Hero image: Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. Image: PlayStation Blog
Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis marks thirty years of Lara Croft, and the team behind it says the 1996 design is still the anchor. A PlayStation Blog post from 22 October lays out how the character was rebuilt, in the words of staff at Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog. The quotes below are the post’s own, not ours.
Brendon Bengston of Crystal Dynamics says the original was limited by what the hardware could do. “When the original Lara was made, we could only have a certain number of polygons, a certain number of textures,” he says. The post calls the 1996 design the anchor every choice answers to.
Aleksandra Skiba, a senior character concept artist at Flying Wild Hog, describes the balance. “You want them to feel believable, but you also want them to look recognizable,” she says.
The post goes through the details one by one. Hair is built from hair cards, which Bengston says let the team “craft exact strands” where the first games used big polygon shapes. Skin uses subsurface scattering and flow maps, and the face uses custom blend shapes, so a smile or a frown leaves its own lines. He credits “this technology from Epic in Unreal” for how the characters move and emote.
Clothing came from the real world. The team 3D printed a base body at real scale, dressed it in real clothes and scanned the result, because, in Bengston’s words, “Denim folds differently than silk.” For one outfit they “actually hired a tailor” to make it, then scanned it on a mannequin.
John Stafford, narrative director at Crystal Dynamics, splits the reimagining into three parts — what was kept, what was evolved and what was reimagined. What was kept is “Lara’s intelligence, fearlessness, and thrill-seeking spirit.” He says the Survivor era “showed us Lara works well when danger has consequences,” and that the team carried that sense of earned resilience forward.
The post lists Legacy of Atlantis for 12 February 2027, says Lara’s latest journey continues on PlayStation 5, and says pre-orders are live on PlayStation Store. It gives no price, and we did not read an Australian listing, so none is stated here.
Source: PlayStation Blog – Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis – the evolution of Lara Croft’s design