP and have honestly never met anyone who has mentioned that they play or played this series tbh

  • Laluzi
    Laluzi Member Posts: 5,992
    edited June 26

    Edit: Doh, wrote up an essay and then realized I misread your post and completely agree with you. Sorry! Have a like.

    To amend, I don't think anyone can claim any of the original characters don't belong in horror. They were created for DBD. DBD is a horror game. We have highly successful horror icons who snark off and have stupid catchphrases. IT is a dancing killer clown. Chucky the tiny swearing killer doll is already in the game. I'll eat my hat if Legion wasn't inspired by The Purge, and the idea that ordinary people you know could be hiding so much evil. The chapter title and trailer support that much more than the power does these days… but yes. Horror is not limited to stereotypes.

    In this case it's not about role, it's about the property the character came from and whether or not that property is focused on horror. Resident Evil might have way more guns and explosives than Silent Hill, but they're both full of sequences meant to terrify the player and leave them inching around feeling exposed, underprepared, and never sure when something is going to jump out at them or when they'll need to hide or flee. Tomb Raider has horror elements, particularly in specific games, but they're not designed as a horror game and the experience is very different from playing one of the former two. When you have adequate tools to protect yourself and avoid danger, you shift from horror to action-adventure.

    Not that I mind. DBD already jumped the shark in that regard. Nick Cage, Vecna, even arguably Stranger Things. It is what it is, and Lara Croft is cool. I'll be happy so long as we don't end up with New Killer: Teletubby and New Survivor: Otto Van Bismarck.

  • vol4r
    vol4r Member Posts: 225

    People were waiting for The Walking Dead character based on what dev's were saying on stream and published.

    I was hyped for TWD, oh boy I was wrong.

  • Archol123
    Archol123 Member Posts: 4,634

    All fine buddy ^^

    As for the ordinary people part, you don't need to go into horror for that… Just look up interviews of the neighbors of serial killer and they will almost always say the nicest things about that guy, that's not necessarily horror, that's just life :D

    Honestly, if we get Otto von Bismarck, that would be quite funny ^^ Iron Chancellor of the german empire, however I don't really see how that would work out. Being 83 and dead for 130 years surely does not help with all the running he would need to do in game ^^

  • Mooks
    Mooks Member Posts: 14,705

    I am not surprised by this tbh.
    I mean, ALIEN just got included like your average chapter and it’s now just here. New characters are thrown out way too often and we have way too many to actually care about the current one when it’s only a skin and in 1.5 months the next is coming,

    Would be cool if chapters introduced other stuff as well - they kinda did it with Felix and the basement/hatch offerings (being kinda thematic as he is an architect) or Alien with the neat map specific things but these still felt too small..

  • Nazzzak
    Nazzzak Member Posts: 5,366

    Agree with this, but I'd argue that pretty much everything can be adapted into horror. Like there literally exists a Winnie the Pooh horror movie lol and The Watchers is a recent horror movie about fairies (full disclosure, I havent seen the movie yet but have read the book so it's possible they changed things). I personally don't think it's too outlandish taking a character from an action / adventure medium and dropping them into a horror one. Especially since Lara Croft games do involve many supernatural elements.

  • UndeddJester
    UndeddJester Member Posts: 2,862

    This is a great point, and I think one issues with the Lara Croft IP is the more recent entries do tilt a lot more in a horror survival direction.

    It's still more of an adventure game, but there are sequences such trying to slowly limp away unarmed with a hole in your side, through a cave with bits of bodies and half eaten corpses all around, while a cannibal is trying to catch you. Sequences your hands are tied while a cult is trying to execute you, and then one guy tries... do bad things to you... Another one where that same cult has you suspended by your ankles in the air in a sacrificial chamber with basically a lake of blood beneath you need to escape from in order to save your female friend who is about to be gutted to release their God of the Isle...

