Fenixp

Lexx, are you craving transport-tycoon like experience or generally a cool management sim? Because... You know, Parkitect will get released in EA soon enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tppTzfBXfU

Well to be fair it works well enough for Black Library - vast majority of those books are crap, but then some of them stick. One might say it cheapens the universe but GW seems to be doing a well enough job of that themselves lately. In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there is only equality.

I got really excited that Endless Legend allowed me to increase font size and disable intro cinematic. Then I got somewhat sad that we knew this kind of stuff is needed for over a decade and is still not a standard. Well that makes two of us. Idunno, it was really pretty and they made combat animations faster so it feels a lot more responsive (and doesn't take control away from you for long enough that you fail to counter attacks like in the previous games.)

Well that's the issue. Length and substance. If a game is over 100 hours long and those 100 hours offer meaningful content, I will play it for over 100 hours. Honestly I find the "backlog and job" arguments kinda weird myself - nobody ever forced me to only play one game at a time or to finish a game within a week. If a game is very long, I'll take months to finish it while also playing other stuff, and that's fine. On the other hand, if there's nothing of substance you can add to your game and you're only adding content for the sake of boasting long playtime (see Dragon Age: Origins), you should stop adding content. That's why I believe being too hang up on playtime is harmful - it'll make short game pointlessly longer or, like the modern trend goes, long games shorter.

First look on Eisenhorn: Xenos (Warning: TotalBiscuit): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw-HQWjkoj0 Apparently, not good. I can't say I didn't expect that, but I was holding out hope as I kinda loved the books (so much in fact that I'm still inclined to purchase the game, but ... I'll probably grab Battlefleet Gothic: Armada instead.) Bugger.

Probably the best zombie action-orientated game I have ever played, with fantastic movement system, shockingly fun driving in the expansion and absolutely packed with content. Most of it of reasonable quality too. Play it on hard if you want a more hardcore zombie survival experience with a decent amount of frustration, normal is the way to go if you just want to toy around and kill a lot of zombies. So... How do you enjoy performance drops? Even after close to year worth of patching, they're still not resolved and the game just sometimes starts stuttering like mad (SSD should alleviate some of it). That said, it's my favorite installment of Arkham series - I loved the shift in graphical presentation and the batmobile sections. A lot of people hated either or both tho, so it's a bit of a coin flip on whether you'll enjoy them or not. Also, keep in mind that for a 'good' ending, you need to 100% the game, including all Riddler trophies. Hearts of Stone is entirely kept to high standard of the best questlines in the game. There's one particular scene which even topped Bloody Baron by its sincerity for me. It's basically the best out of Witcher 3, condensed and packed into about 15 hours of gameplay. Personally, I would pick Hearts of Stone, but all three have a lot to offer. As much as I enjoyed Arkham Knight I'd say that's lowest on the ladder due to the inherent risk that it'll just run terribly even if your machine's insanely powerful.

Well stop posting trailers about most likely inferior games and go download it instead, you don't even need base TTDX to play it. The reason why that game worked so well is because it was very straightforward to play yet no matter how much time did you spend with it, there were always ways to make your systems more efficient, to toy around and improve. The reason why nobody seems to be able to replicate it is, IMO, because modern attempts don't quite seem to understand that adding pointless new features to a game which got popular for being easy to grasp, thus increasing the learning curve, is extremely counter-productive. And now that Open TTD introduced a bucketload of quality of life features ... Just play it. It's great and there's no reason not to.

You only get 2 camping supplies (2 rests before resupplying) and you'll encounter more creatures and more difficult encounter composition. To my knowledge that's about it, neither creature nor character stats get changed at all.

I'm asking because it's actually really cool. It's not just a cheap 'You take more damage' mode (altho it does that too) - health packs don't heal instantly but instead heal over time, resources are more scarce, you can't purchase ammunition, people take shorter period of time to reach dropped supplies, Crane's echolocation brain device doesn't reveal items, that kind of stuff. At the beginning, fighting a common zombie is a real challenge. It turns the game into a proper zombie survival game, which is pretty much my dream zombie game. Mind you, it makes boss fights suck more since in this mode, avoiding conflict is even more essential than before. Also fighting other people is more irritating than ever. It can generally get quite frustrating and virals become a nightmare until you get a skill to squish sculls. Still, it's a proper hard mode which genuinely makes things harder in other ways than just cheap 'more HP and damage for evil'.

