They should consider this for what it is: a successful game, a fortunate escape, and a lesson how the market cannot sustain 30 blockbuster releases a year that each need 4-5 million sales plus DLC change to make back their costs; and won't be able to again for decades, potentially. The credit bubble popped, the losses we dumped on the masses, and consumers have debts to service on decaying incomes and rising living costs.
As much as I liked the game, at least half of that was the representation of what it could and should have been. Many of the interesting things about the game were heavily marketed and despite their promise, ended up being little more than compromised window dressing transplanted onto a lowest common denominator action game with regenerating health.
They sold me a survival-focused Tomb Raider game driven by an origin story focusing on a sophisticated character arc; that's the experience I signed up for, but it wasn't the reality of what I bought.
It's because of this coward-stricken broad ambition with its conflicted systems and wasted features, that I don't think it deserved to do much better than it did; in terms of commercial success and GOTY recognition. I hope they take the opportunity with the planning for the sequel for a re-think in terms of gameplay direction, so they get something smarter with a genuinely coherent focus that's greater than the sum of its parts.
In this games case, it should have meant more hunter/gathering for subsistence and resources, scampering to throw dirt in attackers eyes and working through Lara's anxieties in navigating deep dark scary caves; and less arrows layed nonsensically across your path for the next ridiculous shoot-out later on. Though that boat has now sailed, I still think more emergent gameplay and a lower bodycount should paradoxically be on the cards..