    Lara is in her first adventure canonically in the 2013 game, a rookie and afraid/traumatised by what she sees; these sequences in the 2013 game ring more true to the experience you describe... and from my own experience I enjoyed the 2013 way more than the originals (which I never finished)... so that is my mental image of Lara…

    The elephant in the room of course is the badass Lara in the originals doesn't really gel with this new direction of Lara... and it's a bit of a contention point with the newer games now that Lara is meant to be the battle hardened badass at this point in the series... and she is still whittling about things like she did in the 2013 soft reboot...

    This doesn't make sense anymore to Lara's character, and unfortunately despite this direction shift the general Public perception of Lara is the original version, not the newer games...

  • Mooks
    Mooks Member Posts: 14,705

    Richard Grimes

    this looks so wrong

    I didn’t even know this was his full name??

  • UndeddJester
    UndeddJester Member Posts: 2,862
    edited June 26

    You think that's bad...

    I keep Freudian slipping Frank Grimes... which is this guy xD

  • Krazzik
    Krazzik Member Posts: 2,475

    Tomb Raider is certainly horror-adjacent, especially the earlier ones. Heck I'd argue Tomb Raider 1 could be classed as a horror game at parts. Also as mentioned, survivors don't HAVE to be as focused solely on horror, most of the original survivors certainly don't have anything to do with the genre.

  • BbQz
    BbQz Member Posts: 83

    Nothing to talk about the perks do nothing for the game which is the most important aspect. People are only even talking about the horror aspect because behavior didn't give them anything else to talk about instead. Obviously power creep is a issue in a game like this but with no reason to play a characters perks the only thing worth liking about them is a skin which is hardly conversation worthy it most likely won't even be attractive so appealing to the gacha crowd won't even be a talking point like talks about sable were

  • Laluzi
    Laluzi Member Posts: 5,992

    As someone who's not familiar with Tomb Raider beyond the impression in the collective gamer consciousness and a few wikipedia dives - if the recent games do focus more on these sequences that induce pressure and fear on the player, then she does fit much more into DBD. Because that's the important bit with horror elements. A cannibal doesn't make a game a horror game. Trying to keep quiet and not bleed out as you hide from a cannibal in a gruesome den of their former victims does make a horror game.

    But that's an interesting dichotomy with survival horror - where vulnerability is a key component, even if there's a good deal of grit involved in surviving - going against the original iteration of Lara Croft as the ultimate badass, and potentially undermining her identity. Because yeah, that's a direction that works great when you're creating a prequel situation, but doesn't hold once you've passed the gauntlet of character development. But from a game design perspective, you have all these intense and powerful sequences that perform well, and you want to keep doing what works...

  • mecca
    mecca Member Posts: 284

    Survivors never have the kind of drumbeat like killers. Lara doesn't really belong in DBD and I think devs didn't really want her to be. Her entire backstory and history doesn't fit this "survivor is weak and killer is strong". It doesn't make any sense.

  • Huge_Bush
    Huge_Bush Member Posts: 5,232

    I agree. The only time I’ll ever truly care about a licensed Survivor chapter is if we get Brenda Meeks from Scary Movie (better happen!). Otherwise, new Licensed Killers are really what draw people in.

  • Yharwick
    Yharwick Member Posts: 521

    I guess we'll just ignore the 2013 game which is the version we got was literally inspired by The Descent. I swear the DBD community is secretly in a competition with the Dark Souls community to see who can gatekeep the most.

  • NightWolfsFury
    NightWolfsFury Member Posts: 220

    Sadly, we technically do have a full Tomb Raider chapter outside of a map. One of her biggest obstacles in Tomb Raider 2013 at the end is an Oni. I wouldn’t be surprised if Oni gets a Tomb Raider Oni skin to match.

    This is all technicality. They obviously could’ve made a Stormguard killer or took one of the human enemies and amplified them a bit, but I get why it’s survivor only. The only killer they could’ve REALLY used from the reboot series is already in the game.