Oh hi. We got you into PoE arguing mood over at GOG, didn't we? :-P Anyway, 18 might = +24% to all damage and healing. 18 constitution = +40% endurance/health 18 dexterity = +24% to action speed 18 perception = +24 interrupt / +8 accuracy 18 intellect = +48% AoE / +40% duration 18 resolve = +24 concentration / +8 deflection All of those things are pretty significant, perhaps save for the accuracy bonus which becomes slightly less so on higher levels (altho every point counts in some encounters...) Just because the game can be finished with any stat distribution doesn't make the stats insignificant - it just makes them all equally important and if you play the game in a way which your stats don't support, you will be punished even on lower difficulties (mage with low might and high intellect using damaging spells is not actually going to do much, but he'll be a king of debuffing.) All these values are going to be adjusted further by items, I think it's max. +4 to each from items and then some from buffs? And then something for race? Do I recall that correctly? That would make it possible for a specialized build to reach, say, 25 intellect (+90% AoE / +75% duration!? Okay, that is getting ridiculous) and that's before buffing such character with spells. It's one of those things I love about PoE, actually: Each stat has a strictly defined role. I'm purposefully not mentioning resistance increases since they get pooled between two attributes, but from what I understood from Sawyer's GDC presentation, that's there moreso to make the 'min' bit of min/maxing more risky.

Well I bought Dying Light EE once it came out on GOG and uh... I don't have a life any longer. Noticed you talked about it some time back in screenshots thread: Normal or hard mode?

Most reasonably modern TVs will have display presets if you play around with options - subset of those reasonably modern TVs will most likely have a gaming mode which'll get you rid of that effect.

It's the amnesia. Burdens of life weighting him down. But yeah, I didn't find the swamp too bad either, in fact it has some of the most memorable game's moments for me. Weird.

The chainsaw sync kills in new Doom look so irritatingly long

Got similar specs with an i5, but I do happen to aways track my framerate. It depends on location, in smaller, more linear locations it's steady 60, in the hub areas, it stays somewhere between 30-40. I believe I'm using high preset with motion blur off.

Depends, the first game is quite different from the following titles. When it comes to combat, it rewards preparation and is not at all about fast reflexes. It's pretty bad at providing feedback to player tho and combat mechanics are just wonky at best with weird animations and central mechanic being ... Somewhat unorthodox and not working particularly well. Preparation aspect is amazing tho, alchemy system is a lot of fun to play around with. If you don't want to bother with any of that - easy difficulty is the way to go as it genuinely makes the game quite easy. While yes, the main storyline is amazing and nicely reactive with consequences which can come back and bite you in the ass hours after making a choice and some very cool investigation bits in the second act, the writing is ... Not good. Many dialogues are sub-par, game is trying hard to be "Mature" by including swearwords just about everywhere, and there's a mechanic where you collect cards with pictures of naked woment you banged (it can technically be ignored, but some conversation choices lead to surprise sex!) I'm no fan of gaming feminism, but Witcher just goes overboard with that kind of crap. If you play the first game tho, you'll probably also want to play the other two titles in the series, and those are significantly different. Witcher 2 presents game of thrones wannabe plot which is actually fairly good, but a lot people disliked it for dealing with politics a lot more than personal stories of individual characters. It'll also teach you to never want to hear the word "Plough" again. They have finally dropped Geralt bedding 5 different women every day. Combat shifts towards 3rd person action game, again, it's fairly easy on easy, especially if you go down signs route of character development. You can also make potions but they're not quite as well implemented. And then there's Witcher 3, which has by far the best writing, graphics and combat system, altho it's still 3rd person action. They finally dropped the constant swearing, writing feels a lot more natural and it presents open world which I found could be a fair bit better implemented, but eh. Edit: Oh and consider reading Witcher books before playing the games. They're pretty damn good and are worth reading trough even if you don't play the games. Because if you do end up playing them, knowing lore and Geralt's story from the books will help you enjoy those games a fair bit more.

In spite of each repeating 3 times, boss battles in Darkest Dungeon are among the best designed boss battles I've ever seen in videogames.

I think that would be really cool, and I don't believe it would be too hard to implement altho one can never be too sure of that. Leave the properly balanced difficulties as presets and put a "custom" button somewhere in there. That said, it's not going to happen.

