Congratulations for picking the dumbest possible example for your argument.
Graphics aside, Tomb Raider hasn’t gotten “far” at all - it’s one of the IPs that have blatantly regressed the most since its early days. It was a door to the future, a ground-breaking game, the proof that the new tech could really advance gameplay towards new horizons in 1996. Tomb Raider is one of the reasons gaming went from mascot platformers to the movie-games everyone is vouching for in this thread. Except it also had outstanding level design and scope, plus some solid gameplay that’s still good today if you’re willing to learn its controls. It doesn’t take more time than the forced tutorial of any modern game.
The irony is that your precious technology has hardly produced a similar game since. With all the possibilities the medium has today, most of the scenery in games that go for the same scope as the original TR is just that - scenery. In TR, if you could see that mountain, you could climb it 90% of the time. In Dark Souls 2, you needed 30 hours and the killing of a thousand enemies plus a bunch of demigods to go past a waist-high wall. “This is how far we’ve come”, indeed.
And to prevent your rebuttal, yes, I have replayed TR1 after TR2013 and Rise. And it’s by far the better game. Even better now that everyone is used to navigating 3D worlds.
See, as much as I love Ikaruga, this is not a game I’d suggest here.
It’s way too difficult to grasp and master.
