Crystal Dynamics, the European part of Square Enix, announced a brand spanking new Lara Croft game, and she doesn’t look like the Lara Croft some of us grew up on.
“Forget everything you knew about TOMB RAIDER, we are exploring things that have never been done before in this game,” said Darrell Gallagher, Head of Studio, Crystal Dynamics. “This is an origins story that creates Lara Croft and takes her on a character defining journey like no other.”
After a brutal storm destroys the boat she was traveling on, a frightened young woman is left washed ashore on an unknown beach. On her own but not alone she has only one goal, to survive.
Game Informer magazine has all the information in the January issue that arrives December 11.
19 Comments
Will she encounter a donkey wheel and a man in black? If so count me in.
I love it when the company that retconned the series decides to retcon the retcon. I couldn’t have been happier when Crystal Dynamics stepped in and remade Lara Croft with Tomb Raider Legends, Anniversary and Underworld (my 3 favorite games). It was a vast improvement over the miles of endless sand from the original series and the flop that was Angel of Darkness. However, I have to say that Gaurdian of Light doesn’t live up to expectations (because they changed the style of game play to a top down dungeon crawler) and the news that they’re rewriting Lara’s origin is very upsetting to me. Lara was always the survivor of a plane crash in the mountains. Recently they threw her mother in the plane with her but despite the details, that was always an underlying consistancy.
I’ll look into it and most likely buy this game but I’m a bit leery about them changing Lara’s origin story. I like rewriting the details of the past … not something I percieve to be the core of it.
I agree totally. Anniversary, Legend and Underworld are 3 of my favorite games as well. Guardian of Light was OK, but I’ve just been looking forward to the next “full” Tomb Raider game. Now I’m worried.
On another note, Tomb Raider Anniversary had the coolest purchase receipt ever. When I bought the game, it was abbreviated on the receipt as “TRAnny.” My friends looked at me somewhat askew when I said I planned to spend the weekend playing TRAnny.” :-)
That is epic! XD
Btw … thanks for reporting this to me. I really love reading video game news on the site too. At least games that have ties to D&D or comic characters. :) (Billy Tan’s Lara Croft for the win!)
Glad to be of service. We’re (I’m) trying to add more gaming news as often as I can.
Is that Alison Carroll in the picture? I like that they aren’t afraid to bloody up their pretty women to provide some realism.
I’m willing to bet that is CG.
The whole girl? It could be. If so, she looks spectacular.
But Alison Carroll is the woman upon whom Lara is modeled, right? So maybe it’s a CGI version of Alison?
No. That is not Allison Carrol. The tell tale signs that point to this being all CG are in the nose texturing and shading, the hair, and the specular highlights of the dirt across the face. Too many of the smudges have the same specular highlight as her skin – something that would not happen in real life. Also if you zoom into the picture, you can see that a lot of the dirt lack any kind of depth. CG all the way. The other thing that tipped me off was she looked an awful lot like Aki from Final Fantasy.
When my girlfriend saw this she asked why Hillary Swank was on the cover of my gaming magazine.
Unless Alison Carroll got some work done on her nose, spread her eyes further from each other and made them more almond shaped, Im betting that is all CG as well. The girl has a final fantasy vibe to her too, which makes sense. I just hope this new telling of the story has Lara grow into a badass rather quickly. Nothing is worse, or more confusing to some, than imagining the ‘buxom heroine’ as an adolescent teen. Aferall…depending where you start, she was between 9 and 15 when the bulk of her “origin” begins, and the culmination of her adventures I played for years take place well after that. It is for that reason that I have a very hard time “Forgeting everything I know about TOMB RAIDER”. Dazzle me, crystal dynamics, dazzle me.
That pic looks amazing, Lara looks almost real. Hope the game is as great as the first one.
After opening my web browser, hitting up Google and doing a “Tile Screens Vertically”, I can’t tell if this picture is indeed a real person or not. It looks like it COULD be Alison with some CG air brushing (like the gloss effects). Cudos to Crystal Dynamics for a stellar picture none-the-less.
Real or not, it’s a beautiful image, thats all I’m going to say.
definitely CG…
http://www.gameinformer.com/mag/tombraider.aspx <—a few more
http://kotaku.com/5707601/we-may-have-seen-the-last-of-the-flesh–blood-lara-croft
^^ interesting read.
Well, even if CG she looks great. It looks promising for the game.
I wish I knew an irl woman who looks that good.
I just read this today. From what I’ve read, I’m not happy at all.
http://windows7themes.net/tomb-raider-9-a-survivor-is-born-trailer-screenshots-release-date.html
It looks to me like they’re going to be making game play more like Uncharted than Tomb Raider. The Free Roaming guns are a major turn off for me because I absolutely SUCK at any kind of shooting game unless it has some sort of Target Lock system. It’s not even funny how bad I suck. I pray they do something to make it really, really easy on me or I’ll have to drop one of my favorite franchises much like I had to drop Resident Evil when they made RE4.
I’m really heart broken right now. This is going to devestate Victoria too. :(
But Resident Evil 4 was a phenomenal game, so if it has that kind of feel to it, I might enjoy the game even more. But sadly the last Tomb Raider game that I played and really enjoyed was Tomb Raider II for the PSOne, and the only thing I had kinda wished they’d done was to tilt the scales back away from puzzler toward action game just for a little balance. It was about 80% puzzler and 20% shooting stuff. Either way, I’ll wait to see if I’m gonna actually play this one.