To be fair, when I'm purchasing a primarily singleplayer game, I wish no resources were wasted on tacked-on multiplayer and vice versa. (I sort of miss bots tho) Rise of the Tomb Raider just showed us what happens when you take an entire team which was dedicated to MP from previous game, drop MP, and have them do content for SP (what happened are optional challenge tombs, which as far as I'm concerned are the best part of already excellent game.) Some MP functionalities in a SP game can potentially be cool, like drop-in co-op, but I wish the silly scoreboards and stuff which only point is to tie your SP progress with an online account would just go away once and for all.

Wait a minute, Warhammer 40k MMO is still a thing? I thought it got cancelled? We're literally running in circles now. Look, I apologize for lashing out on you earlier, your manner of argumentation frustrated me and I'm sure this went both ways. Our argument covered far too many topics (and this was my fault) for us to even be able to reasonably answer each other's questions in a satisfactory manner as they got lost in an avalanche of words. At the end of the the day, I do believe this topic ultimately comes down to one thing: You're dissatisfied with state of gaming today while I'm finding many more games I enjoy than I ever did in the past. From that standpoint, we can't agree, and so I'd say let us just agree to disagree. I honestly do hope that one day, a game or new series will start coming on which will satisfy you fully. Seeing your requirements, I would like to see such a game myself. For now, I would suggest taking a look at Kingdom Come: Deliverance in case you happen to not be aware of it.

First impressions of The Division. For people who don't mind TotalBiscuit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdNv1alwCSc&ab_channel=TotalBiscuit,TheCynicalBrit ... I honestly have no other source. The only other thing I found was article on Forbes "5 Biggest problems with The Division beta" so I guess if you don't mind clickbaity articles... I gave you a bloody list of every single feature you named and a game which either did it better or expanded upon it in an innovative fashion. I asked you for telling me when exactly were the "standards" you were talking about a standard. You keep dodging key points I make and when you have no way of retort, you reply with what essentially accounts to "Well but you're wrong because I don't like those games." and then pretend your opinion is the pinnacle of objectivity somehow. I mean... "Regardless of your opinions games need to mechanically reinforce the players actions." - why would a larp simulator do that? The reason why Elder Scrolls games function like they do is precisely because they leave a lot to your imagination. It's how they operate, it's a large part of why they're popular, but it's bad design becaaaause you don't like it? "by now this should be standard not a feature one hopes to include" - Should? Based on what, your expectations? "When a decades old game did them as standard" - one game did them as standard. I'll let you think on that sentence for a second. "well then now with all this supposed 'evolution and innovation' trumpeted by one and all, these things should be an breeze to implement and no big deal" - What do you base that statement on? Why does 'evolution and innovation' mean that every future game must have all features of older games, implemented better? How did you come to such expectation? "Once again you miss the point, Ultima did this better than Oblivion twenty years earlier" - how? You even admitted dynamic behavior was step in the right direction, not to mention the technological leap between the same present in Oblivion and in Ultima 7. "Dishonoured has an easy time of it with a fixed protagonist, a small arena of conflict rather than the vast ones of Arcanum and Fallout" - that's the bloody point, it took smaller scope and upped reactivity. If you didn't notice, the game is not an RPG, you brought the Arcanum and Fallout comparison which quite simply doesn't work. Dishonored had worse sound design and lighting than Thief because... Reasons. You keep playing your arguments safely into subjective territory just to then go on and say that I'm objectively wrong. Your reasoning is entirely circular - you have decided that the only game which would mean evolution and innovation for gaming is modern replica of Ultima (because that's somehow innovation) and if there's no such a game, games are clearly devolving. You have created an entirely arbitrary set of standards without having anything to base those standards on (and which indeed were never a standard to begin with aside from lack of loading screens. Naturally, my argument that streaming assets made huge leaps in technological execution got ignored as it doesn't fit your narrative.), and since these made up standards are not met, you're clearly right. You're quite correct, this argument is not going anywhere. edit: Removed the stupid attack on Nonek's personality which was entirely unwarranted.

