Crystal Dynamics (the remnant of the old 3DO project) and there are people with high hopes about this project here?
Fun Fact- CD was *saved* cos Eidos, a British company, wouldn't pay the brit *inventors* and devs of Tomb Raider a decent budget, but the dribblers who ran Eidos were happy to hand over a *vastly* bigger budget to the yanks at CD to make the next one.
Today Square is just the latest incarnation of Eidos (which itself was but an incarnation of UK/US Gold).
CD is highly competent in a *very* workmanlike fashion - but brit coders run circles (very very *big* circles) around yank coders. Same with E/W european coders vs yank coders. Where do all the good game engines come from? If you are American, you may wish to not discover the answer.
America does fare better with console exclusive engine work tho, but that isn't the case with this Avengers game.
Anyway i'd expect great art and character design. Great cut-scenes. But gameplay- cough, cough, cough. Superheroes shoehorned into the mediocre Tomb raider engine, shudder.
Don't get me wrong, the limited skills of CD suit TR fine. A simple single character plodding thru basic unchallenging data sets - all style, little substance. Like those sh-tty titles so beloved from naughty dog. And I like the new Tomb raider games for what they are.
But now look at Rocksteady or the peeps behind the just-good-enough new spidey game. They put the agency of the superhero *first* and find a way to bring the agency to life in an engine designed around said hero's skill sets. Can anyone here see Crystal Dynamics doing this? God how I wish- but no.
Still it is going to be fun finding out. I love it when any dev ups their game, or a new dev comes along and trumps the current players. Advancing the state-of-the-art in game design. Rather than taking the same aging engine, and giving it a new lick of paint (more triangles, a better lighting system).
The way you speak, I assume you just hate superheroes in general.
No, Spider-Man PS4 was not just-good-enough game. It was actually just a step below masterpiece.
And no, Naughty Dog's games and the latest TR aren't mediocre, they range all from good to great, with a few masterpiece here and there (cough cough... THE LAST OF US, Uncharted 4).
Now that I think about it, I am actually more excited about this game than before thanks to your post.
I loved Deus Ex HR and MD, I liked all the three new TR games, I love Marvel and I am excited about the "original story", the gameplay and the single player experience.
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