I mean, those are safe bets to sell your game, it's understandable. The problem is that there are other game types that would sell well, except that there is no competition. A 3D Zelda-like game with sixth gen graphics and made to be cheap and small would have the market all to itself most years and could easily make money even selling under 500k.

One of the reasons why THQ went under is because they made the third or fourth best FPS/TPS/GTA of the year, but they put huge teams and budgets on each of them.

Oh and I think Japanese games are resembling this too. They seem much more interested in delivering their narrative now. Miyamoto has personally removed the story from two major games that we know of (Galaxy, Sticker Star), I think if he wasn't there then every NIntendo game would be like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest

Just another mediocre Uncharted clone, no interest whatsoever.

I have a hard time believing all you do is press forward in the game. As for beeing able to swim... cmon... we know thats irrelevant.

Not sure if you're being serious here or not, but in case you are - swimming (diving actually) has always been one of the main staples of Tomb Raider games.

I'm starting to get the feeling that the actual fun part of the game will be the survival/hub-like areas where you find resources, craft weapons, hunt, actually raid tombs etc. They've only touched the surface of that in the demo's I've seen and it was barely featured in the preview I played. The campaign looks to be a fairly normal/average slog through an adventure game.

I'm thinking a bit like Far Cry 3 but in third person.

Same here. Why not give it a different game, new story instead of a prequel loaded with baggage.
The original TR was more of a puzzle game in 3D and was great for that. Carefully positioning Lara after counting out the steps to make that crucial sequence of jumps after meticulously scanning the environment to find a route up. That seems all forgotten nowadays, auto climb, auto jump, auto grab, auto look to the next hot spot, auto mid air course correction, bleh.

If you have free roam like in Far Cry 3 between missions then all is redeemed.
Well as long as it's not auto climb out of cenote AC3 style. Oh she can't swim either, so guess cenotes and (under)water cave exploration is out. So just some hunting then.

Ah, the "press win button" mechanics, the possibly fatal outcome of the dreary (for many of us) 7th generation.