Procedural streaming of assets brought to the level of modern open world games is a huge technical achievement. Along with many ways of obscuring loading screens like loading behind pre-rendered videos or making player to run trough a tunnel of sorts to load the next section. Not all games implement this. It's a shame. For the game which don't implement it, it generally doesn't matter. In old games, lack of loading screens was not a feature. It was necessity. Regardless of your opinion, these 'larping simulators' need to mechanically reinforce them being larping simulators. So fully animated day cycles was a standard in Ultima 7 days? It was difficult to create back then and it's difficult to create now. That's not an excuse, that's reality. It'll always be present in minority of games. It would be cool to see in all open world games that ever come out, but it's not realistic. If I'm to choose whether developers should focus their resources on daily schedule or "core" mechanics, it'll always be the "core" mechanics. Happily enough, daily schedule was one of the "core" mechanics for both Ultima 7 and Oblivion - which is why they're so fleshed out. Or do you think Ultima developers spent all of those resources on their development just because? Again, not an excuse as you keep trying to frame it - every project needs to choose how to focus their resources. If you have a better way of developing games, Unity engine is over there, C++ over there, Java over there, free Unreal engine over there. Take your pick. It doesn't change options in Dishonored. It changes gameplay itself directly trough gameplay. No, neither Arcanum nor Fallout worked like that, not nearly to this extent. You want innovation, so that's innovation. That you choose to ignore it to push your own narrative is your call. Aside from tutorial, you don't have to use teleportation a single time in Dishonored. You can make use of lightning and shadows and only climb terrain using basic jump. Yes, you can finish the game as a ghost run this way. I found both sound and map design in Dishonored better, but we could go back and forth on that all day. Which is exactly why your argument is flawed, because that's quite simply not how evolution works. Some parts are stripped away, others are added - that's basis for evolution of a media and for innovation in general. Yes, some of the stripped away parts are actually quality ones and should not get stripped away. It's a shame, but it's also reasonable to expect them to make a comeback at one point or another. As for modern games to not being able to replicate these features, everything running on Oblivion's engine had NPC schedules, just not as fleshed out as the feature didn't seem as important later on. Day and night cycles are pretty much a standard in most open world games, including dynamic weather - STALKER brought this to perfection when combining AI behavior with it (it also included NPC schedules and wildlife dynamically hunting, relocating and generally... Being wild.). We already talked about reactive worlds, this concept has never been abandoned. Eviromental interaction is rare as, again, it's difficult to implement for a lot of titles (and was always rare), but its boundaries have been pushed by many games, like Red Faction: Guerilla, Divinity: Original Sin or even Minecraft. There are many modern games which contain other gameplay than combat and conversation. There are many games which contain organic map design (yes, I finished previously discussed Dishonored entirely without quest markers and the map design works very well to lead you towards your objectives. That actually applies to Skyrim as well to an extent, vast majority of its map markers are useless and only serve to distract you from excellent level design.) Investigation and exploration instead of an idiot vision has been explored in more than one modern game, including LA Noir, and that game pushed investigation mechanics way further than ever seen before. We talked about Thief sound design, which was excellent, but very clearly outmatched by Battlefield 4 from technical standpoint. When I look at the singular features you have named, none of them has been abandoned, and vast majority has been improved upon. It's just uncommon that they get all combined in a single game, which is quite logical given their amount. And that's leaving the fact that brand new features were introduced on the side, with entirely new control schemes and new ways of consuming these games. So you're saying that because extraordinary and unique games the likes of which we have never seen before routinely come out, industry is devolving? That makes no sense. Regardless of your opinion of their quality, you can't deny their uniqueness and innovativeness, unless you specifically choose to turn a blind eye and do just that. Your posts read like those of a seasoned gamer who quite simply refuses to see quality in newer titles because of "ye olden days". And that's actually fine, I never even tried to argue against such standpoint. But do not try to pass such standpoint as an universal and undeniable truth by saying your opinion is objective somehow. Reason for this is actually incredibly stupid - it's because, often enough, level designers and writers quite simply can't communicate properly. Quest gets written separately from how the actual map layout looks like. This was not much of an issue in smaller teams (and still isn't, by the way, there are plenty of games with no quest markers of any description), but becomes one in bigger ones. It annoys me to no end.

