Despite its many combat woes, Shadow of the Tomb Raider still manages to provide a rich world littered with hidden caverns and secrets. While the franchise as a whole has suffered a bad habit of just dropping ancient scrolls and relics on the ground for any passerby to pick up, the devoted explorer will still have plenty of hidden gems and artifacts to seek out more intently.

Nevertheless, the designers seemed to only partially comprehend the draw of such exploration. A number of tombs and caverns are only accessible once you’ve accepted the relevant side quest from a local. It does not matter that you know where to go or have all the necessary tools required to access the cavern. The game will either place an artificial obstacle in your way until the quest is accepted, or removes any relevant tool prompts until an objective marker hovers over the offending blockade.

Side quests were largely unnecessary in Rise of the Tomb Raider, but they never interfered with the player exploring at their own pace.

Is this also a sign that the developers were trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible? Steering players less interested in exploration towards tombs and caverns so that they might “enjoy the content” as well, perhaps? Or maybe there were complaints from less patient or observant players that effectively need the quest marker in order to find anything. I don’t want to just assume the developers were so simple-minded as to not realize Rise of the Tomb Raider’s side-quests were never actually tied to a tomb.Sure, the very presence of side quests in Rise contributed to pressure to keep them in Shadow, but more than a few of these quests actively interfere with the player’s ability to explore on their own. The only instance Rise’s side quests would interfere with exploration was when said quest would provide a new progression tool as a reward.

While I personally assert that the Tomb Raider franchise should be about exploration – in part because that’s what I prefer about them – I also believe they should focus on exploration because there are already so many games focused on shooting. It’s the exploration that sets Tomb Raider apart.

To that end I would actually look to Breath of the Wild for inspiration. Not to simply reskin the game with Lara as the protagonist instead of Link, but to consider what the two games have in common. For example, Lara’s affinity for climbing.

Just as the stealth mechanics were an unquestionable improvement over Rise, I would say Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s climbing mechanics and tools are a much more natural evolution of cliff-face clambering than Rise and its broadhead arrows. The grappling hook upgrade paved the way, and Eidos Montreal expanded that to also consist of rappelling and abseiling.

The only real “problem”, and this is going to largely depend on which setting you have exploration on, is the emphasis on realistic graphics. On Normal difficulty it’s sometimes tough to tell which surfaces are grabbable or which ones are designated to swing towards. The “easy” setting will allow them to stand out with an obvious white stripe of paint swiped across. Each subsequent setting of exploration challenge fades the markings out. While these markings can certainly help the player identify certain interactive surfaces, it might have benefited the game more if other surfaces imitated the craggy rock wall. The visual is distinct enough that a player need only look around briefly before spotting it.

So you don’t like dealing with puzzles in the game? Then just select “easy” and Lara will incessantly tell you how to complete the puzzle as you spend the next several minutes following her commands.

Though the visual cues and design could serve the mechanics better, they still serve in climbing and navigation being a far more engaging experience than the prior games. They also cleverly built these new options and mechanics over one basic action: striking the pick-axe into the cliff face. Rather than focus on a series of capable tools, they gave a single tool more versatile capabilities.

If you were to take a bit of influence from Breath of the Wild’s ability to climb anywhere, then you’d truly have a Tomb Raider game for an experienced, curious, adventure-prone Lara. To that end Shadow of the Tomb Raider provides the next natural stepping-stone towards what I would call an ideal Tomb Raider game.

While Shadow is clearly more linear, this greater maneuverability is effectively used in some phenomenal puzzles and set-pieces. One such obstacle course is in the closing of the game’s first act, leading the player up a rickety construct slowly breaking down as Lara climbs towards its heights. She must grapple, clamber, leap, and roll across a variety of platforms and ledges, and it is perhaps one of the greatest moments of the entire series, let alone the game.

It is also one of the few such standout structures. Once more Eidos Montreal’s goal to create this massive, varied game appealing to all fans is met with a game that cannot truly satisfy all player desires. Exploration is chained down by the game’s largest population center, a massive space littered with very little interesting territory and a whole lot of bodies to continually run past or through. Icons start to fill the map that frustrate proper explorers, inaccessible until some generous quest giver summons the God of binary variables to open the path towards a new objective – and thus the path to the document, relic, or cache obnoxiously mocking the player from the map screen.

As I had mentioned in the last article, many of these side quests into caverns and tombs also involve combat. No, not every tomb or cavern with a quest has combat attached, nor does every tomb or cavern with combat come in the form of a side quest. It seems that in order to please everyone, Eidos Montreal tossed activities of all sorts into several missions, trusting that players would adjust each difficulty setting to their perfectly balanced preference.

Even when set to easy, combat or exploration to a player that prefers one or the other is nothing short of wasting that player’s time.

I reiterate that exploration is what sets Tomb Raider games apart. When combat works, it works best as stealth. To that end, I would like to continue my comparison to Breath of the Wild, while also taking influence from the Far Cry series. There’s more than climbing to Breath of the Wild, after all. The player is also constantly on the hunt for Shrines, ancient tomb-like structures filled with puzzles. The analogue for Tomb Raider should be obvious. Allow the player the versatile climbing mechanics of Shadow, but repurposed towards more freely roaming the wilderness in order to find any tomb in whatever order they wish. No need for as large a world or as numerous a set of tombs as Breath of the Wild – them AAA HD assets are expensive, after all – but a world open and large enough that the player is free to truly embody the inquisitive, adventurous spirit of Lara Croft.

The stealth mechanics would make a natural fit in such a world, littered with enemy encampments akin to those in Far Cry. However, while the player should be free to slaughter every soldier in such an encampment if they choose, do not give some checkmark goal to “take over” such locations. Provide instead alternate goals. Perhaps each encampment has “seismic data” of the land, thus providing Lara with maps not only of the world, but of tombs themselves. Allow her to sabotage enemy intel and equipment, sneaking in and out without a drop of blood shed. As the game progresses, the security will increase based on the player’s style. More heat-reading goggles with intel moved into more secure locations if the player is a sneaky ninja, or more heavily armed and armored troops if the player prefers a gender-bent Rambo approach.

This is, of course, all daydreaming and armchair game design. I’ve heard from plenty of panels and articles that designers would rather not hear such ideas, as to implement them would risk lawsuits in the future. Such is the nature of the industry, and thus my self-indulgence and fantasy gets cut short.

Nevertheless, we now have Lara’s origin and it is clear that the exploration, spelunking, and stealth work best in this franchise. Why not stop imitating other games in order to expensively strive for as broad a design as possible? Not everyone shall be pleased, and plenty more will no doubt find the game to be “okay” and trade it in regardless. Would be better to continue the Croft legacy with a game designed from the ground up to be a game that stands on its own merits rather than the hopes to bolster success through blind imitation.