Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is one of the many titles that have been delayed to early 2027, partly to get out of Grand Theft Auto 6’s way, partly for the sake of more polish. It looks like Crystal Dynamics is putting that extra time to good use, though, especially when it comes to polishing the different difficulty options, which will be more in line with the Survivor Trilogy.
Speaking to GamesRadar at Summer Game Fest, game director Raul Siqueira said, “I think the biggest lesson that we took from [the Survivor Trilogy] is tuning difficulty based on players’ expectations. One of the things I think we got really good at towards the end of that trilogy was we had a lot of different options for players that wanted to tune the experience to their liking. We found, because Tomb Raider blends a bunch of different things together, there are people that are really into puzzles, and they want puzzles to be very difficult, but they’re not great at combat, so they want combat to be easy.”
The result is players having ways to “customize their challenge to their liking” in Legacy of Atlantis. “That was one of the things that we really wanted to preserve and make sure that players had a good foot. The balance of that is an ever-changing thing. We’re tuning it pretty much until the end.”
As a result, Siquiera couldn’t really get into the nitty-gritty of all the available options or how close it would be to, say, Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The 2018 title offered three sliders to tune combat, puzzles, and platforming. Of course, you could also pick an overall difficulty setting, including Deadly Obsession, which makes everything very hard and can’t be changed.
The team will have more to share on that in the future, but he promised a “very similar mode” to previous games. So if you’re someone who prefers zero guidance and zero margin for mistakes throughout the experience, it may be worth keeping an eye on.
Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis launches February 12th, 2027, for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2.