Still no compound bow?

[Altarin]

I mean come on. This game is supposed to be from modern times. You will more likely find compound bow in supermarket than regular one.

[Jac]

She takes a bow with her and it's a modern one but the beauty of her signature weapon being a bow is that she can make a new one whenever shes needs to. The aesthetic of the game is guided by the fact that she can create and upgrade gear using materials from the environment.

[Thumper]

Under the weapon selection, the bow has the highest number with well over 10, of those I'm sure you can find 1 that will serve your need for power.

[Noble Nobbler]

Is that the realism breaking bug or was it the dagger that transforms you into a god, you see this is very important because

[DrNewcenstein]

They like to give you this sweet gear for the intro and then run a cinematic where you lose it forever and have to deal with hand-made junk weapons, and just when you finally get one upgraded, you lose that one and have to deal with some ancient hand-made junk weapon that you have to upgrade.

That's why I stick with the DLC weapons. Puka Huk's bow is all I use. "Sure, sure, take the vanilla good stuff away from me. Oh, what's this? A Campfire? Lemme see, oh look, Puka Huk's bow. I'm set."


Personally I think the whole "crafting on the run" is a cheesy mechanic and extremely over-simplified, especially if you know anything about making anything in real life. The most you can do "on the run" is tend to an open wound. Have you even tried making a sandwich while running? You are not going to craft a reliable arrow out of a tree branch and some bird feathers and scrap metal while running through the woods, and you are certainly not going to pack a grenade.

[ramonpontes]

In modern times, you don't see people killing other people with bows. They just use guns.

The crafting mechanism made more sense in the first game, where Lara had no other options for weapons. Still, the bow was the deadliest weapon from the begining to the end.

Now, with all the perks she can have, the bow one of the most overpowered weapons she ever had.

[Altarin]

althou i fully suppprt the notion that her icon weapon is handcrafted bow which she can theoreticaly replace at any time, i would preffer to be able aquire modern bow just as she use other modern weapons. Even the fact she could use it in last two games, and suddenly not here is simply ridiculous.

[Morthoseth]

It would just be another thing locked from 3/4 of the game becasue it's too moder for those primitives.

[sling_shot]

uhmm no you won't find modern bows in this game. it's the obvious consequence of a really stupid story-related reason.

[DrNewcenstein]

Aside from aesthetics, it wouldn't be any different from the hand-crafted stuff you pick up, really.

I mean, a laser sight and a recon scope and targeting computer with Patriot arrows and auto-ignition jet for flaming arrows sounds nice, but no. Just no.

It's bad enough they made the rope ascender only available from the one merchant and only after you REALLY could have been using it, so don't expect them to be smart enough to give you any good gear and not cook up some lame way to take it from you. If you had actual options that resembled reality in any way, then yeah ok fine take away the good stuff, but you're basically handed junk and have to grind to make it useful.

[sling_shot]

yeah they've been mistreading the rope ascender for 2 games in a row for no reason.
they locked it behind a (virtual) paywall in Rise, and now the granny in Shadow... and because they made it so hard to unlock, they had to reduce the number of ropes to the point there's no point in unlocking it in the first place. so dumb

[DrNewcenstein]

I don't remember where you get it in Rise, but I don't remember shelling out any v-coin for it. I know you had to advance a certain way before it was available, and then all the backtracking, but if by "virtual paywall" you mean "you have to buy it from someone in the game", that's no different from Shadow.

[sling_shot]

... and? I never said Rise did it different. they both sucked on that department.

[Thumper]

it shows up in that little weapon shop, i don't recall the dollar value they put on it, but there are some hard choices the 1st time you walk in there. there are but a few places where the rope ascender is really needed and in shadow i use it to fast travel across zip lines mostly. the excess number of bows she has allows you to use then depending on where you are at that point. not all fights require you to use max power, draw speed and hold time also play there part.

I like 2 or 3 of them. but the point being, you have more weapons then your ever going to need or use. don't fall into a rut using but a few. we're all guilty of that. you won't know what a weapon will do untill you use it.

[DrNewcenstein]

I hadn't really played Rise since it came out - maybe 2 weeks then went back to Skyrim LE.
I'm shocked at how similar Shadow is to Rise in terms of level design and overall concept: start in the woods, find a "lost city" of an ancient community (though they are more aware of the modern world than Paititi), go to an ancient ruin. Even some of the caves look very familiar to what you find in Shadow.

Went back and played Rise yesterday, and yeah, it's the guy in the shed selling stolen gear.
It makes sense, though. I mean, Rise was Lara's first real outing as an adventurer. 2013 was a forced situation, so she didn't really have a choice but to scavenge and make-do with what she could find.
For Rise, she didn't really expect Trinity to show up in Syria, so when the truck with all her crap in it gets blown up, it's understandable, and you really can't lug a trunk full of sweet gear up the mountain in Siberia. Still, something handy like the rope ascender and wire spool and rope arrows would have been a few of those things from Yamatai I would have grown very fond of, and would have been permanent features on my utility belt.


I do see now where they changed some things, like needing the rope ascender to pull down barriers in Shadow instead of just the rope arrows in Rise, needing explosives on some barriers in Rise but just the shotgun in Shadow, some barriers you can shoot down with the pistol in Rise (but not the climbing axe, for some reason).

As for what power level each fight might require, I'm not using weaker weapons against weaker enemies and stronger weapons against stronger enemies. Everyone's getting maximum power. The purpose of combat is to kill the enemy as quickly as possible. The guy wearing a t-shirt is getting the same arrow to the face as the guy in the crash helmet.

I have been relying more on the poison arrows though. Especially against the guys with the shields. As soon as they come out the door, they get gassed. Made those encounters much more pleasant than the first time. Flamethrower guy was still a senseless PITA. You have to shoot his tanks multiple times from behind until he explodes. I'm sorry, these tanks are not that armored. Surprisingly.

[sling_shot]

the thing is, 2013 did it right: almost everything in the game was locked behind story progression. Specifically, that game had tons of ziplines because the level designer knew Lara would have unlocked the rope ascender at a very specific point of the campaign.
The problem with expensive/hard to get optional tools in casual friendly games is that the game will most likely never require you to own them in the first place, since the philosophy of AAA games there days is "let the (supercasual) player enjoy the content to the fullest, or else they will think there's less content than there actually is". Combine that with the "people like very long games" mentality and here you go, now you know why some of the cool things in the game were locked behind very high invisible walls.