Where is the point in devoting time into getting rid of loading screens for games functioning in instances anyway? Your insistence on complaining on feature which is quite simply unimportant for vast majority of games is baffling. But okay, we all have our bugbears I guess. Yes, they're inexcusable in Elder Scrolls titles - but vast majority of games with open world actually don't have loading screens at all, aside from fast travel. Yes. Exactly. That's what differenciates them and that's what those games are entirely constructed around. Ultima games could not really be used as larping simulators due to their focus on narrative. That their mechanics were used to reinforce the narrative is why. It's cool that you don't like it, but claiming objective inferiority is incredibly misplaced. So you missed Oblivion, where NPCs can even dynamically steal from each other? Please don't put words in my mouth, I never said anything of the sort. I said the most swooping changes could be seen in the outros, while all other decisions only lead to changed dialogue for the most part. And an abrupt ending. I mean... Okay, that's never been seen again, right? Definitely not last year in Far Cry 4 last time that I know of. What I did say is that Dishonored has the way you play the game directly change composition of opponents you encounter in all future levels, design of some future levels, dialogues and a lot of both minor and major details, like some NPCs being hostile, others not etc. Not conversation options that you pick, not character stats that you select beforehand - the game tracks how exactly do you play and then adjusts later parts of itself to this. Has a lot of this been done in old RPGs? Yes, I don't doubt that. Has it been done to this extent? No, not really. So, what did Thief do that Dishonored didn't? The biggest deal of Thief were reactive surfaces and light/shadow play. Dishonored has both. In Thief, you could use tools to influence these. In Dishonored, you have tools to directly influence opponents. What's next? Besides, you'll actually find that yes, Thief is the benchmark for modern stealth games, which is why most contain light/dark and surface sound mechanics. As for RPGs, okay: Do give me old RPG with stealth system as involved as in Skyrim. Skyrim's stealth system tracks vision cones, sound player makes based on his equipment and I believe surface altho I'm not entirely sure of that, and it definitely tracks light levels. AI attempts to simulate varying degrees of awareness of patrolling guards. Okay, how many times do I have to hammer in the point that the reason why these features didn't advance is quite simply because industry was not focused on them and was focusing on different features entirely? You keep repeating yourself, modern games didn't improve upon all features in old games ... Well, modern games didn't improve upon Ultima, more specifically. Yes, I get it. Please stop ignoring that they introduced many key features of their own. Edit: Unique and extraordinary games, like Ultima series, are in short supply. They always were. Since the release of LA Noir, did a game which directly improved upon it come out? No, it did not. Ever since the release of Dishonored, did a game which improved directly upon it come out? No, it did not. Sunless Sea, Homeworld, Dawn of War II, Brothers - a Tale of Two Sons, Bastion, Transistor, Zeno Clash series, the list goes on and on - they're all unique games from all time periods of gaming which were never directly improved upon by games with the same, just technically more advanced features and never existed in more primitive forms either. Does that mean that if I pick any game, future gaming in general after them is devolving? No, it does not. As I said, your complaints work for RPGs to an extent, but not for gaming in general.

