Impressions upon seeing Rise of the Tomb Raider on a top-of-the-line rig

Sorry man, we can bullshit about video games all we want, but that is some serious stuff you need to deal with.

It's so hard to have this women you love and that always loved you not recognize you anymore. It'll only get harder and harder. My mom works with demented people day in day out. And it's heartbreaking to see family not drop by anymore. But never give up on your mom, man !

Play a few months worth of PC gaming at higher resolutions and 60 fps and higher graphical settings. Then sit down at your console again and you'd actually have to adjust.

You saw Tomb Raider being played for a couple of minutes and weren't impressed ? Ok, I guess.

@cainetao11: Sorry to hear about your mom. I have too many friends and relatives that have gone through this. Chin up.

Oh god dude. I try to not judge others but to just no longer visit? I cant see myself do that to mom ever. I'll just keep bringing the tablet with the photos my brother scans in to One Drive and she loves seeing them and it slowly coming back to her.

@Salt_The_Fries: The Rise of TR had 360 assets, it's not a good showcase for either PC or Xbone.

Rise of the TR would obviously would look nice, like TR2013, since we can't compare Rise or TR 2013 to an actual TR that was designed only for modern current gen hardware), but the game being designed for the 2005 360 hardware is limiting.

Too many cross gen games these days held back by last gen assets, but the tide is turning.

How does it have Xbox 360 assets? Have you even played this game, it looks amazing. You're actually looking at this backwards, the 360 version of the game is a downgraded port of the Xbox One version done by Nixxus.

The games were not developed side by side, it was developed for Xbox One and Crystal Dynamics fed the game to Nixxus which ported it over and downgraded their work throughout the development process.

Who said it was a completely different engine?

The developers of these TR games have been co-developers for over a decade. There is nothing peculiar or odd with this upcoming Rise of the Tomb Raider other than suddenly people are aware of Nixxes and are trying to claim things like a "completely different engine" randomly for this title, when that's not how Nixxes has ever operated in the past nor for this game. This is standard business. Once upon a time, Rise of the Tomb Raider was going to be for PC, PS3, 360, PS4, and Xbone. Then a deal was struck with M$. It takes a lot of effort to get these games released on multiple machines simultaneously, which is what Nixxes helped accomplish. Activision and EA operate in the same way. What didn't change, besides the temporary shelving of the PC, PS3, PS4 versions, is how Nixxes and Crystal have operated. They've been partners since 2000's release of Soul Reaver.

This is the same developer that handled these games (all Eidos games) as well. They've been partnered with Crystal for over 15 years since the Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver on PS1 (Nixxes handled the Dreamcast port). People didn't suddenly claim that the Dreamcast port of Soul Reaver was a "completely different engine". People didn't make that claim about "different engines" for Tomb Raider Legend, Anniversary, Underworld, Lara Croft, or even the recent Tomb Raider reboot, and all those games have Crystal and Nixxes all over them. The Rebooted Tomb Raider (PS3, 360, PC) found itself ported to the newer PS4 and Xbone, but again, the PS4/Xbone version of Tomb Raider Reboot weren't completely different engines. That's not a good business model. SE is looking to make money and this game isn't suddenly way, way different.

Suddenly though, Rise of the Tomb Raider has a completely different engine? Since when? I'll start with 2006 with a list of Nixxes/Crystal games that marked the separation of the original developer of Tomb Raider, CORE, from TR. Same what happened to CORE, the creators of TR. Crystal took over the TR series (which sucks since Legacy of Kain is what I preferred from them), and that's also when Nixxes worked on TR as well. Nixxes has been partnered with Crystal for every single main Tomb Raider titled game (one exception was Lara Croft Osiris and that wasn't a main TR title game and it didn't release on as many platforms as Osiris).

You are correct in that if you are impressed with a cross gen title like Rise of the Tomb Raider (which I wasn't impressed with it visually at E3, but it looked decent), then you'll definitely be far more impressed when Crystal doesn't have to balance last gen 2005 360 hardware for presumably the next Tomb Raider game. A future time and different game when Crystal and Nixxes have the freedom to go all out, abandoning old hardware limitations (geometry, graphics, AI, etc) to fully exploit the Xbone/PS4.

@nyadc: Yeah it was a new thing but that was still the highest resolution available to consumers at the time. There were also some decent lcd monitors. Not as good as CRT as the reliablity and refresh rate wasn't up to snuff but there were some decent ones. They weren't all garbage as you're trying to claim. I had a 1080p one in 2007 and it was still kicking until I lost it by moving 2 years ago.

It's an X360 port. It isn't impressive on any system except X360.