Fresh from her Writer's Guild Award for Rise of the Tomb Raider, Rhianna Pratchett gave a DICE speech today calling for writers to be integrated more closely into the development of games.
During the Game Developers Session (GDS) conference in Prague, we had the privilege of speaking with Rhianna Pratchett, an award-winning writer and narrative designer. Pratchett, who has penned some of the most memorable female protagonists like Nariko from Heavenly Sword, Faith from Mirror’s Edge, and Lara Croft from the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, delves into the challenges and freedoms of writing for different media, AAA and indie games.
Complex? She literally made Lara Croft whine and have father issues for an entire trilogy
Groundbreaking...
Female Commander Shepard is a way better female character then Lara Croft has been.
Meanwhile it seems that female characters across entertainment media are being dumb down. What they've done to the female characters in the Avatar adaptation is insulting.
Mark from WellPlayed writes about five game launches that were impacted by unfortunate scheduling.
Zero Dawn sold really well so I’m not sure this belongs. The second game released next to a big game again and it hurt it some I forget what it was though, oh yeah Elden Ring .
But a good game is a good game to me I don’t care when they release personally but they do have to think about it when you want to get more people to buy it.
The Survivor Trilogy was a drastic reimagining of Lara Croft and Tomb Raider, and it provokes changes for the character that are truly fantastic.
Deserves less IMO, i think the 1st in the new trilogy was a perfect 1st step for the new direction. The next 2 games were half steps at best. Not only that, every character in the series including Lara is just annoying and doesn't make sense in terms of motive, like yes they have a motive, but none of it seems proportional to the lengths they are willing to go through for it. The most annoying thing is every one of the games say "become the Tomb Raider" yet 3 games later and we're still not there? No thanks. Then there's the mess of the 3rd game, massive skill tree that serves almost no purpose as there's literally only like 3-4 short encounters in the whole game, and they took till the 3rd game to finally manage some decent puzzles even remotely close to previous games in the series. Nah, the trilogy infuriated me to no end as a long time fan of the series, i hope we get better going forward cause that crap sucked.
Yeah...no
It was awful, for THREE GAMES it was "become the Tomb Raider" where she went back to square one after each game. Not to mention after a huge reaction of killing someone for the first time she then becomes Rambo straight after and goes on a slaughter spree without a single other reaction. Her development was all over the place.
She was whiney, weak and in later game a little arrogant and selfish
Oh and the voice actress compared to the previous ones was not as good
Lara Croft deserved better and while they are decent games as they are, we deserved actual Tomb Raider games, we could have had better survival games if they just stuck with the original Lara Crofts origin about her plane going down. Surviving 2 weeks in the Himalayas...I'd have liked to seen that, who knows what mystical threat she could have faced in the mountains or underground some secret concealed cave.
2013 I thought was a fine entry, but Rise and especially Shadow were painfully mediocre follow ups imo, I really didn't like how selfish and angry her character was in those two.
First one was decent, played through it twice.
Second one was okay, played through it once.
Third one was really bad, tried twice a year apart, still can't get through the first two hours, it is just really bad.
She won an award for her writing...really? Over the Witcher 3
I'm sorry but her story writing is not that good. I mean she's not her father that's for sure. He was fantastic .
One of these people who got into the industry easy because her father was famous.
Who?!
Witcher 3 had a story ... ???
I call for more focus on gameplay, animation and original design, all that the Witcher 3 lacked for my taste.
I may not have thought too much of the story in ROTTR. It felt like a story that had been done 1000 times in video games already.
That said I completely agree with everything she said and hope that more developers take it to heart.
Even a game as simply as Undertale is has so much heart in its zany story.
Stories do need attention, but so do soundtracks, which are often ignored in Western games.
Undertale was great not because of story alone, nor because of its soundtrack. It was great because the story and soundtrack were together memorable, and really complemented each other.
This relationship is what modern games are missing, as most of them tack on some bland atmospheric soundtrack without really trying to evoke anything in the player.