The Difficulty With Sequels | Tomb Raider 2 Retrospective
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How do you design the difficulty curve of a video game's sequel? Tomb Raider 2 takes an interesting and unusual approach. Instead of resetting the difficulty curve, Tomb Raider 2's challenge picks up where its predecessor left off.
Does that cause Tomb Raider 2 to feel like a true sequel or an expansion pack? Is Tomb Raider 2 uniquely positioned to engage returning fans, eager for harder levels, but at the cost of alienating potential new audiences? How does Tomb Raider 2 then tutorialise and teach its new mechanics and their corresponding controls?
We'll be answering all of those questions today, as we follow Lara Croft's journey from the Great Wall of China, to the depths of the sunken Maria Doria, a Tibetan monastery and then to an ethereal otherworldly plane of existence.
00:00 - Introduction
02:57 - My lack of history with Tomb Raider 2
05:56 - The plot, or lack thereof
09:23 - The game itself
10:55 - Save yourself
12:05 - Too many battles
14:22 - Get in loser, we're going to Venice
16:01 - The difficulty ramps up
17:06 - Tomb Raider 2's secrets
19:06 - Sequence breaks and trophies
20:24 - The Phantom of the Opera
23:08 - Striking oil
25:23 - A Titanic pain
30:15 - Natla's Mines v2.0
32:55 - A return to form
34:34 - Tomb Raider 2's best level
38:27 - The second key
41:09 - Back where we started
44:39 - Things get weird
47:18 - Home invasion
#tombRaider #remaster #aspyr
49:19 - A wonderfully remastered legacy
51:23 - Am I glad I finally played Tomb Raider 2?
53:07 - What did we learn about difficulty curves?