Yes. You can obfuscate your loading screens. I never claimed it's impossible. But even Witcher 3 is still loading a lot of assets in the background, and it's not entirely without loading screens either, and the way games are achieving this now is entirely different from how games achieved it over 20 years ago. Edit: I guess I should clarify here a bit - yes, seamless worlds are the best and yes, loading screens are irritating. However, they're also such a minor annoyance that area transitions as loading screens are a lot cheaper way of achieving that goal than working on asset streaming. That was a feature easy enough to implement back when assets were often reused, just modulated programatically - that's not the case anymore tho, and if I'm have to pick where a development team should invest their money, removal of loading screens is very low on that priority list, especially if those games take place in instanced areas anyway. They're what? While their features overlap, Elder Scrolls games offer considerably different experience to Ultima games - because their features are very different on quite substantial level. Claiming that Elder Scrolls titles and Ultima titles have exactly the same set of features is quite simply false, and that's even if we somehow consider Ultima Underworld and Ultima 7 to be one game, which they're quite clearly not. I think the only comparison that sort of works is with Ultima 7 for its open world and loads of exploration, but I quite simply prefer the hands-on approach Elder Scrolls titles offer and I'm not a fan of dungeon crawling, so Ultima Underworld is out of the question. Even combining mechanics in ways in which they were not combined before is innovative if those mechanics work together well enough you know. Oh come on. Animated sprites are an abstraction when compared to a fully animated 3D model doing the same activity. Ultima 7 still used an obfuscated grid system as far as I know, so even collision detection was not that much of an issue. Do I really have to go into details on how is fully featured skeletal animation combined with proper collisions a tad more difficult to achieve than moving sprites? Of course except for Dishonored actually having three paths. And it reacting and changing around parts of the game to reflect your actions, down to details like your face never being shown on wanted posters if you manage a ghost run. I've played Fallout many times and vast majority of that game's reactivity lies in dialogue, chosen dialogue options and what you picked during character creation. Dishonored reacts and dynamically changes parts of itself not based on dialogue choices (altho that too), it changes based on how you play. Oh sure, there are instances in Fallout and Arcanum where massacring somebody gave you different reactions of other NPCs, but they were neither as common nor as substatial, the most important changes then only came during ending cutscenes. I have finished both of those games several times as opposed to Betrayal at Krondor, I do know them quite a bit. As for Thief having the best stealth system out there - I liked stealth mechanics in Dishonored a good deal better. It has surfaces, it has light levels, sure it doesn't have water and moss arrows to influence these, but it exchanges that for supernatural abilities that I like even more and the AI is a good deal better (even if still quite dumb at times) But that wasn't my point at all - yes, older RPGs tried to imitate stealth, to a good extent even. But none had a stealth system as advanced as Skyrim, and given technical limitations of their times, they really could not contain it, that was my point. Did Thief, which entirely focused on stealth and was constructed around it, contain a better stealth system? That's cool, but also entirely irrelevant. If you focus on dissecting every single feature of a game and saying "Oh yeah, but that game did it better!", you're missing the point entirely - games don't work as a set of isolated mechanics which don't interact with each other in any way. I am actually equaling technical accomplishments of the past with the present. Thing is, that's not what you are doing - you are taking a set of features from Ultima and say newer games suck because they don't implement them better, which is looking at modern games with blinders on. You know why media stick to saying that gaming is more advanced and better than ever? Because gameplay styles and features which were either not possible or not available enough to be commonly used are widely accessible now. We have massive choice of gaming for people of all walks of life, of all generations and preferences. We have consoles which use motion tracking as a control method, we have games focused on middle aged people who never played videogames before, we have big MMO games for people without money, and then for people who don't want to dedicate too much time to gaming, we have massive AAA blockbusters, but we also have this massive indie scene. We have games using mechanics never seen before, games exploring worlds and stories which were quite simply never made before. Gaming is more healthy, varied and welcoming than it's ever been - but yes, there's nothing like Ultima so modern games are clearly worse. If you focus your rant down purely on the genre of RPG games, sure, it could work to an extent, but I still enjoy every Elder Scrolls game up from Morrowind a lot more than I enjoyed Ultima series and I can give you a list of reasons for that. If your argument is that RPG games didn't advance much past their peak in popularity in 90s, I will absolutely agree with you. But talking about gaming in general is a lot more tricky. And besides, and I've made that argument several times already, Ultima games were a peak of RPG genre even back then. They were not the norm - they were the role model every other RPG developer looked up to. So yes, naturally, they will stand on their own even now, 20 years later, just like we still enjoy TV shows and movies made over 50 years ago. But that doesn't automatically mean gaming as a whole didn't move anywhere. Edit: I mean, if I think about it - yes, what you're saying makes a good deal of sense if we talk about RPG games. I mean they did evolve as modern RPG is something entirely different than what was considered an RPG 20 years ago, and by that I mean they're actually third person shooters/sword...sers or something along those lines with a strong focus on narrative. And the more I think about your points the more I realize that RPGs I have enjoyed the most during the last few years were indeed heavily influenced in oldschool RPGs *Hugs Nonek* Thank you. I was so underwhelmed when playing Baldur's Gate back in the days, dear lord.

Yeah I get it, that kind of stuff is just not what you want to do in a game - it's annoying, it's not fun and very anticlimactic way to end your journey. It's still funny tho :-P Oh, so you bought it. Good, don't have to shill for it then :-P Seriously tho, I've read that the challenge tombs were entirely created by the same team which worked on multiplayer for the last game and it shows (that they had a dedicated team behind them I mean). They're huge, they often have mechanics not seen anywhere else in the game, the puzzles in them are a lot of fun - they're no longer just a small room with a simple puzzle. And then there are actual tombs to raid strewn around the landscape, there are the big, open locations like the soviet base which offers a lot of opportunities for exploration which is incredibly satisfying, stuff like that. Weirdest thing is that I'm enjoying doing the challenge tombs and side missions a lot more than progressing trough the main story, but that's not a bad thing per se - it's just a shame that when someone's not a completionist he's risking not really seeing the most fun parts of the game. I also love that stealth is a lot more viable this time around, and generally, if you explore a lot, you'll be doing a lot less shooting and a lot more tomb raiding, which is awesome. Generally speaking I'd say the game has improved in just about every aspect upon the 2013, except for the main storyline buut I'm a sucker for mysterious islands. Oh and then there are challenges. God, it's that kind of thing which gets decided during a board meeting by a bunch of managers who then walk up to the development team and say "Guys, add some challenges. Like cut 7 soviet flags. People like challenges, right?" "But... It doesn't work with the theme at all." "CHALLENGES, MAN! THINK POSITIVE! ONLY LOSERS THINK NEGATIVE! CHALLENGES!" "I... *sigh* Whatever."